Today is May Day. Much of the world celebrates the day as a festival of spring, with colorful things like maypoles (see above) and other expressions of joy at the season’s general Spring-ness. Much of the world also celebrates May 1 as International Workers’ Day, a form of Labor Day.

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro received its premiere 230 years ago today at the Burgtheater in Vienna. Mozart conducted the first two performances himself. The Overture (below the fold):
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“Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.”—Annie Dillard, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”

Annie Dillard is 71 today.

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George Washington was inaugurated the first President of the United States on this date in 1789 at Federal Hall in Lower Manhattan, as depicted in the statue outside Federal Hall seen at top. He told the members of the House and Senate in his brief (1419 words) inaugural address that he would follow their lead in determining what the duties of the executive office ought to be (“… it will remain with your judgment to decide how far an exercise of the occasional power delegated by the fifth article of the Constitution is rendered expedient …”) and stated that he would not accept a salary, as he had not while serving the country in his earlier positions.
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