engaged

Engaged

March 2008

My iTunes: Non Piu Andrai from Mozart's Le Nozze Di Figaro

I just heard that one of the interns who I worked with in London this summer just got engaged. Engagements make for such exciting news! His girlfriend (now fiancee) came to visit him in London for a week this summer, and this is my favorite picture that I snapped of the two of them. If memory serves me correctly, this was when we visited Camden Town on one of our days off. Congratulations, Matt and Nicole!

The song that I'm listening to is quite catchy, and if you listen to (or watch) Don Giovanni, you will actually hear the tune from this piece in that opera as well. Le Nozze Di Figaro was written and performed in Prague before Don Giovanni, and this particular tune was so popular that upon visiting Prague later, Mozart commented in one of his letters that he heard the people singing and dancing to it in the streets. When he composed Don Giovanni, which premiered in Prague in 1787, he had the chamber orchestra in the final act play this piece while Don Giovanni ate his dinner. Don Giovanni's manservant, Leporello, who serves as the comic relief for the dramma giocoso opera, comments that he's heard that tune before, a joke that the Prague audience would have picked up on.

Okay, enough of a music history lesson for today. Hopefully the weather is nice wherever you are and you have a chance to go outside and enjoy it. I will be attached to the couch until my MRI at 3:00, and then hope my pain will be bearable enough with all this medication that I can make it to the opera rehearsal in Baltimore tonight...