Figaro Overture

Yes, I'm alive! Sorry for not posting in months. I've been taking classes in music theory/history and have started re-studying harmony and counterpoint. Left with little free time, going to the opulent Met Opera has taken to the back burner. Don't get me wrong. My obsession over the artistic merit of productions was and will continue to be a 'hoot', but it just does not get at what is so fabulous about these composers we put up on a pedestal- that is their music. Everything important about our beloved Beethoven, Puccini, Verdi, etc. can be discovered by studying the score. Passive listening annoys me- turning intricate music that was never meant to be just 'pretty' into mere background noise. If we don't make an attempt to actually understand what is going on (my problem with not translating operas into English for an English speaking audience), and if we never open a score of the cherished symphonies, masses, concertos, sonatas, whatever, classical music will indeed suffer the fate that its arcane name suggests. This music was meant to shock, to deviate from what came before. So lets stop thinking about it as superfluous fluff.

I want to point something out from the overture of Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro that you can only undertand from his manuscript. It used to be common practice during the classical period to include a minuet or another dance form in the development (middle) section of a piece. It acted as a break from the high energy main theme, often giving more power to its recapitulation. In the Figaro overture, Mozart first planned on writing a typical dance in a swinging 6/8 meter during the development. For whatever reason he later changed his mind in favor of the driving, mischievous, dare I say heroic main theme. As we can see from the facsimile reproduction of Mozart's manuscript, he actually crossed out the beginning of the 6/8 section, wrote Da Capo (back to the beginning), and started writing the recapitulation. (The crossed out section in the first image above would have acted as the transition to the 6/8 section, which is seen in the last measure. In the second image we can see DaCapo and the beginning of the main eighth-note theme in the violins). Whatever his motives were, the result is a much more energetic overture than would have been the case had he stuck with the dance break. See?! Now tell me knowing that now won't make your experience cooler when you hear it performed live. Mmmmmmhm.