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I like Brahms very much! I just finished listening to his First symphony .. it's beautiful! I love classical music.
Taken during rehearsals of the Bradenburg Sinfonia at St Martin-in-the-Fields.
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Liverpool, England.
Featuring the monument to the Duke of Wellington.
Erected in 1865. Architect : Andrew Lawson.
COPYRIGHT © Towner Images
The classical lamp in Bates Hall, which is the main reading room of Boston Public Library. You will calm down, when you are here, and devote yourself to study spontaneously.
Thanks for all negative and positive comments. They will improve my skills and afflatus.
. . . for spring. Take a break on campus. The students are gone for a few weeks and the landscape is very calm.
UC Berkeley.
HBM!
Portrait of a Khmer classical dancer with his mask pushed back from his face. Prasat Bayon, Angkor Thom, Siem Reap, Cambodia.
27/03/16 www.allenfotowild.com
The first guitar I ever picked up- my mother’s classical guitar. It’s not fancy, and it’s not expensive, but it’s incredibly sentimental. I love the sound of a classical guitar now and then!
Theme: Music To My Ears
Year Ten Of My 365 Project
Lyric Opera of Chicago
October 11, 14, 17, 20, 23 and 26, 2025
🎭 Cherubini’s Medea – Synopsis
Composer: Luigi Cherubini
Libretto: François-Benoît Hoffman, based on Euripides’ Medea, Pierre Corneille’s Médée, and other classical sources.
Premiere: 1797, Théâtre Feydeau, Paris (Médée in French); commonly performed in the 20th century in Italian translation (especially the Lachner version)
Setting:
Ancient Corinth, in the aftermath of Medea and Jason’s adventures in Colchis and the quest for the Golden Fleece.
Act I – The Wedding Day
The opera opens on the day of Jason’s wedding—not to Medea, his former wife, but to Glauce (also called Creusa), daughter of King Creon of Corinth. Jason has abandoned Medea and their two children in pursuit of social status and security.
Glauce is nervous—haunted by Medea’s reputation as a powerful and vengeful sorceress from a foreign land. Creon is firm: Medea must leave Corinth at once to prevent disruption to the royal wedding. Jason, torn but resolute, justifies his betrayal as necessary for the children’s future.
Medea arrives uninvited, distraught and humiliated. She pleads with Jason, only to be met with coldness. When Creon orders her exile, she manipulates him into granting her a one-day reprieve. The act ends with Medea vowing revenge.
Act II – The Veil of Vengeance
Medea wrestles with despair and rage, invoking the gods and her own powers. She hatches a deadly plan: she will send her children to Glauce bearing gifts—a robe and a diadem laced with poison.
Jason, still deluded by self-justification, allows the children to deliver the gifts, thinking it will bring peace between the two women. Medea hides her fury behind a mask of reconciliation.
Act III – Fire and Blood
Word soon comes that Glauce is dead—her body consumed by fire when she dons the cursed robe. Creon, trying to save her, dies as well.
Medea's triumph turns to horror as she prepares for her final act. She resolves to kill her own children to fully punish Jason—denying him both legacy and love. As Corinth burns and the people cry out in terror, Medea murders the boys and appears before Jason one last time, bloodied but defiant.
She vanishes into the night, leaving Jason to face the ruins of his ambition.
Themes and Musical Style
Cherubini’s Medea is a powerful blend of classical tragedy and early Romantic opera. Though written in the 1790s, it anticipates the dramatic intensity of later composers like Beethoven and Berlioz. The title role is one of the most demanding in the repertoire—vocally fierce, emotionally volcanic, and psychologically layered. Medea is no mere villain; she is a wronged woman driven to the outer edge of human experience, her grandeur and monstrosity bound together.
The opera explores:
Betrayal and abandonment.
The foreign woman as both outsider and threat.
The limits of power, reason, and vengeance.
The devastating consequences of pride and revenge.
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🎭 Opera in Revolutionary Paris: From Collapse to Reinvention
🔥 The Crisis (1789–1794)
At the outset of the French Revolution in 1789, opera was seen by many revolutionaries as a corrupt and elitist art form associated with the ancien régime. The Académie Royale de Musique (Paris Opéra), long funded by the monarchy, symbolized aristocratic excess and state patronage. The fall of the monarchy in 1792 and the execution of Louis XVI in 1793 sent shockwaves through all institutions—including the arts.
During the Reign of Terror (1793–1794):
Many aristocratic patrons were executed or fled.
Censorship was intense and ideological.
Performances were suspended or redirected to serve revolutionary propaganda.
Operas of the ancien régime were banned or rewritten to reflect republican ideals.
Some theaters were shut down; others became stages for revolutionary pageantry and pièces à sauvetage (melodramas featuring heroic rescues and virtue).
Yet even amid the chaos, theater and opera never fully ceased. The revolutionary government understood their power for mass persuasion, and theaters were repurposed as tools for civic education.
Rebuilding and Redirection (1795–1797)
After Robespierre’s fall in 1794, the political climate began to thaw. The Directory (1795–1799) brought a more pragmatic and less ideologically rigid approach. Cultural life, especially in Paris, began to rebound, driven by:
A new bourgeois audience, eager for diversion and moral elevation.
A reorientation of content: works with themes of virtue, justice, and self-sacrifice were encouraged.
Relaxation of censorship allowed composers and librettists more freedom.
Theaters were reopened or rebranded; the Paris Opéra resumed activity under different auspices.
Foreign composers and émigré artists (like Cherubini, an Italian working in Paris) were welcomed, especially if they embraced revolutionary values—or at least avoided monarchist associations.
🎼 Cherubini’s Médée in Context
Luigi Cherubini had remained in Paris through the Revolution, adapting astutely to the shifting tides. He aligned himself with revolutionary ideals without becoming doctrinaire. His music struck a new, leaner tone—stripped of rococo ornament, full of dramatic clarity, moral gravity, and classical rigor—all qualities that appealed to post-revolutionary audiences.
Médée (1797) fit the moment perfectly:
Based on a classical subject, it resonated with revolutionary neoclassicism.
Medea, as a powerful outsider, embodied anxieties about vengeance, justice, and moral collapse.
The opera combined psychological realism with tragic grandeur, aligning with the Directory’s taste for high-minded drama over frivolous entertainment.
The setting and costumes could invoke antiquity without recalling Versailles.
Bigger Picture: Why Opera Survived
Opera endured because it could adapt:
Thematically, by shifting from gods and kings to heroes and martyrs.
Aesthetically, by adopting simpler, starker forms in tune with revolutionary neoclassicism.
Institutionally, by transforming royal theaters into national ones.
Politically, by serving as both mirror and mouthpiece of civic ideology.
And crucially: the public still wanted it. Even in the darkest days, Parisians flocked to theaters. In a society newly preoccupied with the people’s voice and emotions, opera—paradoxically—became more essential than ever.
This text is a collaboration with ChatGPT.
This classic beauty, for me a latter-day Helen of Troy, was seen on the street in Chania, the second city of Crete, Greece.
Model & Stylist : Bily
Location : Opera House
Classic style costumes mixed with modern very creative and eye-catching
Tele 70-200 F2.8
Ha Noi - Viet Nam 2011
Vintage gasoline pump at a former gas station in Santa Barbara, California.
According to the property owner, the underground gasoline storage tanks were removed in the 1980s, along with the last of the later pumps that once occupied this service island.
The property is vacant as of early 2021, but the station building has potential to become a coffee shop, pub, or other business.
A stone dancer representing Champa culture from central Vietnam . The Cham flourished from the 2nd to 15th centuries in and around present day Danang . They adopted Hinduism , employed Sanskrit as a sacred language and borrowed heavily from Indian art . The Cham constitute only 3% of Vietnams ethnic minority peoples today .
Brisbane
The frieze in the foreground was designed and created the American artist Benjamin West, the same artist whose paintings adorn the Royal Chapel.
An HDR composition