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Guest Black Lotus

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Last week marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Giuseppe Verdi. Verdi was the great master of Italian opera in the Romantic period and is one of the most historically significant composers in the non-musical sense because his operas were the soundtrack to which Italy won her unification and independence.

 

Like most great musical anniversaries, this was celebrated all over the world. One of the biggest events was in Chicago, where the Chicago Symphony Orchestra staged a webcast on October 10th of Verdi's Requiem. Although this is an orchestral work with chorus and vocalists, the operatic influence is unmistakable, as is the sense of drama that flows throughout the work. I couldn't relocate the webcast (though I did watch it on Youtube, Googling it again has proven challenging) but this 2001 sample with soprano Renee Fleming gives you an idea of the piece's feel.

 

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The String Quintet by Franz Schubert, who churned out an extraordinary amount of amazing music in a life that ended when he was only 31 years old (many scholars attribute his death to syphilis, a venereal disease that was incurable and deadly during his lifetime and probably contracted as the result of a youthful "indiscretion".). Schubert worked so obsessively and wrote so much music that much of it he never even heard performed. It is believed that the score to this masterful quintet was found in a box in his closet after his death, untouched possibly for a few years.

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