Povero Rigoletto

This is from the movie "Rigoletto from Mantua", a movie of Verdi's 'Rigoletto' filmed live in the city where the action takes place. Beautifully made, tenor Placido Domingo sings the baritone role of Rigoletto at age 70. While not the booming voice one generally hears as Rigoletto, but rather with a 'tenorial' timber, he delivers a lovely performance with dynamic stage presence and touching expression. The entire movie can be seen at PBS currently and is well worth anyone's time who likes great music and great singing. The Italian tenor, Vittorio Grigolo, who has recently been making a big name for himself, sings the Duke of Mantua, and the pretty Russian soprano, Julia Novikova sings Gilda. One of the best opera movies to date, in my humble opinion.

My video clip begins after Gilda, Rigoletto's daughter, has been abducted by the courtiers and brought to the Duke for his vile pleasure. This is after the courtiers have actually fooled Rigoletto, the Duke's court jester, into helping them kidnap his own daughter for her dishonor. As Rigoletto enters the Duke's palace, looking for Gilda, the courtiers sneer and mock him. This clip includes the piece, "Cortigiani, vil razza dannata..." which I posted earlier sung by Louis Quilico.

Archie is a good-lookin' fella.

Making videos for YouTube

Well, it's harder than I thought it would be to make a satisfactory video to upload to YouTube. Their system will not allow just any old avi so I had to do some re-encoding. Since YouTube re-encodes when you upload, any re-encoding is highly undesirable as it will drastically reduce the quality of your clip. I was forced to re-encode one of my videos, as everytime I tried to cut the video from the front, this particular video kept turning out with no picture - arghh!! Must have been some necessary info missing everytime I did it - I tried many free tools to repair and rebuild keyframes and indices, etc., etc., but was finally forced to simply cut and re-encode which rewrites the information and generally solves such problems. I was, however, able to keep the original audio stream, which is most important in an opera video, so I was pleased with that. Still, upon uploading to YouTube, the video at first turned out with a nasty black pixelated look for the first few seconds. I tried many things to get rid of this and finally succeeded by using the x264 video codec rather than xVid. The main free tool I used to do this work is one I have had sitting on my pc desktop for ages and had no idea of all the useful things it could do. It is called avidemux. It can do way more than de-mux. It can mux, encode, cut, join, AND it supports quite a few different file formats. It can also do many of these actions to the original information without re-encoding so you may keep your original quality of video and audio if necessary.

Turns out getting your container right is also pretty important; ('container' meaning avi, mp4, mov, etc.) I always used to make all my videos .avi since the free player I use on my Dell Axim doesn't seem to care what the container is as long as it can process the codecs. However, when uploading to YouTube, an accurate container and file name extension seem to make a big difference in success of the upload, playability, and quality. I decided to simply go for no re-encoding of my second video which was h264 avc and aac audio, since it was possible to cut the video successfully without any re-encoding. This was my original video and I did not want to go back an recapture the video digitally again, however, cutting and getting a video perfectly synced from the avc variable rate video proved a challenge. I finally figured out it is pretty much a snap using the free tool, AVI-Mux GUI. I have used this tool many times for simple muxing, but had never noticed if you click on the audio track, a little box shows where you can set an audio delay - (duh, how great is that?)

I rather prefer hard-coded subtitles on this type of opera clip, but since that would cause a need for re-encoding, I used YouTube's closed-captioning option for the subtitles. I did that on my previous video also as it is very convenient. I also force the option in my embedded videos here, but I don't think you can force the option at YouTube. I am a huge fan of English subtitles for opera - makes the piece come alive to me to fully understand everything being said.

Anyway, there are many great, ad-free, safe, and powerful free tools for video editing out there for Windows users that often can do more operations that spendy software. Many of these tools don't even have to be 'installed' on your pc, but are rather, stand-alone executables.

"Cortigiani, vil razza, dannata!..."

This is one of my favorite baritones singing the big bit from Verdi's Rigoletto, "Cortigiani, vil razza, dannata!..." (Courtiers, you vile, damned race!...") In this solo, Rigoletto, the court jester, whose daughter has just been kidnapped by the duke's courtiers for his immoral pleasure, hurls abuses at the kidnappers. When he realizes he is powerless before them, he then begs them for pity. He pleads with them to return his daughter to him, as, he says, his daughter is his whole world.

Louis Quilico was a famous Verdi baritone who also sang much French opera as he was Canadian-born of an Italian father and a French-Canadian mother. He died in 2000. He has a son, Gino Quilico, who is also today quite successful as an operatic baritone, but his son has a lighter voice and does not have the fatness of sound, and general largeness of voice like his father had, which makes for a more successful Verdi baritone. Rigoletto was probably Louis Quilico's most famous role. This clip is from a Metropolitan Opera broadcast from 1981 with Luciano Pavarotti singing the role of the Duke. The entire opera is currently available for streaming rental at the Met Opera website.

Otello with Placido Domingo and Sherrill Milnes as Iago and now I am testing as to what happens if your title is really long...

This is a video I uploaded to YouTube - a clip from Verd's Otello from the Metropolitan Opera, 1979. It is the tenor-baritone duet which ends the second act in a frenzy of emotion as Otello vows vengeance, believing Iago's lies about Desdemona's unfaithfulness. Placido Domingo is in the title role and his Iago is Sherrill Milnes. These two always worked wonderfully well together and put audiences in a euphoria of heightened emotions with their incredible voices and mastery of Verdi's style.

I tried to cut the video so one can experience the roaring eruption of the audience well before the music ends, generally not done at fancy opera houses like the Met, unless, as in the case with this particular performance, it is so exciting, people just cannot contain themselves. I started the clip a little before the big duet, where Iago has just told Otello about the handkerchief. That way, you don't miss Otello ripping his shirt open, crying, "Sangue, Sangue, SANGUE!!!", and dropping to his knees right before "Si, per ciel..." ("Yes, by heaven...") I probably watched this clip some thirty times while trying to work with the quality and learning how to edit videos, and still, it gives me a chill of excitement every time.

This video can be watched in its entirety at the Metropolitan Opera website for $4 or $5. I don't think the video has ever been released on dvd, however there are three separate commercial dvds available of live performances of the opera with Placido Domingo in the title role, not counting a Franco Zeffirelli movie. He also recorded the role in the studio at least two other times and performed the role live some 223 times. One of the commercial recordings of the opera, from La Scala in 2001 documented his last appearances in the role, as he retired the role at that time. If you are not familiar with the opera, Otello is a very difficult role, requiring a passionate temperament, and a big voice. Only a handful of tenors have made the role their own in the past century and Placido Domingo is one of, if not 'the' most beloved of all time.

'Madama Butterfly' from the Metropolitan Opera

I recently watched this video from the Metopolitan Opera website. You can rent it there to watch on your pc or you can pick up a copy from Amazon.com or if you are real lucky, you local library will have a copy of this performance. I watch and listen to a lot of opera so I can tell you that 'Madama Butterfly' is a difficult opera to execute well because the soprano needs to have a hardy voice, but she also needs to appear to be a waify, 15-year old girl - a very hard thing to pull off. American soprano, Patricia Racette, does the job beautifully with a little help from the costume department. Racette sounds great and doesn't tire out down to the last note of this difficult role. The other singers round out the cast well, and the production, created by Anthony Minghella, includes some wonderful unorthodox puppets. The main puppet used represents Cio Cio San's (That's Butterfly's given name) little boy, whereas generally they just use a real boy. But this puppet is adorable as his masters make him walk around and look at up at her with such a display of trusting emotions. It's quite fantastic. I've seen a few different productions of 'Butterfly' on screen, but none ever worked as well as this one in my opinion. It's just a wonderful show and a great way for anyone to enjoy a Puccini Opera cheaply in the comfort of their own home. If you have never watched an Italian opera before, don't worry, English subtitles are now always provided so you don't have to do any homework, or any thing like that. Just open a bottle of wine and enjoy the show.

First mowing of the year.

February 5 it is, and I already felt compelled to do some lawn-mowing. It was terribly thick in some areas, and if you put it off, you are just heightening the difficulty later. It hasn't rained for quite a few days, so I though had better get at it. I decided to leave the front yard alone as it wasn't bad yet. Also, violets have taken over the place and I want to leave them alone and not discourage them. I have no idea where they came from, but they are so pretty. There is also some beautiful light green clover in the front yard that later blooms with some adorable pink flowers and I didn't want to ruin that either. Then, all around our big cedar tree, and in various small patches in the yard, there is this little bulb flower that makes tall dark green grass and blooms in the spring with pretty little purple flowers. They are cute but the plant seems a bit invasive. I've been in a dilemma how to treat them. I mowed down the backyard ones, but I think if it rains soon, I will selectively pull the front yard ones up by the root and see if you can control them and enjoy their beauty without getting irritated with them. They smell like onions and when you mow over them, they clog up the mower much worse than the thick grass does. Anyway, I like to try to use what I call "selective mowing" to encourage pretty little flowers in the yard. I wish we had some of those tiny white daisies you see in some lawns. It would be great to have an entire lawn or large patch that was mostly small, pretty flowers.