wiki-illiam #108: q3

[dubdobdee]

3. In what work:

1: does the clown inadvertently commit filicide?
2: is the two-timing stout knight emptied from a laundry basket into the river?
3: does a half-caste Peruvian gentleman twice change his name and become a monk?
4: does conflict between patricians and plebeians lead to poisoning of the chief magistrate?
5: does a nobleman unknowingly order the beheading of his brother, supposing that he was the son of a gypsy?
6: does the heathen King, like his real daughter, convert to Judaism, following a meteorologically induced period of insanity?
7: does jealousy over a military promotion lead to a contrived 'affair', followed by uxoricide and then suicide?
8: is the King assassinated at a festive occasion, following a prediction by a fortune-teller?
9: is a regicide conspiracy overheard in the great tomb in the Cathedral of Aachen?
10: does the love affair of a phthisical courtesan end in her premature death?

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

OK on the the initial (possibly deliberately misled towards) assumption this might be SHAKESPEARE-related:

ii: is possibly Falstaff in THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR
iii: yikes, are there any Peruvians in Shakespeare, possibly not
iv: CORIOLANUS has conflict between patricians and plebeians
vi: sounds like LEAR, so I'm going to say CYMBELINE (who is definitely a heathen king with a daughter)
vii: how can this not be OTHELLO?
viii: ditto ditto MACBETH (Duncan assassinated following witch's prediction)
x: I vaguely feel that she is rudely referred to somewhere as a courtesan so ANTHONY AND CLEOPATRA

I strongly intuit this is a deliberate bum steer, so yay me for getting it all out of the way, no?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

Matt McG on twitter has a smart suggestion: vii is not Shakespeare's Othello but Verdi's OTELLO and ix is Verdi's ERMANI (an opera based, google tells me, on a novel by Victor Hugo).

So possibly they are all OPERAS, in which case viii may be LADY MACBETH OF MTENSK by Shostakovich

Or else they are all VERDI-RELATED, in which case ii is FALSTAFF

(Vaguely recall Verdi did a fvckton of Shakespeare -- also, via google, 2013 is of course the bicentennial of his birth, which is KW-katnip)

[petra jane (from livejournal.com)]

3 is Voltaire's Candide, I'm sure of it.

[petra jane (from livejournal.com)]

Can only lay my hands on my French edition right now and not in any state to translate...as I recall, Candide and his part-native manservant go in search of El Dorado and they disguise themselves as Jesuits with hilarious consequences.

[petra jane (from livejournal.com)]

If the theme is "they're all Verdi operas" then 10 is surely La Traviata (unless Verdi wrote more than one opera about a consumptive courtesan...to be fair, it's the only opera I've ever actually seen).

[alextiefling.livejournal.com]

Definitely Verdi operas.

1 would probably be Rigoletto as that's the one with the sad clown.
2 looks like Falstaff.
3 is The Force of Destiny. I seem to remember that the Peruvian chap kills someone in a firearms accident at the end of act 1, and it's all downhill from there.
7 is Otello.
8 is A Masked Ball, which is a fictionalised account of the murder of Gustav III of Sweden, transplanted to a Ruritanian setting and lacking the possible gay angle of the real thing.

[alextiefling.livejournal.com]

A friend observed that 6 somewhat recalls the Exodus narrative; is it therefore Israel in Egitto?

[alextiefling.livejournal.com]

...but I now realise that it is more likely to be Aida. Or Nabucco, as that's the one with the famous Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves.