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Friday, 8. December 2006

Willow Song



You may have enjoyed the recent Bollywood take on Othello in "Omkara". But Othello has been making the rounds in various guises for quite sometime now. The final scene in which Desdemoda sings the airas "Willow Song" and "Ave Maria" (before Othello kills Desdemonda) is one of the more famous scenes in Verdi's take on Shakespeare's play, in his opera "Otello". Wiki's description of the scene and the aira:

"Desdemona and Emilia are preparing for bed. Desdemona asks Emilia to put out the sheets she used on her wedding night, and asks that if she dies, she be buried with them. Emilia asks her not to talk about such things. Desdemona recalls how her mother had a servant named Barbara, who fell in love with a man but went mad when he left her. She sings the Willow Song."

I am slowly working through Richard Powers's wonderful brick of a novel on music, physics of time, and racial identity: "The Time of Our Singing". And it is Powers's dazzling descriptions and reflections on classical music thickly threaded in this novel, which made me turn to opera tonight, with its possibilities for transcendence, which is beyond my ability to comprehend languages in which it is sung. Listen:




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