Modest Mussorgsky, Boris Godunov (1868-1873)

You know, I'm willing to be that there are an awful lot of people with no idea that this name is what "Boris Badenov" is a play on. Not that you couldn't find it in .3 seconds via the Wikipedia entry, but would you even think to? Anyway. I don't know what my point is, except that it's sort of interesting to go back to something that's mainly known, to the extent that it's known, via pop culture goofing around.

Anyway, Godunov was an actual historical figure, of course, but this opera surely is what explains his continued...popularity? This is an spectacular, extremely large-scale production of an extremely large-scale show, with hundreds of chorus members as priests, boyars, peasants and so on. The story in outline is fairly simple: Godunov is stricken with crushing guilt over having arranged the murder of the child tsarevich, facilitating his own rise to the throne, yearning to be a good ruler but ultimately brought down by his own sins. Meanwhile, a megalomanic or possibly just insane priest has become a pretender to the throne, and plots with Marina, a power-hungry Polish princess, to overthrow him. And the Russian people suffer. O how they suffer.

Godunov is played by the German bass René Pape, and it must surely be the part he was born to play. His performance is something else. His singing is great, and the way he staggers around the stage, twitching with irredeemable remorse--I mean, wow. And to top it off, he's an absolutely perfect physical fit for the role. This is totally how you'd picture the actual Godunov. He's played the role in numerous productions, and no wonder: if you can get him, it seems like you'd be foolish to want anyone else.

Obviously, Godunov himself dominates the opera. The director, Stephen Wadsworth, assertsthat there are basically just two characters here: Godunov himself and the people collectively. The chorus, therefore, plays a more prominent role than in most operas, and it truly does reach staggering heights. However, there are few other standout roles, notably Ekaterina Semenchuk as Marina hamming it up like some kind of anime villain and Andrei Popov as the holy fool who mourns all this endless suffering and whose song "Flow, Flow Bitter Tears" ends the opera on a tragic note that goes well beyond the character of Godunov himself. Russian really has had it rough, unto the present day. La tristesse durera.

If I'm going to be critical, I have to note that there are some parts where the whole thing seems a bit baggy. The entirety of Act 3--along with Marina's character--was not present in the original version, and although it certainly has merit (I should probably also give a shout-out to Yevgeny Nikitin, who may or may not be a neo-nazi WHEE, in a small role as a Sinister Jesuit--is there any other kind?), even while I was watching it, without knowing it hadn't always been there, I was thinking, boy, you know, this could easily be taken out and you'd lose nothing. It dulls the momentum after the towering end to Act 2. Then too, there's the whole of the last scene. Watching it for the first time, you would have every reason to believe that the opera would end with Godunov's death. But...it doesn't. It goes on for quite some time after that, in fact. And I have mixed feelings about that, because there's certainly some dramatic stuff there, and then that poignant ending, but Godunov's personal downfall feels blunted. I suppose it really depends on whether you think this is an individual tragedy or a collective one. I mean, clearly it's both, but I think with our modern sensibilities, we're more likely to favor the former, whereas Mussorgsky was going for the latter. So, it's something to think about.

Still, structurally flawed though it may be in some ways, this is really what I love about opera. Don't get me wrong; I like a nice comedy too. But something like Boris is just so massive and so powerful. I mean, granted, it's only a few years I've been into opera and less than that that I've been really into it, so this might partially just be the zeal of the convert, but I feel like, as the performing arts go, it doesn't get any better.

Gaetano Donizetti, La Fille du Régiment

I always think of Donizetti's operatic work as being a stark and somewhat weird dichotomy between on the one hand frothy comedies and on the other grim period dramas about the British nobility. That's not fair; he was very prolific and wrote a bunch of stuff that doesn't fall into either category. But WHATEVER! That's how I feel, and as we all know, our feelings are the most important thing. Feel free to guess which side this one falls on. There's going to be a new HD production in March, but I'm not going to be around to see that, so I saw this. Which also has the bonus of starring Natalie Dessay, the highlight of Ariadne auf Naxos, in the title role. La. One curiosity is that, unusually for an Italian opera, the libretto--as the title might've given away--is in French.

So...yup. This is some pretty silly stuff. The plot is extremely Gilbert-&-Sullivan-esque: the title fille, Marie, is an orphan who's been brought up by a bumbling French regiment. She's in love with a Swiss villager, Tonio (the ever-reliable Juan Diego Flórez), but will extremely minor complications and revelations about Marie's parentage keep them apart forever? The answer...may surprise you.

Yeah, I mean, it's fun, as well it should be, and there's some great music and impressive singing, as there should be. There's a famous aria--that first bought Luciano Pavarotti to fame, I am informed--where the tenor has to hit nine separate high C's; it's pretty awesome, even if I only have the vaguest idea of what that actually means. Also, it's fun watching Dessay and Diego Flórez acting goofy. There's some rah-rah stuff at the end about how great France is, which apparently made it popular there, but it's a little hard to see why, really; it's not like the regiment or anyone really does anything to showFrance being great. The production here is fairly minimalistic, by Met standards; it's fine, if, honestly, a little half-baked. There are giant maps of Europe in the background, which seem like they might be meant to make some sort of statement, but...don't, exactly. There's also a related thing where giant, old-fashioned cards appear, but it only happens TWICE in the whole show, and again, is really nothing. Apparently, the libretto has been slightly rewritten here, but it seems okay to me. The only thing that sort of rubbed me the wrong way was the duchess whose son Marie is supposed to marry. It's a spoken role that--here, at least; presumably not in the original--occasionally lapses into English. It's okay, but there's this...thing where, several times, she explains her son's absence by saying he's on the Olympic bobsled team. "Bobsled." So I guess someone thought that was funny, and not just distractingly weird? Well, no accounting for tastes.

So yeah. Fun. And yet, my god, it is so light. A New York Times review memorably declared it "so inconsequential that it makes Donizetti’s other great comedy, L’Elisir d’Amore, seem like Götterdämmerung," and that is...less of an exaggeration than you might think. It's perfectly agreeable to watch, and yet I can't help feeling like it's not quite providing all the necessary vitamins and minerals. One thing I like about opera is that, even in lighter stories, the better ones sort of resonate and stick in your head. This...doesn't, quite. L’Elisir d’Amore is definitely the superior work.

Henry Purcell, Dido and Aeneas (1688-ish)

Look, I'll admit that English literature has its moments, but when it comes to opera, it's time to face a hard truth: we are getting the shit kicked out of us. Or better to say, I suppose, we have gotten the shit kicked out of us. We got the shit kicked out of us. It is a done deal. Yes, there are still operas being written, and if I had to guess on the basis of no evidence, I'd say that a greater proportion of contemporary operas are in English than in the past, but face it: we're done. Catching up is hopeless. The question of why that should have happened is no doubt multifarious, and not being an expert, I really couldn't even hazard a guess.

Oh well, here's one, and indeed one of the first. As seen here. It's short with a run-time of just an hour, but it's definitely an opera. And it's pretty good! Although actually, sort of hard to talk about. I don't mean this as a negative, though it obviously sounds like one, but nobody in the cast particularly stands out. They don't have the opportunity to, because all the characters--very much including the title duo, and especially Aeneas--really have very small roles. And the relationship between them is seriously nothing; you don't expect a long, detailed depiction of a relationship in an opera, a few arias'll do the trick, but this doesn't even have that; they really barely interact, which necessarily attenuates the emotional content, though I'll admit that her death scene is pretty good. That's okay, though: the music is good and frequently even catchy, and the staging, though somewhat minimalistic, is reasonably striking.

The main thing that may stick with you is that this is a pretty darn strange variation on the original story. As you know, the idea there is that Aeneas leaves Dido because the Gods tell him to and he's just so darned dutiful: he's gotta found Rome; it's his destiny. But here...instead, his leaving is machinated by evil witches, who impersonate Mercury and order him to leave. You wonder: did Purcell think, "man, I can't believe the gods would be such jerks;there has to be another explanation!?" It very much changes the tenor of the story if he just leaves because he's tricked. Very odd.

Regardless, though, it does present a compelling case that opera in English could be more of a thing than it is. I don't know to what extent the libretto here had been updated to be more comprehensible, but there's definitely something about being able to understand the language without the mediation of subtitles. One's so used to watching operas in other languages that it can be kind of jarring watching them in English, but this really works well. I'll try to find some more English operas to watch, maybe.

Richard Strauss, Ariadne auf Naxos (1912)

Okay, so from now on, I'm going to try to write something about every opera I see. I don't know why I didn't start doing this a long time ago, really. I'm into opera now, FYI.

Ariadne auf Naxos. Or, you know, just Ariadne *on* Naxos; we could easily get into a long, boring discussion about whether and when and if to use untranslated versions of non-English titles, but let's leave that aside for now. I'd previously watched Strauss' Salome and Elektra, which are both pretty stunning pieces of work; my only regret is that I can't refer to the latter as "electrifying" without it seemingly like I'm making a lame pun. But it really is. Electrifying. So there. Anyway, those two are fairly similar: they're both one-act operas that push musical boundaries about murderous, obsessed women. Ariadne is not that at all. But I had to see it when I read about the premise, which seemed totally irresistible: the richest man in Vienna invites two musical groups to his house: an opera company which is going to put on a new, extremely Serious, Tragic opera; and a burlesque troupe to provide comic relief. Only, for Reasons, the schedule has changed so they're both required to perform at once. How do you not love that? I watched this Met production.

And reactions are...mixed. It's a little odd, and not always in the ways you'd want it to be odd. I think this is partially down to the opera itself and partially the production. There are two acts, the first being a back-stage prologue and the second the opera-within-the-opera itself. And that first act is very promising. It mainly consists of the composer (Susanne Mentzer in a pants role) getting outraged that she's being asked to desecrate her VERY, VERY SERIOUS opera (which is about Ariadne being stranded by the faithless Theseus on the island and eventually, natch, dying and stuff). She's pretty darned funny, as she (he? It's hard to know what pronoun to use here) gets caught up in the sheer, ineffable tragedy of the whole thing; Strauss punctures his pretensions effectively while still keeping him sympathetic, and his outlook starts to change when the leader of the comedy troupe, the coquettish Zerbinetta (the utterly delightful Natalie Dessay) starts flirting with him. But the thing is, after this act, that's itfor the non-performing characters; the composer's just gone.

So then there's the opera itself, the bulk of which is focused on Ariadne herself (Deborah Voigt), and the thing is, she's...not very good, I have to say. Nothing wrong with her singing, but the acting just isn't there. It seems to me there are several ways to play this: do you go with high pathos occasionally collapsing into bathos, or do you do it with a touch of self-awareness? Or maybe some combination of the above? Well, Voigt goes with neither, such that it's impossible to tell what she's thinking about these goings-on. When the burlesque troupe appears and tries to cheer her up with a song, she basically reacts to them by...ignoring them. It seems like a lost opportunity. And it really does go on. It may be meant as a joke, kind of, only the length of the thing suggests that one is supposed to take it at least somewhat seriously, but with no real effort having been made to make the character sympathetic (and, again, with Voigt's non-performance not helping), it gets...well, a little boring. At one point the players show up again, and Zerbinetta sings a lengthy aria about her inability to settle on just one man. It gets a lengthy ovation, which is deserved, it's the best thing in the show, but, well, then she's gone and we're back to flippin' Ariadne. And, eventually, it ends, not tragically (the players apparently having impressed upon her in some imperceptible way their philosophy, that there are more fish in the sea), but not maybe possibly the most excitingly.

I dunno. It's nice that Strauss had a sense of humor about these things, which you wouldn't necessarily suspect from Salome and Elektra,but the execution here seems a bit half-baked--though, once again, it's possible that a production that set out specifically to address the structural problems could do better. Maybe I'll watch another production sometime and see how that works out.

Dmitri Shostakovich, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1934)

The entirety of my knowledge of Shostakovich came from William Vollmann's novel Europe Central, where he's one of the main characters. But I read that kind of a long time ago, and I can't say I remember it very well. I guess I was mostly interested this because Verdi's Macbeth is so bangin,' and here was another opera with the word "Macbeth" in the title even though it bears absolutely no similarities to the other one, so boy, THIS sentence sure is turning out great; I'm glad it's over now. Anyway, I saw this production.

Actually, the title's a bit of a misnomer, really: the protagonist, Katerina, is absolutely nothing like Lady Macbeth in terms of circumstances, character, motivation, or anything. The plot: she's in an unhappy marriage to a rich merchant, feeling bored, trapped, and sexually frustrated, and boy, you just know THIS is going to turn out well.

It is, indeed, almost certainly--hell, strike the "almost"--the grimmest opera I've ever seen. Not even the slightest hint of redemption here, no matter how hard you look.  No remotely sympathetic characters other than Katerina herself, sort of, and she's mainly just sympathetic in an Emma Bovary sort of way.  Certainly not a positive outlook on humanity. But it's absolutely electrifying, is what else it is. Eva-Maria Westbroek is really great as Katerina, bringing across the character's ennui punctuated with moments of passion and violence. The tenor Christopher Ventris is fine as Katerina's lover, Sergei, but the real standout among the secondary cast is bass-baritone Vladimir Vaneev as her satanic father-in-law. Vaneev doesn't have much of an international reputation (I mean, no wikipedia page, even in Russian--though he seems to be rather prolific in Russia), but man, he's mesmerizing (it would be hella cool to see him doing Scarpia), and you're kinda disappointed when he's killed off midway though, not because he doesn't have it coming, but because you want to see more of him.

As I said, I wasn't really familiar with Shostakovich before now, but holy god is his score ever intense. I'm dumbfounded. And the production really complements it. I mean, I suppose it's good enough that almost any production would work, but well, this is what it is and what it is is intense as anything. It was banned for many years in Russia, after having been condemned possibly by Stalin himself, and fuck that guy, of course, but you can see why if you were gonna ban any opera, it would be this one. There's a scene near the beginning where a chorus of workers are sexually humiliating a workwoman which is particularly disturbing, and mention surely must be made of Sergei's initial rape of Katerina, which in this production is accompanied by strobe lighting such that you can only see the action in a series of disconnected images. I'm feeling short of breath just thinking about it.

Now, fair's fair, and I have to say, man, operas often have scenes that just break the momentum, and this is no exception: near the end, after a very intense climax, we have a too-long interlude with a chorus of police officers complaining about not being invited to Katerina and Sergei's wedding--in a humorous sort of vein--that I have to say, I did not love (although, fair's fair's fair, it may indeed be necessary to have the odd bit of connective tissue to make the story work). That's about all though, man. As a whole, the thing is some great damned work, and it's a fucking tragedy that, due to oppressive Soviet censorship, Shostakovich didn't write more operas (he did write one based on Gogol's story "The Nose," which sounds bizarre but hey, I'm up for anything). I'm definitely going to check out more of his music, though.