Tosca

Is AWESOME! And now that I"m getting good at the Italian language it's even more awesome cause I can understand most of it, without reading the subtitles. I think Puccini is a genius. He uses motives to represent each character and presents them in a very subtile way. Which rocks! My favorite part musically and dramatically is when Tosca kills Scarpia. There is this gorgeous dramtic music that just swells and takes over the drama. I love when music and drama can match so well. Music can create such mood swings too. For instance: At the end of the opera Tosca thinks that her lover Cavodossi is going to be fakely executed, but he is really killed. At first the music is all hopefully and rather casual, but as Tosca realizes that Cavadossi is really dead the music quicly changes with the realization. It is a beautiful and horrific moment in the opera.

Mozart 40

So, since I spent a bit too much time this weekend with Mozart 40, I am going to give you a preview of the piece. The piece is interesting to analyze, for three out of the four movements in this symphony are in sonata form. Without giving too much away about the content of my paper, each of the sonata form movement really is formed in a different way. It is interesting to see the ways in which Mozart has taken a relatively strict form and changed it to make it accessible yet interesting in three movements. It is also very interesting to see a second movement in sonata form. I really like this form for a slow movement; it allows the thematic material to get beyond simply a statement when you have three distinct shots at it in the expo, develop, and recap. This symphony is one of his later and is arguably the most famous symphony that he wrote. The piece was originally written without clarinet parts, but it is evident he revised the score at a later date to accommodate his clarinetist friends. There are parts of this work that, if heard out of context, you would believe were from the sometime in the romantic period or perhaps later. Each of the movements has a different emotion associated with it with a range of emotions within each of these movements. Ok, I think that is enough…I don’t want to repeat what I have said in my paper, so yeah. This is a very cool piece and according to Jessi, “it gets in your head really easily" and she would know since I subjected her to it a few times.