If music be the food of love, play on!” the nobleman tells his court musicians. “Give me
excess of it, so that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and die!”
Duke Orsino closes his eyes, letting the piquant tones of the lute pluck at his heart-strings, the
wind instruments’ lilting melodies lift his spirits—briefly—and the deep, bowed stirrings of the
bass viol, the viola di gamba, bring resonance to his soul.
“That strain again!—it had a dying fall—oh, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound that
breathes upon a bank of violets, stealing and giving scent!”
Attended by several of his realm’s lords, the heartsick duke, handsome and healthy at thirty,
languishes in a sunny room of his palace, high at the rocky point of a peninsula on Illyria’s
western shore, across the sea from mid-16th
century Italy............
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