{"id":77,"date":"2012-10-30T09:00:19","date_gmt":"2012-10-29T22:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/catesings.org\/?p=77"},"modified":"2012-10-30T09:00:19","modified_gmt":"2012-10-29T22:00:19","slug":"madamina-pisaroni-the-catalogue-aria-mozart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/2012\/10\/30\/madamina-pisaroni-the-catalogue-aria-mozart\/","title":{"rendered":"Madamina Pisaroni (The Catalogue Aria) – Mozart"},"content":{"rendered":"

As promised, I return from the opera gala with something to amuse you.\u00a0 This aria was sung by a very handsome young baritone with a beautiful voice, a gleam in his eye, and a copy of Vanity Fair, to which he referred at salient moments, to illustrate the ladies in question.\u00a0 This particular recording, by Erwin Schrott, is much in the same spirit, and leads one to believe that the singer is in fact detailing (and revelling in) his own conquests, not those of his master.\u00a0 In my mind, it immediately became ‘the notches on the bedpost aria’, because I’m vulgar like that.\u00a0\u00a0 See what you think…<\/p>\n

[youtube=http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=tM-2CA47L_A&w=420&h=315]<\/p>\n

I have one, very shallow, reason for liking this aria.\u00a0 OK, two very shallow reasons, because that baritone is really exceptionally hot, but the other shallow reason is that my Italian is pretty basic, but numbers and countries I can do, so the entire first part of the aria is entirely intelligible to me.\u00a0 This fills me with joy.<\/p>\n

(But here’s a translation, in case you’d like to know what the rest of the aria is like<\/a>.\u00a0 All class, Mozart was…)<\/p>\n

I’ve never seen any of Don Giovanni before, and this has been, for the most part, a deliberate decision. I’m afraid I’m not a huge fan of Mozart, having been traumatised by one too many piano sonatas as a child.\u00a0 I find his piano music is very clockworkish, though his vocal music has been growing on me (mostly because he teams up with some fairly entertaining lyricists, but also partly because I do like bouncy coloratura, and you can generally rely on Mozart for that).\u00a0 And then the plot Don Giovanni itself does not strike me as terribly pleasing – I realise that if you are listening to opera in the first place, you have to just assume a certain level of dodgy gender politics, but Don Giovanni annoys me.<\/p>\n

Having said that, I have to admit that this is a fun aria, and surprisingly sexy, despite it’s terribly dubious content.\u00a0\u00a0 You can see a staged version here<\/a>, with a bit more context (which does, admittedly, make it less funny and more disturbing, but that’s Don Giovanni for you).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As promised, I return from the opera gala with something to amuse you.\u00a0 This aria was sung by a very handsome young baritone with a beautiful voice, a gleam in his eye, and a copy of Vanity Fair, to which he referred at salient moments, to illustrate the ladies in question.\u00a0 This particular recording, by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[192,228,433,504,505,549],"class_list":["post-77","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-don-giovanni","tag-erwin-schrott","tag-leporello","tag-mozart","tag-music","tag-opera"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}