“When the person called teacher stands in the place called school and gives the thing called book to the person called student, no one is free to say and do as he pleases. When the teacher gives a book to a student outside the classroom, the rules are far more lax. When the student gives a book to a student inside the classroom, he is basically free. But the convergence of these four things— the teacher, the school, the book, and the student— invokes a timeless ceremony, drafts on a timeless power, and invisibly calls forth a separate and higher reality.”
— Joshua Gibbs, Something They Will Not Forget: A Handbook for Classical Teachers
2 CORINTHIANS 4:16-18
16 So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. 17 For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, 18 as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.
THE LORD’S PRAYER
Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven: Give us this day our daily bread; And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those that trespass against us; And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, For ever and ever. Amen.
ART APPRECIATION
The Three Musicians is a famous example of Picasso’s style of Cubism. The three musicians are transformed into a sequence of two-dimensional planes, lines, and arcs.
1
Pablo Picasso (1811-1973) was born in Malaga, Spain. His name at birth was Pablo Diego Jose Franciso de Paula Juan Nepomunceno Maria de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santisima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso. His parents gave him many names honoring saints and relatives. His mother claimed Pablo’s first words were “pencil, pencil” (in Spanish, of course). His father was a fine arts teacher at several schools, but legend has it that when he caught his 13-year-old-son finishing one of his paintings, he never painted again. Pablo was enrolled in a prestigious art academy, but soon quit because he didn’t like formal education. Instead, he moved to Paris to learn from the masters there. Picasso was the best-known figure in 20th century art and was more famous for his work during his lifetime than any other artist before him. He was a founder of a new art form called Cubism.
2
MUSIC APPRECIATION
| “O mio babbino caro” from Gianni Schicchi |
Puccini flirted briefly with faintly Wagnerian subjects in his early operas Le villi (1884) and Edgar (1889), though in these operas, the music owes much more to Verdi than to his Teutonic contemporary. Gianni Schicchi is a comparatively late work, comprising the third part of Puccini’s Il trittico (The Triptych), which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1918. The libretto takes an episode from Dante’s Divine Comedy, the damnation of the will-forger Gianni Schicchi, as its starting point. His fraudulent will enriches his clan so that Lauretta, his daughter, can marry Rinuccio. In “O mio babbino caro,” one of Italian opera’s greatest tunes and a number that has become an archetype of late Romanticism’s final flowering in Puccini’s hands, Lauretta begs her father to go with her to buy a ring so she can marry, setting the whole forgery in motion. The tone of the aria is over-the-top in its voluptuousness, almost parodistic, which perfectly fits Lauretta’s melodramatic emotional state.
3
Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) was an Italian composer, one of the greatest exponents of operatic realism, who virtually brought the history of Italian opera to an end. His mature operas included La Bohème (1896), Tosca (1900), Madama Butterfly (1904), and Turandot (left incomplete). 4
- Lange, Krista, and Leigh Lowe. First Grade Enrichment: Classical Core Curriculum. Teacher Guide. Memoria Press, 2017. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- “‘O Mio Babbino Caro’ from Gianni Schicchi, Giacomo Puccini.” LA Phil, http://www.laphil.com/musicdb/pieces/56/o-mio-babbino-caro-from-gianni-schicchi. Accessed 15 Apr. 2025.
↩︎ - “Giuseppe Verdi.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., 19 Feb. 2025, http://www.britannica.com/biography/Giuseppe-Verdi.
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Providence School of Tifton 