Double-Edged Sword

A bunch of Eastern Europeans play music from a Venetian in a Portuguese Church. Tomaso Albinoni. We don’t know much about Tommy. He didn’t seem to need a gig, wrote what he pleased, and didn’t hang out with the baroque music set enough to develop a personality cult. I like that a “posthumous” collection of some of his work was published in France eleven years before he actually died. Gotta like a guy that skipped the eighteenth century version of Facebook and LinkedIn that thoroughly.

What little we do know was made less by the bombing of Dresden in World War II. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down is tough on libraries. According to the fellow that has the most to gain from lying about it, a mere scrap of this work was sent to him, charred, from the Dresden State library, and he took said fragment and wrote the rest of it. The eye notices that when it was in his interest to say Albinoni wrote it, he said Albinoni wrote it, and when it wasn’t, he didn’t, and moves on.

The church is Igregja da Misericordia of Aveiro. A misericord is like a shelf in a church for your butt, placed so you can lean on it and remain standing throughout a long service; a “mercy seat.” A misericorde is a sort of stiletto, used to give a death stab, a “mercy strike” to a wounded knight on the ground.

You have to take your mercy where you find it in this world.