Early music specialist Andrea Marchiol is our guest this week, discussing the texts to "Piangerò" from Händel's Giulio Cesare and the Prologue to Monteverdi's L'Orfeo. We concentrate on the accidental doubling of consonants, open and closed E's and O's (as usual!) and talk a little about the different styles of recitative throughout the 17th and 18th centuries.

The Giulio Cesare libretto is here--along the left hand margin, scroll down and click on Act 3 Scene 3 for "E pur così in un giorno...Piangerò". The text to L'Orfeo is here, and our text is La Musica's Prologo.

The websites I mentioned early on in this episode are LibriVox, the audiobook equivalent to Project Gutenberg. They have audiobooks in many different languages and offer them through iTunes as well. LibriVox is also looking for volunteers to read and record literature in the public domain--a perfect way to practice your own diction if you have the time! The other site I mentioned is dict.cc, an online dictionary that relies on users to post translations. There are no phonetics, but there are sample recordings of the words and a vocabulary training flashcard program.

As always, please feel free to contact me here, at the Facebook page or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com