Today (12/6: St. Nicholas Day, Finnish Independence Day, and Mozart’s death day) my morning name was the Italian phrase dalla sua pace ‘on his / her peace’. From a Mozart opera. The music playing on my Apple Music when I awoke was indeed from opera in Italian, Rossini’s Barber of Seville, so if the phrase had come from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro — Figaro being the barber in question — the appearance of that phrase in my morning mind would have been easy to explain. Alas, Dalla sua pace (On her peace) is an aria from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, quite a different plot, entirely barber-free and Figaro-free.
It is, of course, possible that my unconscious mind is not as up on the details of opera in Italian as my conscious mind, so it made this distant operatic association. Or maybe I was just reviving an interest in the preposizioni articolate ‘articulated (i.e., articled / arthrous) prepositions’ of Italian, of which dalla — combining the versatile preposition da (expressing source ‘from’, location ‘at, on’, and goal ‘to’) with the fem.sg. definite article la — is a prime example; here it is in a display of the articled prepositions (versions of this chart are found on many sites):
Prepositions down on the left, definite articles across at the top
(Articled prepositions are found in many European languages, as in French du = de ‘of’ + le (masc.sg.) and German zur = zu ‘to, towards’ + der (dat.fem.sg.), with very different details in each language.)
But the aria from Don Giovanni, what of that?
The tenor Don Ottavio’s aria. Which begins:
Dalla sua pace la mia dipende “‘On her [Donna Anna’s] peace [of mind] mine also depends’
Anna is the daughter of the Commendatore; Giovanni attempted to rape or seduce her, but the commander intervened; Giovanni and the commander then fought a duel, in which Giovanni killed the commander, but managed to escape unknown. In this aria Ottavio declares his intention to find the murderer — could it be his friend Giovanni? — and avenge the murder — and declares his love for Anna.
My morning names. I haven’t posted about one in quite some time, even though I have one (or more) almost every morning. Partly that’s because I’ve been overwhelmed with other stuff in my life, but mostly it’s because the names I’ve been getting are pedestrian: names in the news, names of people and things familiar to me and not likely to be of interest to my readers, names I’ve already posted about, that sort of thing. But dalla sua pace, that’s worth talking about.
December 6, 2023 at 12:00 pm |
Side note: Dalla sua pace was not in the original version of Don Giovanni that premiered in Prague. Among the several changes that Mozart made for performance in Vienna, it was added and Ottavio’s second-act aria Il mio tesoro was deleted, I presume because the Vienna tenor couldn’t or wouldn’t sing the latter (the two arias make very different demands on the voice). Nowadays, of course, no tenor would consider omitting either of them.
December 6, 2023 at 9:58 pm |
One of my favorite arias.