03.29.04 - 10:51 a.m.

I love my new computer at work. I really love it. I might propose marriage to it, but... probably not. The computer I've had for the last five years has been, well, a computer with issues. It did not, for example, have a sound card. Now, one does not necessarily need a sound card to work, but it's much easier to stick a CD in the CD-Rom drive than to walk across the room and put it in the stereo. Also, it's easier to listen to music at a volume that other people can tolerate when the speakers are right in front of you. So.

.love it. Right now, I'm listening to my CD of Bellini's opera Norma, which is the opera I saw last summer in Cincinnati. The orchestration isn't as grand and complex as some of the later operatic composers, it's really simple, it's just background to the singing. But, the singing... According to the liner notes, Chopin had two favorite composers: Bach for counterpoint, and Bellini for melody. Here's the rest of the liner notes' bit about Bellini's orchestration:

In fact, in Bellini, one sometimes feels thereis almost no orchestration at all, merely a kind of perfunctory oom-pah-pah on the cellos. By much later standards, especially those of a Wagner or a Benjamin Britten, Bellini's orchestral musci can be regarded as naively simple. To appreciate him fully, it is necessary to put aside insistence onf rich harmonies and complex structures and rely on the power of melody alone to fully express the drama.

The orchestration also reminds me of scores for old movies, black and whites, or the background orchestrations provided for some of the Ella Fitzgerald's records of classic pop songs. Well, not so much those - too icing sweet, the lush rising strings, the manipulative swell of the orchestra: feel longing now, etcetera, etcetera.

So: simple. But then, Casta Diva. If you understand opera only from the outside, it looks a good bit like roleplay: the outrageous, ridiculous plots, the elemental emotions swept across grand stages. There's a subtlety to the music, though, that shades the melodramatic plotting and turns melodrama into something much more immediate and real, at least in the imagination. At the same time - music this grand requires melodrama. How is someone going to sing so purely and passionately about something prosaic?

It's unlikely, unless you're a fool like me, easily seduced by everyday objects and strange connections and connotations.