Monteverdi's lost operas comprise seven of the ten operas written or
part-written by the Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi (pictured)
between 1607 and 1643, during the early baroque period. Apart from a few
fragments, the music for these seven works has been lost, though in some
cases the librettos have survived. Opera as a genre emerged during
Monteverdi's creative lifetime, and he became a principal exponent of
this new form, first at the Mantuan court and later as director of music
at St Mark's Basilica in Venice. The loss of these works, written during
a critical period of early opera history, has been much regretted by
historians and musicologists, but reflects the habit of the times, when
stage music was thought to have little relevance beyond its initial
performance and often vanished quickly. Contemporary documents,
including many letters written by Monteverdi, have provided most of the
available information on the lost works, and have established that four
of them were completed and performed in the composer's lifetime. Of the
little music that has survived, the lamento from L'Arianna (1608) is
well known as a concert piece and is frequently performed.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monteverdi%27s_lost_operas>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1509:
An estimated 10,000 people died in Constantinople due to an
earthquake so strong it was known as "the Lesser Judgement Day".
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1509_Istanbul_earthquake>
1547:
Anglo-Scottish Wars: English forces defeated the Scots at the
Battle of Pinkie Cleugh near Musselburgh, Lothian, Scotland.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Pinkie_Cleugh>
1898:
In an act of "propaganda of the deed", Italian anarchist Luigi
Lucheni fatally stabbed Empress Elisabeth of Austria in Geneva,
Switzerland.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_Elisabeth_of_Austria>
1946:
While riding a train to Darjeeling, Sister Teresa Bojaxhiu,
later Mother Teresa, experienced what she later described as "the call
within the call", directing her "to leave the convent and help the poor
while living among them".
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Teresa>
1961:
At the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, German driver Wolfgang von
Trips's vehicle collided with another, causing it to become airborne and
crash into a side barrier, killing him and 15 spectators.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_von_Trips>
2008:
CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and highest-
energy particle accelerator, was first powered up beneath the Franco-
Swiss border near Geneva.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
variadic:
(Computing, mathematics, linguistics) Taking a variable number of
arguments; especially, taking arbitrarily many arguments.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/variadic>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything — other
people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's
otherness is antidote to confusion — that standing within this
otherness — the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields
or deep inside books — can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.
--Mary Oliver
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mary_Oliver>
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