- Joined
- Jun 21, 2003
no need for italian to read the libretti... and it's not only italian opera at fault....
and so what you are saying is that the context doesn't matter since the music is so beautiful... then why are you against strange fruit...? that's a double standard....
Here's what I think: you know too much about music in general and opera in particular. For me (not knowing Italian and not knowing much about the plots of operas), beautiful music as a backdrop for an athletic performance is pretty much all that is required.
I confess that I never knew or cared anything about the plot of Turandot. I did look up the words to Nessun Dorma once and found out it was something about, "Don't go to sleep."
As for Thais, many skaters used that music (I especially liked Berezhnaya and Sikharudlidze's). I even played it in concert myself once in my junior high school band* -- but I was never curious enough to read about the opera, and the Mediataion doesn't have words, anyway.
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* The score for the trombone part carried the instruction, "muted thruout." I remember wondering, what the heck is a muted thruout? I supposed that since our band did not have a thruout player, I was supposed to fake in the thruout part on the trombone.
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As for the double standard charge, the music (without words) of Strange Fruit cannot stand alone free of context in the same sense that we can make that claim about Nessun Dorme and the Meditation. In fact, I have never heard tell of an instrumental version of this song -- or of any version that was not designed to emphasize the horror embodied by the words. No one would even recognize what song is being played if they heard just the accompaniment.
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