Word: giambattista
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Mozart's librettist, Giambattista Varesco, brewed a confusing plot based on the Odyssey, with such extraneous characters as Electra thrown in. Idomeneo, King of Crete, is buffeted by storms on his return from the siege of Troy. To appease Poseidon, he swears to sacrifice the first person he encounters on landing. That turns out to be his son Idamante, who is in love with Ilia, daughter of the vanquished King of Troy. The gods finally clear up the whole matter, and the opera ends four hours later with Idamante and Ilia on the throne. Even the charm of Mozart...
Though history was, to Joyce, "a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," he made some frightening images of the history of his time. Finnegans Wake derives much from the philosopher Giambattista Vico's cyclic theory of history, which is highly apposite to the present. According to Vico, and Joyce, the first of a civilization's four phases begins, and the last collapses, in fear of thunder, and a rush for underground shelter; and in that sheltering cave, religion and family life begin again. Today the ambiguous thunder talks above every great city of the earth...