At 13:23 +1000 02/07/4, Pat Naughtin wrote:
Another satisfaction comes from the inbuilt operatic gestures that are
possible based on this conjecture, and that they could well fit within the
constraints of the 16 bars of music.
whaoo! Pat, are you an art director? Congratulations!
My suspicion is that Figaro is using 'hands' and his cubits, although I
don't know what these might have been called in Italy at that time.
Fran�ois Cardarelli in Scientific Unit Conversion (Springler,
1997), mentions as "Old Italian units":
piede liprando, base unit of length, SI equivalent 0.51377 m
oncia = 1/12 piedi liprando, SI equivalent 0.12844 m
Apparently there is here some lack of coherence?
To respond to Bill Potts, Cardarelli makes no mention of the
"bracco" but the Rowlett dictionary does, under the name of
"braccio":
braccio: a traditional Italian unit of distance. The world means "arm", and a braccio is the length of a man's arm, about 27 or 28 inches (68-71 cm). In modern times, the braccio has become a metric unit of exactly 70 cm
By the way, there is no way that either the composer, Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart (1756 - 1791), or the librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte (1749 - 1838),
would have known about metres when "Le Nozze de Figaro" had its 'prima
rappresentazione' at the Burgtheater in Vienna on '1. maggio 1786', the
metric system of measurements was not thought of until 1790 at the earliest.
Well, not sure, even if you are totally right!: in 1675 the
Italian scientist Tito Livio Burattini had proposed a universal unit
of measurement based on the length of the pendulum beating the second.
He had named this unit "metro catholico", simply meaning
"universal measure". Indeed there is very little chance that
Mozart or dal Ponte had ever heard about Burattini and his
"metro" (unless Burattini was Freemason, who knows...)
Cheers
Louis
