Last week's blog was rather abbreviated so this week you will get rather more than usual (two separate and distinct parts, no less) to make up for it.
On Monday last I went to the opera master class being given at PSU by Senor Tito Capobianco and afterwards had a very brief chat with him which led to our getting together on Wednesday to chew the fat at greater length.
The first thing I must tell you about the man is that he is an out and out fraud. He apologises for his “poor English” and then displays an understanding and feeling for the nuances of the language that put my own to shame. He will tell you he is getting old. Pah! The man has a demeanour and vitality of any other man one half his chronological age. He will shake his head at you and tell you his memory is letting him down. Pshaw! I would not be surprised to hear that he gives master classes in factual recall to elephants!
I had taken with me to our meeting some paper and a pen in the hope of making notes that could be reproduced here in interview form. Some chance. In the much-too-short one hour we had together he spoke of Nietsche, Freud, Socrates, Laurence Olivier ("I saw him play Hamlet nine times. Nine times!"), Anthony Quinn, St Augustine, Disraeli, Einstein, Andre Previn, the hopes and dreams of US soccer (comparing and contrasting the European playing model with the American and South American ones), how working in Germany enabled him to cultivate discipline and how that is for him such a necessary adjunct to the passion he gets from his Mediterranean background. Oh, and opera.
Another week when I was not very productive. I got another dose of the bug going around town and then was struck with a recurrence of some back trouble that plagues me from time to time. And, yes, I am a little better; thank you for asking!
If I had had to pick on one thing that I thought Shakespeare and Verdi have in common it would have been that neither of them is very funny. Now, I have been a lover of the Bard since I was a teenager, have read nearly all of his plays and acted in a number of them (I believe my interpretation of Lady Macbeth is still talked about at my old boarding school. Not in a good way). The tragedies never fail to move me and the histories are wonderfully, well, historic and all. But the comedies.....It is true that to a great extent my disappointment in them was brought about by the fact that I thought a comedy was something humourous. It is only relatively recently that Elizabeth pointed out to me that a comedy is nothing more than a piece with a happy ending. It is not required to be a barrel of laughs. So, Shakespeare gets a pass on that one.
Against the possibility you have had enough of all the Falstaff stuff here are a few of the usual tid-bits for you.
I need to be very brief today. For boring reasons I won't explain but which concern me changing my isp and phone service provider I am having to rely on the wifi in my apartment building and I manage to log on for about three minutes on any given day. This situation will pertain until this coming Friday after which you - and I - may expect things to return to normal.