musitorial n a mashup of music, musings and editorials, music and song that evokes thought and commentary.
Today’s musitorial, celebrates “Va’ peniero” – better known as the “The Anvil Chorus” – from Giuseppe Verdi’s (1813-1901) Il Trovatore (1853). This chorus gives me chills – the good kind.
That work of art is reason enough to play it as background music for musing, but a good reason to select it for today’s musitorial is that Verdi was an Italian classical master (those Italians really knew how to do it up big, eh?). But there’s a third reason (are you following this?), and that is that on June 27, 2025, the Italian city of Venice played host to an extravaganza that would be the envy of any self-respecting operatic chorus: the wedding of digi-billionaire Jeff Bezos to high-flying socialite Lauren Sanchez. Wow. Just wow. (Wow to the wedding, not her).
As the world watched, their wedding displaced more mundane media events – you know, like Gaza, Iran, Ukraine – and I couldn’t help but draw a thoughtful line between that wedding (especially the resulting public protestations), Verdi’s anvil chorus and that historically famous paragon of decadence, Marie Antoinette (1774-1792), who famously said of her impoverished and much abused French populace: “Let them eat cake.”
Things ended badly for Marie Antoinette. In a future post I will explore that now-timeless quote in a slightly different light, but for now, I am using it to point to the unmitigated arrogant display by the world’s elite to the down-in-the-dirt plight of the rest of us.
Venice has been a hotbed of restive resistance toward tourism of late. As the wedding spectacle and those protests captured the headlines, I recalled recent protests in Barcelona where “locals” protested that their city was being overrun by tourists, apparently displacing locals from their favourite bars and restaurants. Unlike the gun-slinging heroes of the old spaghetti westerns, or our gun-happy neighbours to the south, Barcelonians began shooting squirt guns at tourists occupying seats at popular outdoor cafes.
Look out world, the peasants are armed and righteous!
You can learn a little more using the links below.
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Link to Wikipedia article (complete with “play” link) about “The Anvil Chorus:” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anvil_Chorus
Link to Wikipedia article about Verdi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Verdi
Link to Wikipedia article about Marie Antoinette: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Antoinette
Link to news article about the wedding protests (CNN): https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/28/europe/jeff-bezos-wedding-protest-venice-latam-intl
Link to news article about Barcelona protests: https://tinyurl.com/yushyxmw
