Tuesday Tones

As I continue working through this site’s new look and functionality on the back end, I suppose it’s time to figure out how posting music looks and works here. I haven’t listened to this in quite a while, but it’s always a delight to come back to: the ballet “Dance of the Hours” from Amilcare Ponchielli’s opera La Gioconda. The opera is one that to this day I’ve never heard, but it’s still a mainstay on the international repertoire, even though full stagings are infrequent because the opera’s complexity and scale makes it expensive to do. Ponchielli is almost entirely known now for La Gioconda and especially for the “Dance of the Hours”; his music now aside from those works is little heard. But he was influential in his day, and without Ponchielli we don’t get the likes of Puccini or Mascagni. Those kinds of composers are important to recognize and to hear, once in a while.

The “Dance of the Hours” is pure light and magic, utterly effervescent the entire way through. It depicts the march of an entire day’s time, and it comes at the end of the third act of the opera. Having just read a synopsis of the opera, I find myself wondering how this gloriously magical ballet works in the midst of a scene where guests have arrived at the home of an Inquisitor for what eventually turns out to be a fairly dark evening.

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