Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

Welcome to my music-related blog post.

Friday evening meant a trip to the opera here which was even more beautiful than pictures can capture.  We were way up in the nosebleed section, which is even more of a nosebleed section because this theater is more vertically oriented than horizontally oriented.  The opera we saw was Mozart's Don Giovanni which just happened to have premiered at the Estates Theater.  This theater and this opera are especially significant to the Amadeus enthusiasts among us (anyone?  anyone?  just me?  don't be shy) as the operas were filmed at this theater.  I could almost see F. Murray Abraham being moody in one of the boxes to the left of me.  Don Giovanni is also quite an important opera to the story of the film. 

Don Giovanni also played an unlikely role in my upbringing.  My father sang a lullaby to me at bedtime when I was little, one which he insisted he made up.  He was quite proud of this.  It was only until listening to a classical music station later that he realized he had been ripping off Mozart all this time-- tune-wise, the lyrics were all his own.  This tune actually came from Don Giovanni, and it was quite lovely to hear it performed by professionals, in the place where it was performed for the first time to the public.

Segue alert: I'm listening to the Beatles as I write this blog post for inspiration.  Emily has been visiting for the weekend, plus a few days, and we've been doing some sightseeing.  On Sunday we went to the Czech Museum of Music which currently is home to an extremely awesome Beatles exhibit.  The exhibit features your run-of-the-mill Beatles facts, which you can really learn anywhere, but are still interesting to read about.  What interested me most was the Czech Republic's (really, Czechoslovakia's relationship to the Beatles).  It was fascinating to read about the rejection of the "long hairs" (you guessed it, people with long hair), the censorship of rock music, the fact that young people in Czechoslovakia were always behind on the latest Beatles music, because of this censorship.  Really, I am not doing the information justice.  I would like to say that it is so enlightening to see something familiar, i.e. The Beatles, through a completely unfamiliar lens, i.e. 1960s Czechoslovakia.  Also, fun fact-- Paul McCartney is the only Beatle to actually perform in the Czech Republic.