The Corpuscle

I have a friend, call her Deb, who once upon a time attended a past lives regression workshop. She's a Unitarian minister now, but apparently at some point in the distant Hellenistic past her eternal beingness also manifested itself in the form of a temple boy-prostitute. (Some people have all the luck.)

I'm pretty sure I don't have any past lives, though to be honest I've not thoroughly checked that out. If it ever turns out that I do, I suspect one of the more influential of my previous existences will have had something to do with España. Oh, sorry, I lapsed into Spanish there for a minute. (See what I mean?)

I don't even speak Spanish. And I've never even been to Spain, though I've been to Juarez, Mexico a few times. (Ay Carumba!) But here's the deal, see, some of my favorite classical music is heavily influenced by Iberian tunes. Joaquín Rodrigo is my hombre principal. (Well, one of them.)

If you've seen Master and Commander you will recall the final scene between Stephen ("Subject to the requirements of the Service") Maturin and Jack ("The bird is flightless... it's not going anywhere") Aubrey. With rueful smiles all around, Jack strums a tune on his violin. Maturin and his cello presently join in. Then we have that lovely sequence in which the young gentlemen of the Surprise beat to quarters, the tars scramble into the rigging,  and then we get one of the grandest shots in all moviedom, in my view: the Surprise coming about, sou' east by east, in renewed pursuit of the devilish Acheron (her sails just visible at the horizon).

And so it was, just the other night, I had the radio going in the background and that delightful tune from that last sequence came on. My spirit lit up. I grinned all the way through both the music and myself, and when the piece was over I jotted down its name. ("La musica notturna di Madrid" by Luigi Boccherini).

It's the third movement, "Los Manolos" to be precise, that Jack and Stephen play during the final sequence. And so today I finally managed to make it over to the MegaVirgin Store to find and buy a CD with this night music of Madrid on it. Todo es muy bueno! And on top of all that chewy muy bueno-ness, you know what else? Reading the liner notes, I discovered that in the old days wagging tongues used to say that  "Boccherini is the wife of Haydn". (Some people have all the luck.)