Verdi's second thoughts

 Thanks to urgent party business and difficulty connecting to the Internet yesterday, I missed my usual weekday blog post. The suspicion grows that each successive Windows 10 update adds code to the connect sequence so that older machines like this one time out at busy times.

Anyway, Covid apart, nothing much caught my eye recently except this report from euronews. It seems that Giuseppe Verdi originally wrote around 100 bars more music for his grand opera Aida than was performed at its gala Egyptian opening. Verdi, a man of the theatre, probably judged that the shortened version played better, but enough people were interested in the material unearthed from the composer's archive to warrant a premiere performance. Not that Verdi let it go to waste himself, incorporating much in his Requiem.

I was never a great opera enthusiast, but the Grand March became very familiar in the 1950s because it was used as the station ident. for the English language output of Egyptian State Broadcasting.