Finished the first item on my great Mozart Opera listen-through project for the end of the year today. I'm afraid it took me a full three weeks to carve out the time for genuinely close listening to Idomeneo, but somehow the opera cohered for me over that time. The second and third acts are wonderfully constructed such that even someone with my tin ears can appreciate the glorious, almost seamless, flow of sound from one item to another.
I've been reading the relevant chapter in David Cairns's Mozart and his Operas as I've been going along and today enjoyed his blow-by-blow of the musical delights on offer with which he concludes his account. However, I'm afraid my powers of recall of the actual music were not up to the detail he provides which has caused me to wonder whether to now give the whole thing another spin, this time with Cairns's account in hand rather than following the libretto. I've got a feeling that doing so would prove illuminating, but perhaps in the kind of strenuous fashion I might not quite be up to.
Part of the fascination of Mozart lies in the way that the delicious surface of the music, its obvious delight-in-itself-as-gorgeous-sound, turns out to be just an introduction to its deeper delights.
No comments:
Post a Comment