Just one more anvil post; I’m not sure which is my favorite, yesterday‘s or today’s. Yesterday’s is a complete piece, start to finish; today’s is an snippet from an opera …. but it’s Wagner.

This short video is an excerpt from his massive, 15 hour opera cycle known as “The Ring Cycle” – four long operas based on German mythology and part of the inspiration behind Tolkein‘s “The Lord of the Rings.” It’s music that accompanies a scene change; its crescendo and sinister sound make it memorable and loved by Wagner fans. The scene change takes us from the land of the gods to the depths of Nibelheim, an underground city of dwarfs. The dwarfs here tirelessly mine for gems and work at the anvil, hence the unmistakable sounds you’ll hear starting around 1:53.

gotta love this video for the extreme close-up of Wagner’s mutton chops and neard.

If you haven’t seen the movie Amadeus, stop putting it off and go see it!

The movie stretched the facts a bit in order to craft a good drama; you can read about that by googling it. However, there were two things in the movie that were spot-on: first, Mozart was a dirty man who was obsessed with poop; second, his insane genius for composition. Even his farts sound as good, if not better, than the average classical symphony.

One of his most famous operas, Don Giovanni, opens with an equally famous overture. The music is out-of-this-world (standard for Mozart), but even more impressive is the fact that he wrote it 24 hours before the opera’s first performance. Legend says that he woke up drunk on the day of the premiere, rolled out of bed and wrote the piece. It’s more likely that he wrote it the day before. Still, that’s not exactly timely, especially in light of the fact that, in 1787, after writing a piece, the score was sent to a copyist who would have to hand-write the individual parts for the musicians to play – and even then there’s the not-so-small matter of the musicians rehearsing …

So the next time someone tells you not to procrastinate, remind them that one of the greatest pieces of music ever was a drunken last-minute quickie written by a potty-mouth.

The classicists (composers from 1750-1810) were all about form. Symphonies, sonatas, concertos, operas – there were specific forms associated with all of them, which audiences expected to hear. A typical symphony would start with a sonata-form movement, then a slow rondo or theme & variations, then a 3/4 dance in trio form, then a quick rondo.

But these 18th-century wig-wearing aristocrats weren’t so stuffy that they couldn’t occasionally break away from convention. When they did, the pieces were called Divertimenti – “amusements”. These were like a hybrid between a baroque dance suite and a classical symphony: a flexible, multi-movement suite of short pieces (like the baroque suite, often more than four movements – more than a symphony), using traditional classical forms (sonata, rondo, trio – not the binary forms of the baroque).

Confused? Put more simply, this is late 18th century party music – short, flexible pieces that could be cut short if dinner was about to be served, or repeated if the cooks failed to cook the main course on time. Often they were written for smaller ensembles which could fit into smaller spaces, and often used wind instruments, which were a little louder and could be heard indoors and outdoors. Today’s piece is just this – a divertimento for wind sextet (two oboes, two horns, two bassoons). Go ahead and play it while your food is cooking; Mozart wouldn’t mind.