Outdoors and indoors

Correction to my last entry: clearing the leaves IS an ordeal. Especially now that it's colder and damper and they don't want to burn. I did try using the lawnmower to gather them up, but it has now gone off sick and is awaiting a spare part. So I gave myself a change yesterday by getting out the chainsaw and cutting up some of the many large branches still lying around after last January's destructive snowfall.

Back indoors. There's an excellent new website just opened with digital scores of Mozart's entire works, in the authoritative Neue Mozart Ausgabe edition. So I thought I'd take a look at one of his pieces which I'd heard of but never actually encountered, the opera L'Oca del Cairo (The Goose of Cairo - yes, really). It quickly became apparent that Mozart left it incomplete - very incomplete - which is itself a gift because it gives a fascinating view of how he composed. The various songs are complete in the sense that the vocal line(s) and the bass line have been fully composed, so the structure of each song is there. But the orchestral parts are still waiting to be written. Sometimes the orchestral opening to a song has been written, giving a clear idea of the intended style and texture, only to vanish once the voices come in. Occasional important counter-melodies have been written in, just a bar or two at a time. It's the composer's equivalent of an incomplete painting, where the artist's intention is clear enough but the raw canvas is showing through. What's there is good authoritative Mozart, with confident melodies and masterful ensemble work. A shame that he abandoned it.

This evening I did a presentation on the lute and baroque guitar for a music class of 11-14 year olds in Réalmont. They've been studying renaissance music this term and the idea was to bring it to life by presenting it on the instruments of the time. All went well (apart from cutting my finger on the music stand) and they all enjoyed it. A journalist from Le Tarn Libre came along to take pictures so I hope to get a newspaper article out of it.

We were all back in England last weekend for my parents' golden wedding celebrations. Lovely occasion. So many other people were taking photos that I forgot to take any myself. So, no pictorial evidence here yet until someone else sends me some!