GOD OF LOVE, HEED MY CRY

It's never easy having your heart broken and especially when you're younger there can be a lack of finesse to the process that can leave you quite disturbed and ill prepared. I was just reminded of one such incident that happened to me whilst listening to the Countess's aria 'Dove Sono' from Mozart's timeless masterpiece 'Le Nozze Di Figaro' (1786) earlier this evening and contemplated how sometimes life truly can imitate art.

My girlfriend at the time (whom I shall refer to as Countess), for reasons purely cultural was under a lot of pressure from her family about who she dated and looking back now I can appreciate their concerns far more than I did back then when it was the Countess and I versus the world and our siege mentality propelled the sails of our doomed romance. We weren't to know at the time that we were, in fact, part of that grand lineage of tragic lovers which stems back to Tristan und Isolde, Romeo and Juliet and Layla and Majnun.

After I had an unexpected encounter with one of the elders of her family before a formally arranged time of meeting, the Countess panicked and ceased all communication with me. With no way of understanding the radio silence and persona non gratis with her family I found myself becoming unravelled both emotionally and psychologically. It could have been a scene out of an opera which seems appropriate as the Countess was, in fact, an opera singer.

Each day that went by felt like some spiritual test of my personal resolve and fortitude and just about the only thing that kept me from going slightly mad was a deadline for a film composer that I had to meet by the end of that week. If there was a heartbreak equivalent of ADHD then I had acquired it at that time, finding my mind would refuse to think about anything other than my lost love.

But then, as fate would have it, the Saturday following what I had believed to be the last time I might ever see the Countess, my father and his friend had tickets to see her sing Brahms Requiem at Llandaff Cathedral in Cardiff, Wales. I assembled a bag of gifts with an accompanying card for him to pass onto the Countess should he see her after the concert as a last ditch gesture of reconciliation. It turned out that not only did he manage to pass on the gifts but she had put together her own assortment of gifts and written a card for me also. It appears great minds and broken hearts think alike. The Countess also gifted the large bouquet of flowers she had received for her performance in the cathedral to my parents which seemed poignant.

So where does Mozart fit into all this? Well, after we'd resolved our issues and found a way to embark once again on our voyage of doomed love, the Countess told me that the day after she'd felt under pressure not to see me again that she'd had to record the Countess aria 'Dove Sono' from Mozart's 'Le Nozze Di Figaro' for a music programme being aired on the BBC. Performing the heart-wrought aria multiple times with full orchestra, she confessed that she had thought only of me each time she sang the words and I was genuinely humbled by the admission.

The aria itself, in which Mozart's Countess Almaviva expresses her profound sadness and yearning that her marriage to the unfaithful Count has so cruelly exposed the frailties of their bond together, is beautifully reflective and melancholic. Mozart's accompanying orchestrations greatly enhance the emotion of the Countess's aria which is both lyrical and expressive and helps creates a genuinely authentic sense of poignant tenderness. One of the reasons "Dove Sono" like the Countess's equally famous aria 'Porgi amor' from Act 2 of 'Figaro' has resonated with audiences throughout the centuries is because they both capture something exquisitely delicate about the trials of the heart with their themes of love, loss and longing and are just two of many sublime examples of Mozart's unique ability to get to the core of the human condition in opera form.

Later, seeing my own Countess's performance finally broadcast, I found it strange to have a marker in time recorded for posterity that I remembered as being such a moment of heartbreak for us both. While I'd been in a form of suspended emotional purgatory, she had been singing her heart out in front of the camera. Ultimately, life and art had somehow found a bond for us both to understand things more clearly through the sublime vessel of Mozart's music. And though we're no longer together, It's impossible for me not to listen to the aria without thinking of her.