The tender pulse of pardon - redemption and forgiveness in The Marriage of Figaro

On the one level, the Count is an antagonist, a ruling party pooper. Yet he is more than comic fodder. Mozart knew this. We feel pathos for the short-sided man. This character blindly spends the entire opera in this mire of anger and longing, conspiring to pain and manipulate, to wrongfully seduce another man’s wife. He has no regard for his actions, no awareness of what his intentions might entail; from a limited perception based upon his own righteous self-justification, he is attempting to undermine the order and happiness of the day. Towards the end of the opera, the veil begins to life for the Count, and he soon has eyes to see.

Christijan Robert BroerseOctober 13, 2021Forgiveness, Opera, Anger

Anger, Ira and the early history of my inflamed bowel/body consciousness

From an early age growing up in Canada, I was exposed not only to English but to French (through school) and also to Dutch (through my father’s family). Words, then as much as now, have filled me with wonder and that wonder contributed to my yearning to solve mysteries; namely one of the sources of the ulcerative colitis.

Christijan Robert BroerseOctober 11, 2021Anger, Latin, Etymology, Word Origins, Emotions

A bowel barbed in self-cruelty

…with my Opa. After all my research, I finally understood that my body back in March 1997 was expressing a latent grief. I thought of a friend’s sister. Jess had got the Crohn’s disease following her grandmother’s hit-and-run accident. The raging sorrow. My gut back then at the age of 17 was crying. It was doing the weeping for me.

Home

Contact Subscribe