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Monday, April 28th, 2025
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| 8:00a | When Queen’s Freddie Mercury Performed with Opera Superstar Montserrat Caballé in 1988: A Meeting of Two Powerful Voices
Combining pop music with opera was always the height of pretension. But where would we be without the pretentious? As Brian Eno observed in his 1995 diary, “My assumptions about culture as a place where you can take psychological risks without incurring physical penalties make me think that pretending is the most important thing we do. It’s the way we make our thought experiments, find out what it would be like to be otherwise.” And with Freddie Mercury and Queen, if it wasn’t for pretense we wouldn’t have “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Hell, we wouldn’t have Queen, period. But in 1988 the gamble didn’t exactly pay off. To the British music press, Mercury was coasting on Live Aid fumes and the shadow of his unsuccessful solo album. And then to hear that he’d teamed up with opera singer Montserrat Caballé? Despite what any hagiographic tale of Mercury might say, this passed your average rock fan by. Outside the whims of the charts, however, Mercury’s teaming up with Caballé was the fulfillment of a goal he’d had since 1981. The singer had fallen in love with Caballé’s voice in 1981 when he’d seen her perform alongside Luciano Pavarotti. Then began a dance between the two artists. Mercury was worried that Caballé would not take this rock star seriously. Caballé, on the other hand, was a rock music fan just like so many people. They owned each other’s albums. Finally, in early 1986, the two met: Caballé’s brother was the music director of the upcoming 1992 Barcelona Olympics and ‘Who better to do a theme song with than Freddie Mercury?’ said the singer. According to Peter Freestone, Mercury’s personal assistant and longtime friend, meeting Caballé was the most nervous he’d ever been. Mercury was worried the opera singer would be aloof and distant. But she was as down to earth as Mercury in their offstage moments. As Freestone recounted, “Freddie assumed they’d only make one song together. Then Montserrat said: ‘How many songs do you put on a rock album?’ When Freddie told her eight or 10, she said: ‘Fine – we will do an album.’” Mercury had two deadlines: one based around Caballé’s schedule, and the other based around his recent AIDS virus diagnosis. Though he had composed the opening song “Barcelona” to sing alongside Caballé at the 1992 opening ceremonies, he told her that he probably wouldn’t be around for that to happen. (Caballé instead sang “Amigos para siempre (Friends forever)” with Spanish tenor José Carreras.) They did manage to perform together, singing “Barcelona” at a promotional event at Ku nightclub in Ibiza in May, 1987. Mercury wrote the eight songs on the Barcelona album with Mike Moran, the songwriter who’d also worked with Mercury on his previous solo album and whose “Exercises in Free Love” was adapted into “Ensueño” for the album, with Caballé helping in the rewrite. According to Freestone, watching Caballé was the most emotional he’d seen the usually reserved singer: “When Montserrat sang ‘Barcelona’, after her first take was the nearest I ever saw Freddie to tears. Freddie was emotional, but he was always in control of his emotions, because he could let them out in performing or writing songs. He grabbed my hand and said: ‘I have the greatest voice in the world, singing my music!’ He was so elated.” In time, the album has gained in reputation, but critics point out that the label spent most of its budget on the title track—full orchestration, the works, as befits a meeting of two operatic minds—and relied on synths for the remaining songs. Fans are asking for a rerecording that brings the full orchestra to all the tracks. We’ve certainly seen odder requests granted in the last few years, like the remix of what many consider Bowie’s worst album. So who indeed can tell? Watch this space. Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020. Related Content: Freddie Mercury & David Bowie’s Isolated Vocals for Queen’s “Under Pressure” (1981) Hear a Previously Unheard Freddie Mercury Song, “Time Waits for No One,” Unearthed After 33 Years Ted Mills is a freelance writer. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here. |
| 9:00a | The Greatest Art Heist in History: How the Mona Lisa Was Stolen from the Louvre (1911)
If you happen to go to the Louvre to have a look at Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, you’ll find that you can’t get especially close to it. That owes in part to the ever-present crowd of cellphone photographers, and more so to the painting’s having been installed behind a wooden barrier and encased in a sturdy-looking glass box. These are suitable precautions, you might imagine, for the single most famous work of art in the world. But there wasn’t always so much security, and indeed, nor was Mona Lisa always so dearly prized. A little more than a century ago, you could just walk out of the Louvre with it. You could do so, that is, provided you had a knowledge of the Louvre’s internal operations, the nerve to pluck a masterpiece off its walls, and the willingness to spend a night in one of the museum’s closets. Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian immigrant who’d worked there as a cleaner and reframer of paintings, had all those qualities. On the evening of Sunday, August 20th, 1911, Peruggia entered the Louvre wearing one of its standard-issue employee coats. The next day, he emerged into an almost empty museum, closed as it was to the public every Monday. You can find out what happened next by watching the Primal Space video above, which visualizes each step of the heist and its aftermath. Why did Peruggia dare to steal the Mona Lisa in broad daylight, an act worthy of Arsène Lupin (himself created just a few years earlier)? Discovered a couple years later, having hidden the painting in the false bottom of a trunk nearly all the while, Peruggia cast himself as an Italian patriot attempting to return a piece of cultural patrimony to its homeland. Another possibility, elaborated upon in the video, is that he was nothing more than a pawn in a larger scheme masterminded by the forger Eduardo de Valfierno, who planned to make several copies of the missing masterpiece and sell them to credulous American millionaires. That, in any case, is what one Saturday Evening Post story reported in 1932, though it could well be that, in reality, Peruggia acted alone, out of no higher motive than a need for cash. (In a way, it would have been a more interesting story had the culprits actually been Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire, whose unrelated possession of statues stolen from the Louvre drew police suspicion.) However the heist occurred, it wouldn’t have happened if its object hadn’t already been widely known, at least among art enthusiasts. But soon after La Gioconda was returned to her rightful place, she became the face of art itself — and the reason museums do things much differently now than they did in the nineteen-tens. The Louvre, you’ll notice, is now closed on Tuesdays instead. Related content: What Makes Leonardo’s Mona Lisa a Great Painting?: An Explanation in 15 Minutes What Makes the Mona Lisa a Great Painting: A Deep Dive Why Leonardo da Vinci’s Greatest Painting is Not the Mona Lisa How France Hid the Mona Lisa & Other Louvre Masterpieces During World War II When Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire Were Accused of Stealing the Mona Lisa (1911) Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall. |
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