Mozart, Mahler, rain

I'm sitting at my desk listening to wind and rain beating on the windows. We're getting drenched out here in the West. In Seattle, the rain just keeps coming in monotonous heavy bands of showers, although this persistent storm track is hitting Oregon and Northern California even harder. 

So what was the worst place to be in the lower 48 states last week?  A few thousand feet up Mt. Shasta, with 156 inches of snow, 115 mph winds and -10 wind chill.  Hi April, I hope things are OK in Medford!  In Missoula, Montana, our friends say they're unusually warm and wet for December. So this must be our "El Neutro" winter shaping up.   

When the weather gets tough, we don't get going, we just spend more time sitting on our posteriors.  At least 6 hours this weekend, between the Met movie theater broadcast on Saturday and the Seattle Symphony on Sunday afternoon. Plus time sloshing back and forth on the freeway.   Oh, after Mahler's hour long symphony yesterday it felt good to get home safely, eat beef barley soup and watch mindless football for a hour.

The Saturday opera was La Clemenza di Tito, written a few weeks before poor Mozart died. It is not performed as often as his other operas, so this was a chance to see it "almost" live.  At the end of his life Mozart was sick and broke, and the myth goes he hacked out this final opera in fifteen days while traveling from place to place. It's written an old formal style called opera seria that was already out of fashion in 1791, and the opera was long dismissed as the easy music of a tired man about to die.  But now that every facet of Mozart's music and life has been subjected to minute study, La Clemenza is appreciated for the great humanity and anguish that comes through in one of his final masterpieces.