In honour of the two newest saints in the Church panoply, here is the overture to Rossini’s opera La Gazza Ladra – the Thieving Magpie. I’m not sure about Carlo Acutis’ proclivities to opera (as mentioned, he died at the tender age of 15, and was more given to technology than music). But we do know that Pier Giorgio loved music and the opera, even if his own singing was not quite always on key.
Rossini completed the overture the day before the premier performance. The story is told that he was locked in a room with four watchful stagehands standing guard, and threw each page of the score out the window as it was finished to the copyist down below. Whether true or not, it makes for melodrama, which is what Rossini’s operas are all about. As he put it, the only bad music is boring music, a sentiment with which the joyful Pier Giorgio would agree, who lived a full life in his brief span of twenty and four years.
