Monday, December 22, 2008

Advent... Day 21

We had a night full of wise guys and wise men.
You can guess which is which.

*sigh*

Tate opened one of our newer books, "Amahl and the Night Visitors", originally written as an opera (the first to be commissioned for television) and later made into a book. Gian Carlo Menotti (b 1911 in Italy) began composing at age 5 and had written his first opera at age 11! As a child, he was miraculously cured of lameness during a pilgrimage, which inspired this story of the Wise Men's stop-over at a village of shepherds.

Our devotion also focused on the Wise Men.

...the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold and of incense and of myrrh.

2 comments:

The dB family said...

It would be neat to see the opera of it too, but I'm sure it's in Italian :(.

Herding Grasshoppers said...

I wonder... but I haven't investigated yet.

Much of the dialog in the book has a subtle poetical feel to it - even some (loose) rhyming, so it may be in English.