Connecticut Summer Opera

02/18/2026

THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES:
Harmonia Caelestis
The Celestial Harmony of Franchino Gaffurio

Franchino Gaffurio (Franciscus Gaffurius 1451 - 1522) was choirmaster of the Cathedral of Milan.

Gaffurio’s writings on music theory are essential for understanding how scholars of that era understood the universal aspects of music.

One of Gaffurio’s brilliant contributions to music theory was depicting the musical universe as the tones and modes of the musical scale that coordinate with the heavenly bodies.

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This woodcut of the Music of the Spheres was originally the frontispiece of Gaffurio’s 1518 De harmonia musicorum instrumentorum.

Gaffurio’s treatise was based on the hermetic tradition of Pythagoreanism.

The Pythagorean musical theory that the image was originally created to illuminate, also has alchemical symbolism that has fascinated scholars for the last five hundred years.

The tones and modes of the musical scale are correlated with the Nine Muses.

Euterpe was the Muse of Music and is seen mid-left, playing the Auloi.

Opposite the Muses are their correlates:
The Celum (Caelum) Stellarum is logically placed across from Urania.
The sun,moon and known planets are positioned across from the other Muses, with Thalia at the bottom
They are surrounded by the Four Elements of ancient Greek philosophy and medieval alchemy: Aqua, Ignis, Aer, Terra (Water, Fire, Air, Earth).

Note that here Apollo is presiding over this complex and splendidly interconnected celestial realm in his manifestation as Apollo Musicus.

Another of Apollo’s manifestations was as Apollo Paene: Apollo as physician god and father of Asclepius.
How wonderful- Music and Medicine!

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The major treatises by Gaffurio during his years in Milan are: _Theorica musicae_ (1492), _Practica musicae_ (1496), and _De harmonia musicorum instrumentorum_ (1518).

The second of these, _Practica Musicae_, is the most thorough of his works , “proceeding through subjects as diverse as ancient Greek notation, plainchant, mensuration, counterpoint, and tempo.”

Gaffurio’s most well-known statement is that “the tactus, the tempo of a semibreve, is equal to the pulse of a man who is breathing quietly— about 72 beats per minute.”

References:

1) Margaret Mendenhall
Music of the Spheres:
Musical Theory and Alchemical Image
https://lnkd.in/ebDQK43F
This reference discusses the woodcut

2) Peter Pesic.
Music and the Making of Modern Science
MIT Press. 2014
This magisterial tour de force is on my desk.

Image:
Franchinus Gaffurius (Franchino Gaffurio or Gafori)
The frontispiece of his treatise, _De Harmonia Musicorum Instrumentorum_.
1518

01/31/2025

Schubert and the Clarinet

Happy Birthday Franz Schubert !
(31 January 1798 - 19 November 1828)

The clarinet features prominently in many Schubert symphonies, in the wondrous Octet and in The Shepherd on the Rock.

As a clarinetist, this is my essential Schubert:
Der Hirt auf dem Felsen (The Shepherd on the Rock)

Here is a reference recording, the iconic performance by Benita Valente, Rudolph Serkin and Harold Wright.

https://youtu.be/zuXQenEzE3I?si=Ey_wL__e_-C1DPfm

09/06/2024

A German Requiem
ein deutsches Requiem
Johannes Brahms

Brahms’ German Requiem (ein deutsches Requiem) is that great paean to his mother, Christiane, who died in 1865. This seven-movement choral masterwork, premiered in its final form in September 1869, is a consolation for the living even more than it is a threnody for those who have passed on.

There are many fine performances of Brahms’ German Requiem.

The one I link here, by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra and MDR Radio Choir is crystalline, transparent and revelatory.

Take the time to listen.

Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra
MDR-Radio Choir
Christiane Karg - soprano
Michael Nagy - baritone
David Zinman, conductor
Alte Oper Frankfurt
11 October 2019

https://youtu.be/ZXU9vqVdudM?si=1mYUXGrAfM5gK9N_

Image:

A wonderful colorized photo of Brahms, derived from an 1880’s B/W photo of the Master

05/06/2024

AN ODE TO JOY, FRIENDSHIP, UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD and PEACE:
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony

Tomorrow is the bicentennial anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s monumental ninth symphony, the “Choral,”
Beethoven began composing it in 1817 and premiered it on 7 May, 1824, at the Theater am Kärntnertor, Vienna.
Michael Umlauf and Ludwig van Beethoven conducted the Kärntnertor house orchestra, Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde with SATB soloists Henriette Sontag (soprano), Caroline Unger (alto), Anton Haizinger (tenor), and Joseph Seipelt (bass)

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is one of the great artistic achievements of western civilization.

It is a celebration of hope and joy, and universal brotherhood, a transcendent masterpiece crafted by a composer who could not hear all of his magisterial creation.

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is an extraordinary, monumental, complex, and powerful work that continues to uplift, amaze and challenge musicians, soloists, choruses, and listeners, as it celebrates the most wondrous shared dreams of humanity, of community, of happiness, of freedom, together “beneath the starry realm.”

Here is a link to my essay on the Ninth Symphony, which has served as program notes for several concert performances in Connecticut.

Ode to Joy:
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony
Vincent DeLuise MD
http://amusicalvision.blogspot.com/2017/04/beethovens-ode-to-joy.html

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
by Ferdinand Georg Waldmuller
1823
Kunsthistorisches Museum
Viennaa

05/06/2024

MOZART’S MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR DE FORCE:
The Three Levels of Meaning in Die Zauberflöte

Everyone loves Wolfgang Amadè Mozart’s and Emanuel Schikaneder’s fabulous operatic Singspiel, The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte).

I do as well. The more I listen to it, the more I find within its magical, mystical, mysterious and universal spirit beauty.

I wrote program notes for Opera Brooklyn and Connecticut Lyric Opera productions of the opera (Singspiel).
The link is at the end of this post

There are three levels of meaning which Mozart and Schikaneder built into this wondrous Singspiel: exoteric, mesoteric and esoteric. Die Zauberflöte is an enigma, its ambiguity purposeful.

The opera coruscates as a crystal, reflecting one's own hopes, fears and experiences, which in turn deepen our admiration and reverence of this masterpiece.

As a musical work, it draws the listener in, at first with simple song, then with indelible musical love poems, and at its climax, with a monumental paean to hope, faith and virtue.

As a literary work, it intrigues the reader with allegory and complex symbolism, and its disparate, yet mystically interconnected philosophies.

As a visual work, it captivates the viewer with its trajectory, from darkness to the brilliance of light.

Die Zauberflöte can be viewed as a Gesamtkunstwerk, the idealized and complete work of Art, which one can visit and then revisit again throughout life, from childhood into senescence, at each stage always finding new secrets, new harmonies and new understandings within.

http://amusicalvision.blogspot.com/2012/03/mozarts-magical-mystery-tour-die.html

As you read the program notes, listen to the wonderful 2003 Covent Garden Colin Davis-led production with Damrau, Roschmann, Keenlyside, Selig & Co., In my view, it is among the best Die Zauberflöte performance since the days of Edda Moser and Rita Streich of the 1970s.

https://youtu.be/BoFFIFluhdg

Image:
Set design for Act I Scene VI from Mozart's and Shikaneder’s great Singspiel, Die Zauberflöte
Königin der Nacht (Queen of Night)
Aquatint by Carl Friedrich Thiele (1827)
after a print by Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1816)

04/05/2024

WHAT AMADEUS GOT RIGHT

The movie and play, Amadeus, brought Mozart's ineffable music into the consciousness and lives of millions around the world.
We all know, of course, that the the play and the movie were not all factual. It was Broadway and Hollywood, and historical fiction.

However, Milos Forman and Peter Shaffer had researched Mozart’s real life and knew what they were doing with Mozart’s history in the play and the movie. They knew more about Mozart than many Mozart lovers, and crafted a wondrous movie that deservedly won eight Academy awards.

While Forman and Peter Shaffer never intended to create a documentary, they crafted such an absorbing and compelling story about Salieri and Mozart, that legions of music lovers have jumped in to point out the “historical inaccuracies” that limn the film.

Shaffer and Forman took some of the ideas from Pushkin’s eponymous play (and Rimsky-Korsakov’s subsequent opera) about the dialectic between Salieri and Mozart, between quotidian mediocrity and Genius, to create a play, and a subsequent Hollywood movie that won eight Academy Awards.

Here is a link to an essay I wrote on Amadeus, the play and movie; and with Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields Orchestra, Mozart’s Music and his Genius shine brightly through.

Vincent DeLuise

WHAT AMADEUS GOT RIGHT
Vincent P. de Luise MD

http://amusicalvision.blogspot.com/2015/03/what-amadeus-gets-right.html

05/22/2023

BRAVI TUTTI !

What a spectacular concert this afternoon by the Waterbury Symphony Waterbury Symphony Orchestra, under the superb direction of Maestro Leif Bjaland.

The concert opened with Joan Tower’s dynamic and percussive, “Tambor,” followed by a galvanic performance of Franz Liszt’s fascinating and dramatic Totentanz for piano orchestra with Thomas C. Clark concerto competition winner Homan Cheung. Totentanz is based on the Gregorian plainchant melody of the Dies Irae, and Mr. Cheung and the WSO gave it a powerful, indeed in moments, breathtaking, reading.

The centerpiece of the concert was a scintillating performance by the WSO of Franz Schubert’s magnificent, monumental ninth symphony, his last, the so appropriately named, “Great.”
Maestro Bjaland brought forth with crystalline clarity all the dynamics and tonal color of this classical music masterpiece, a work which was not heard in a public performances during Schubert’s own lifetime. It would be over ten years after his passing before Robert Schumann rediscovered the autograph manuscript and gave it to Felix Mendelssohn, who at once recognized its majesty and conducted it at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1839.

Schubert truly outdid himself in this great work; not only offering and then developing and modulating many gorgeous melodic motifs, but moreover, crafting a composition which creates a truly modern orchestral sound.

Over the decades, Maestro Bjaland has fashioned an extraordinary ensemble of musicians in the WSO, a stellar group of instrumentalists that can perform any work in the repertory at the highest level.

Bravi Tutti!

04/22/2023

MOZART REQUIEM

The Connecticut Choral Society will be performing the powerful Mozart Requiem, this Sunday afternoon, April 23rd, at 3 PM, at Trinity Episcopal Church in Newtown.
The Choral Society will be led by its esteemed Maestro, Eric Dale Knapp, accompanied by the takented NYC-based Orchestra Nexus and an extraordinary ensemble of SATB soloists from NYC.
I will offer a pre-concert talk on Mozart's life, music and legacy at 2 PM.
The concert begins promptly at 3 PM and is about one hour in duration.

Tickets are 35 dollars.
Tickets can be purchased at the Connecticut Choral Society website:
https://ctchoralsociety.com/
Click on the yellow button to purchase tickets.

The concert will begin with the Adagio movement of the Mozart clarinet concerto, performed by Orchestra Nexus with Grammy nominated clarinetist, Todd Palmer, as soloist.
The Choral Society will follow with Mozart's sublime motet, Ave Verum Corpus, whose 46 measures have been said to be the most beautiful music ever written. These two pieces provide a meditative prelude to the performance of the Mozart Requiem.

Any opportunity to experience this powerful work of sacred music is not to be missed.

04/16/2023

MOZART REQUIEM !

The Connecticut Summer Opera Foundation (CSOF) is proud to be a sponsor of a wonderful upcoming concert by the Connecticut Choral Society.

The Connecticut Choral Society will be performing the magnificent and poignant Mozart Requiem on Sunday afternoon, April 23rd, at 3 PM, at Trinity Episcopal Church in Newtown. (Exit 10 off I-84 and up the hill to the flagpole).

The Choral Society will be led by Maestro Eric Dale Knapp, accompanied by Orchestra Nexus and an extraordinary ensemble of SATB soloists.

There will be a pre-concert talk on Mozart's life, music and legacy at 2 PM.

The concert is about one hour in duration.

Tickets are 35 dollars.

Tickets can be purchased at the Connecticut Choral Society website
Here is the link https://ctchoralsociety.com/

When you are on the website, simply click on the yellow button to purchase tickets.

The concert will begin with the Adagio movement of the Mozart clarinet concerto, performed by Orchestra Nexus with the esteemed clarinetist, Todd Palmer, as soloist. The Choral Society will follow with Mozart's sublime motet, Ave Verum Corpus, whose 46 measures have been said to be the most beautiful music ever written. These two pieces provide a meditative prelude to the performance of the Requiem.

Any opportunity to experience this powerful work of sacred music is not to be missed.

I hope to see you there !

Thank you for your ongoing support of classical music in our communities.

You Bring Life to the Arts !

Vincent

Vincent de Luise
President
Connecticut Summer Opera Foundation (CSOF)

04/16/2023