Please help me with a sentence I came across in Aldous Huxley's essay "Justifications", published in the book The Olive Tree.
Huxley quotes Lorenzo Da Ponte on his work process (how Da Ponte liked to have a bottle of wine on the right hand, a box of tobacco on the left and an inkstand in the middle when writing librettos). Da Ponte also frequently employs the services of a 16-year old girl ("Whenever I rang the bell", which cracked me up).
Huxley's description of the scene:
"It is a scene from a settecento Earthly Paradise - before the Fall of 1789."
Settecento refers to the period from 1700 to 1799, but what exactly happened in 1789 that Huxley refers to as the Fall?
Oddly enough, this question has nothing to do with Italy. The only significant event I could think of in Europe in 1789 was the fall of the Ancien Régime in France - also known as the French Revolution, and a bit of investigation showed that it was connected to this.
Lorenzo Da Ponte(the Venetian opera writer I hope, or else this is all off course), was not living in Italy in 1789, but in Austria, where his patron was Joseph II, the Holy Roman Emperor and older brother to Marie Antoinette, Queen of France.
Da Ponte's position in society then was quite a high status one(at least, it is if you go for an arbitrary upper/middlish/lower split), and the fall of the old order in France, the imprisonment of Marie Antoinette and her husband, and the general tension that this spread around Europe would have been felt keenly by Da Ponte. As a member of Austrian society, he would have been directly threatened by the possibility of revolution fermenting outside of France. In the 1790s, multiple armies gathered on the French border foreseeing just that, so we know it was a widely felt fear.
The Earthly Paradise most likely refers to the status quo pre-Revolution, and the Fall to the end of that with the uprising of the French populace.
Purely speculation, but it's probably all tied into the Garden of Eden seeing as he was Italian, his patron was the Holy Roman Emperor, and France was Catholic. Revolution was the fall from Eden all over again for the aristocracy.