Episode 31

This week is the other half of my conversation with Tuscan tenor Giorgio Berrugi. Our texts today are Christoph Willibald Gluck's "O del mio dolce ardor" and Petrarch's Sonnet 104, "Pace non trovo." We talk about whether or not to use glottals in Italian (spoiler-the answer is NO!), some irregular verbs you may run across, some standard suffixes with stressed E and the importance of knowing every meaning of your lines in an opera. You can find both texts for today at the Lied and Art Song Texts Page. "O del mio dolce ardor" is from the opera Paride ed Elena, a collaboration of Gluck and Ranieri de' Calzabigi, who also wrote the libretto for Orfeo ed Euridice. Francesco Petrarca's "Pace non trovo" is one of his sonnets to Laura, the married woman whom he loved--Wikipedia even has an entire section devoted to Petrarch and Laura. I also found a short essay on Liszt and Petrarch at a website entitled The Engines of our Ingenuity. The Lied and Art Song Texts Page lists "Pace non trovo" as Sonnet CXXXIV, but every other source that I found lists it in modern numerals as 104, so I've used that number on this episode. For people interested in reading some of the classic literature online, check out Project Gutenberg, Classic Authors dot Net or The Literature Page. Kindle for PC or MAC is also available as a free download from Amazon, if you would like books in that format but don't have a Kindle (I personally have this on my Netbook, so that I can carry it around with me). Anyone interested in studying more mythology can get started at Wikipedia's Roman Mythology and Greek Mythology pages, as well as Encyclopedia Mythica, Myth Web and Theoi Greek Mythology or check out Edith Hamilton's book Mythology. As always, please feel free to contact me here, through the Facebook page or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com with any questions or comments.