Pat he comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy. My cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o'Bedlam. -- O, these eclipses do portend these divisions. Fa, sol, la, mi.
A helpful note in the Arden edition reads:
Fa ... mi Edmund sings, as if unaware of Edgar's approach, in order the fourth, fifth, sixth and third notes of the scale of C major, a discordant motto, Hunter suggests, appropriate to the character of Edmund: 'He thus moves across the interval of the augmented fourth, called diabolus in musica (the devil in music).'
Now, without really doing any hard research except a Googling, it seems this footnote must be wrong, and I am so very eager to ascribe it to a general cluelessness about music prevalent among some theatre people... I smell a rat discussing "C major" per se in the 1604 environs ... and F, G, A, E, does not outline a tritone; there are even no tritones within it. Before I burn my Arden edition in a fit of rage, are there any Shakespearians out there who can clarify this mystery? Pretty pretty please?
Also, to add to my last post about Bach and Lear, the following wonderful quote:
instead of one unitary passage of time, then, there are many temporal dimensions leading us back into Bach's fugal workshop, in which musical thinking and the relations between musical ideas and God-given principles of harmony exist in a tension with the ultimate order in which the results nominally appear.
And lastly, a dear friend has sent me the very first Think Denk T-shirt:
Many thanks.
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