Leoš Janáček, The Cunning Little Vixen (1924)

I am not even going to put the original title up there, which is Příhody lišky Bystroušky. It's just not happening, except to the extent that it just happened. My impression is that this is the second-most-internationally-famous Czech opera, trailing only Dvořák's Rusalka. And boy is it...something.

Well, the story is pretty simple, in outline: a forester finds a young fox cub and takes her home as a pet. Eventually, she grows up, gets tired of this domesticity, and escapes. She meets a male fox and they get married and have a bunch of cubs. A poacher shoots the vixen. The forester learns about it and is sad, but then learns about the Circle of Life. Hakuna Matata. E pluribus unum. Hic haec...hoc.

This is a very experimental opera; not like anything I'd seen before or was expecting. Sometimes I felt like it was more of, I don't know, a spectacle with incidental music. Certainly there are striking musical moments, but as a whole the music feels rather understated, given the form.

Of course, I also think that, perhaps more than any opera I've seen, the whole tenor of the thing could be dramatically altered by the individual production. You're switching between two levels, of the human and animal worlds, so you need to do something fairly dramatic there, but exactly what seems open to interpretation. This production here featured a lot of minimalistic costumes meant to suggest animality, along with a lot of children, stuffed animals, wooden toys and the like, emphasizing the folk-y artificiality of the whole. It was a little confusing--I'd absolutely be up for seeing another production for contrast--but generally cool. The singing was uniformly pretty-good. Nothing jaw-dropping, but not much to complain about. Jana Šrejma Kačirková as the vixen was appropriately vulpine in her movement.

You know, I'm always into pushing boundaries and such-like, and as such, I dug this. But I'm not quite sure whether--if you're just looking for some friggin' opera--this'll necessarily be the thing for you. Still. It does stay with one, and I would like to revisit it at some point in a different production.

Jakov Gotovac, Ero s onoga svijeta (1935)

Not gonna lie: Bánk bánbummed me out a little, so I thought: how about a comedy? And also, a rare chance to see a Croatian opera? Yeah! So, I watched this. That title is translated as "Ero the Joker" or "Ero from the Other World." What the purpose was of me leaving it in a language that almost no one will understand...is unclear.

So there's a peasant girl, Đula, who is in love with this mysterious guy, who turns out to be the titular Ero (real name: Mića, and wow, I have NO idea how make these diacriticals without just copying and pasting), who says he's from another world, and they quickly fall in love, I guess. Đula's stepmother, Doma, appears, wanting to know what's up with her late husband, but Mića says, oh no, he's poor because you still need money in the other world, and he's broke, so she gives him her current husband's money to bring to him, and when said husband (Marko) finds out, he's super-pissed, and did I mention that this is all extremely silly? Anyway, there's some convoluted comic business and some mistaken identities, and then it turns out that this whole thing was a joke; Mića's actually a rich guy, but he'd heard from his mother that you've gotta pretend to be poor to know if a woman really loves you, and CONGRATULATIONS, Đula, you have passed the test!

So that's what that's about. Now, silliness is perfectly fine in operas; I have no problem with that per se. Nonetheless...I have to say, I didn't like this very much, though I think that's probably more the fault of the production than the opera per se. So, first and foremost, it pains me to say it, but say it I must: most of the singers are really not very good. I kind of like Siniša Štork as Marko, and I kind of like Ljubomir Puškarić in a small role as Sima the miller, but boy. Most of the cast just don't have the voices to put it over. I mean, god knows they could still sing me under the table, but that's not a massive accomplishment. I know that the opera's at somewhat of a disadvantaged since it's in a language without any international influence. It must be hard to find foreigners willing to learn it enough to sing, so you've got to go with what you've got. But, well...it is what it is. And then the OTHER rather big thing is that neither Mića (Stjepan Franetović) nor Đula (Valentina Fijačko Kobić) had a great deal of presence, and certainlyno real chemistry together, which is something I think you really, really need to bring a goofy plot like this across. Finally--and this isn't really related to the opera itself, but it still seems relevant--the English subtitles are not always super-coherent, rendering an already somewhat dubious plot even more of a mess than it had to be.

I'll admit there were a few moments that swept me away regardless: certainly, nobody's not going to like the boisterous climactic dance sequence. But overall, I'm a bit frustrated, 'cause here's the thing: the music is GREAT. It really leans heavily on the folk tradition, to memorable effect. I've never heard anything quite like it, and it deserves a production worthy of it, dammit. I just don't think this is it, and it's a damned shame, given the odds of us ever seeing another one.

Ferenc Erkel, Bánk bán (1861)

Let's watch this Hungarian opera! You can watch too, but better not be TOO slow--these Operavision videos are all limited-time-only (which is why I'm going to be watching a lot of them in the coming weeks--if you look in the "flashbacks" section, you can see the MANY, MANY operas that you just plain MISSED; it's a bit maddening); not that limited, but this one'll only be up for a few more weeks.  So.

According to wikipedia, Bánk bán "is often thought of as the national opera of Hungary." It's not well-known outside the country, but this production, by the Hungarian State Opera, was performed internationally. It take place in the thirteenth century, and is based on real events, kind of, allegedly, you know how these things are. While the king is away doing War Stuff, his wife, Gertrud, is, with the court, being decadent and bacchanal and oppressing the Hungarian people (it is kind of dispiriting to contemplate the very large percentage of people throughout history who have been, simply, oppressed, with no help in sight). Bánk is a viceroy ("bán" apparently being his official title), who is also away doing...stuff. Possibly also involving fighting. His wife, Melinda, is back at the court, fending off the advances of the queen's slimy brother, Otto. Ultimately, I am sorry to say, he rapes her, using potions provided by Biberach, a sort of inexplicable Iago-esque character; when Bánk learns of this, he, surprisingly, ends up forgiving her (yes, I know, he forgives her for being raped; it's opera, and given the norms, it still counts as progressive), but if you think cooler heads are going to prevail, you do not know opera. Out of her unbearable shame, Melinda goes mad and commits suicide, taking their young son with her. Bánk (not at this point knowing what has happened) returns to the court and confronts the queen; he ends up killing her. The king gets back, but Bánk is, presumably, going to defy him until he hears what happened to his wife and son, and ends up taking his own life. FUN FOR KIDS OF ALL AGES.

I liked the look of this production, which was a kind of colorful, out-of-time thing with some of the characters wearing probably period-appropriate clothing and some more modern (we will never forget Otto's Blue Hat). I also have no big complaints about the cast, who all put in great work. Levente Molnár (a baritone; apparently the role was originally a tenor, but is commonly played by baritones, which seems to me like a good choice, fitting the character well) has a lot of presence as the lead, and Ildikó Komlósi is a great evil queen. Honestly, I can sorta take or leave Zita Szemere as Melinda--I think some of her later scenes would've been better with a better actor--but what the hey. The music is...well, somewhat Verdi-esque, I suppose, but with what I can only assume are Hungarian elements that one doesn't hear every day, or any day.

And yet, my reactions to the whole are somewhat mixed. I liked the first act the best, with the oppressive court being contrasted with the suffering people. After that, it got sort of...I dunno. Confusing? Unclear? What's happening? Who are these people? Am I supposed to find the king sympathetic, or not? What's with this blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment where the inexplicable Biberach is inexplicably killed? Some of these questions might not be so confusing if one were more familiar with the cultural context, but, well...the music itself, I found, was only intermittently compelling. A lot about Hungarian Pride, which perhaps is more compelling to a Hungarian than to me (of course, the fact that current-day Hungary is inching towards fascism adds some uncomfortable subtext here--not that that's the opera's fault). There were a few very good moments, such as Bánk's final confrontation with Gertrud and his meeting with a peasant, Tiborc (a very good Kolos Kováts), who had saved his life as a child, but overall I couldn't call this one of my favorite operas. I ALSO disliked the fact that this recording doesn't include the curtain call; you just see a boring scrolling cast list. Are ALL of Operavision's performances like this? I hope not, and I will find out soon.

Also, Erkel is big enough in Hungary that he gets to be on currency:

I think that's nice.

Ludwig van Beethoven, Fidelio (1805)

People who don't know anything about classical music (I mean, I'm not claiming to know muchabout it myself, but you know) have this idea that Beethoven is the ne plus ultra in the field. And, even if they don't really know anything about it, that perception exists for a reason. And that reason...is Schroeder from Peanuts. But another, secondary, reason is that he really is that good. I do not, god knows, have enough expertise to make definitive pronouncements, but I have never heard a Beethoven composition where I didn't think, goddamn. I am hearingsomething. As you are no doubt aware, Fidelio was his only opera.

This is about a woman who disguises herself as a man (Fidelio) in order to become engaged to a jailor's daughter to become close to the jailor so that she can get at her husband, who was made a political prisoner for telling some undefined "truth" about the boss of the prison. It's confusing at first if you're coming into it blind, because women playing men in operas is enough of the thing that you assume that "Fidelio" is in fact a man in the opera's reality. But...she's not. So anyway, she saves her husband and the bad boss gets his just desserts and everyone else is freed too. Apparently.

You cannot argue with Beethoven's music. Seriously, you can't. End of game. The plot here is...somewhat vague, even in operatic terms, but that's no problem. This production is set in some twentieth-century European military dictatorship (too many of those to count, alas). That's basically fine, and certainly seems natural; the only niggling issue one has is the idea that taking down one corrupt colonel is enough to dismantle an entire corrupt regime. I mean, that's gonna be an issue however you play it, but possibly more so here. The cast was fine, naturally. The highlight for me was a young René Pape as Rocco the jailor, but once again, I feel like the characters are so...loose that it's a little hard for most of them to make a huge impression. That's not a criticism, really; it's just the way it is.

So but you really just want to say, yeah, cool beans, great opera. But...there's the one sort of insoluble issue that gnaws at you a bit, which is: Rocco's daughter, Marzelline, is just crazy about Fidelio. The opera opens with her rejecting another suitor because goddamn that Fidelio is just the best. So naturally she's enraptured when they get engaged. And...then it's revealed to all have been a sham and never dealt with in any way and THAT'S THAT. I was thinking, even while watching, huh, so she just blatantly tricked this poor girl? That's not cool. But that's what happens. And I just don't think there's any possible way you could produce this that would really mitigate the problem. Would it be better to show Rocco comforting his daughter during the triumphant final number? Well...yes? Probably? And yet, the more you focus on her distress, the more you detract from what is, genuinely, some very joyful and triumphant music that closes the thing. Because, I mean, it's not supposed to have any kind of tragic aspect to it. You would have to do some rewriting to make this work in any way. I dunno. In outline this is fine, and it frustrates me that there should be this issue, but...there it is. It might be that this is one of those operas that, for that reason, is better listened to than watched.  I still wish that Beethoven had written more of them, however.

Alexander Borodin, Prince Igor (1890)

Borodin was a chemist by trade (and also also a big agitator for women's rights, coolly enough); he just wrote music on the side as a hobby. He worked on this, his only opera (based on a medieval epic poem), on and off for eighteen years, leaving it unfinished at the time of his death: he'd written a lot of music (though some only in outline), but parts of it had no libretto, and parts weren't there at all. So his friend Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and his, Rimsky-Korsakov's, student Alexander Glazunov wrote extra music and pounded the whole thing into some semblance of order.

This Met production is very different from that. Director Dmitri Tcherniakov radically reworked the material: most or all of Rimsky-Korsakov's and Glazunov's music has been stripped away and music by Borodin that they apparently didn't have access to has been added back in, along with stuff that he wrote for other purposes (some of which he had cannibalized from the unfinished Prince Igor score--this gets very complicated). Furthermore, Tcherniakov changed the emphasis. One thing that frustrated Borodin and prevented him from completing the opera was a feeling that the story lacked dramatic movement, so now it's more of a psychological story about Igor's mindset (albeit not entirely convincingly), as he goes to war, is captured, and returns home to ruins.

So the plot: well, I guess that last sentence is more or less "the plot," such as it is. It's interesting in that usually you have a dichotomy: either an opera's a comedy or a tragedy. This really isn't either, though; it's certainly never funny or trying to be funny, but at the same time it has a happy or at least hopeful ending. Go figure.

For obvious reasons, Prince Igor is a very messy opera; there's no getting around that. I honestly was feeling sort of alienated at first. The opening scene, where the Russians are gonna go to war and Igor's great rah rah felt a bit pro forma, and then the second scene...my goodness. See, this is the point where Igor has been captured by the Polovtsians. And in this production--this is the most famous thing; you'll see it any promotional still--this takes place in a somewhat hallucinogenic field of poppies, indicating that this is taking place in part (but only in part--I really must insist on that) in Igor's mind. And at first it just felt very opaquely avant-garde to me, no clear idea on how anyone was feeling or what the purpose was or...huh. But I definitely perked up as things started to become a little clearer. This scene also features the famous "Polovtsian Dances," which are often performed in concert. And they're great.

The second act is a bit more "normal," returning home where Igor's wife is lamenting his absence and her vile brother is debauching it up. It's probably also the most accessible act, with some really great music especially as said brother, Prince Galitzky, fantasizes about his hedonistic would-be reign. Great chorus work, too: in my experience (sample size: 3) Russian opera tends to be big on the choruses. It ends as the Polovtsians attack. The third and final act (there's actually supposed to be an extra one after the second, but it's excised here and elsewhere for mostly having been written by Glazunov and for lacking forward momentum. It doesn't make a big difference, but its inclusion would've clarified a few things) is a bit less exciting; Igor, having escaped, is now home. And they begin to rebuild.

Boy, just getting your head around the plot there is kind of hard. I haven't even talked about the singers. Well, no one is less than "fine," as you'd expect. I think for me, the standouts are Mikhail Petrenko, as Galitzky, playing up the villain role to the hilt; Štefan Kocán as the Khan, who comes with real presence and a slightly fey affect that makes sense given the Orientalist conception of the Polovtsians; and of course Anita "great in everything" Rachvelishvili is predictably great as the Khan's daughter who falls in love with Igor's son. As Igor himself, Ildar Abdrazakov is basically fine, though he strikes me as just a bit too youthful and not quite forceful enough to fully inhabit the role.

There IS, it's hard to deny, some disturbing nationalist subtext here. When the Khan--who is treating Igor more as a guest than a prisoner--is talking with him in the poppy field, Igor's all oh but I don't have my FREEDOM and the Khan's like, okay, sure, just promise you won't attack me again and I'll let you go. But, predictably, he answers, nope, I am TOTES going to attack you again, and you think, good god, what is the PURPOSE of all this bloodshed? And...I mean, especially given Russia's current relations with some of its neighbors, it all seems extremely dubious.

I mean, you don't have to think about it in those terms. You probably shouldn't. There's plenty of great music here, so you should appreciate that, even if it has some slow bits and perhaps never quite comes together as a whole.

Stanisław Moniuszko, Halka (1854)

Doggone right I watched this Polish opera. A first for me and possibly a last. These things are NOT readily available video, to my regret. BUT! This one IS availableas a region 2 DVD, with English subtitles an' everything (slightly mangled English in places, but plenty good enough). I'll save my rant about the unforgivability of DVD coding for another day, but word to the wise: you can defeat it with VLC Player, which does not give a shit about your so-called regions. Unless you have a DVD-ROM drive where the coding is embedded in the hardware, in which case...you are out of luck.

Well. Halka is a young peasant woman who has been seduced and abandoned by a noble, Janusz, who is now getting married to a woman of his caste. Meanwhile, Jontek is a peasant man who loves Halka in vain. No good will come of this situation.

Look, I can't hold it back anymore, I'm fit to burst: HOLY GOD this opera is spectacular. One of the very best I've seen. You watch an opera in an unusual language more or less for the novelty of it, you don't necessarily have any expectations, but this is just breathtaking. Moniuszko's music is exciting as anything (I loved the way it was inflected by Polish folk music, especially as exemplified by two well-choreographed dance sequences, one of nobles and the other (even better) of peasants), and while the plot is basically a normal opera thing, it's just really intense and powerful. The cast (not well-known internationally) is uniformly strong. I mean, okay, granted, the Pinkerton-like Janusz probably isn't the all-time most exciting role to play, even if it is the third-biggest role he doesn't really have much to do, but Mariusz Godlewski is fine. However, the real plaudits must go to Tatiana Borodina as the wounded, half-mad Halka and Oleh Lykhach (and boy, is there ever absolutely NOTHING about him online) as Jontek. I think his big act-four aria of longing ("Fir Trees Sigh on Mountain Peaks") is the best thing in the opera. Also, in general, I'd like to praise it for the focus on the natural world, in both idyllic and ominous ways. I mean, I may not know what the Polish Spirit is per se, but even without having seen any other Polish opera, it's easy for me to understand why it would be so important in the canon.

Production-wise, this is fairly minimalistic. Not super-elaborate, with mainly just the necessary furniture and beams standing in for trees when relevant. The most visually striking moment is Halka's drowning at the end, as half of the stage moves up and the other down to simulate her descent. It certainly does the trick. As great as this is, though, I'd really like to see a really fancy Met-type production that goes all out. Just in terms of quality, it should absolutely be in the international repertory; it's really only an accident of Poland's relative international influence that it's not. It's a brilliant achievement in every way, and I'm not sure how you could see it and disagree with that. I would really, really like to see more of Moniuszko's operas.  And seriously, fuck any corporate entity that thinks I shouldn't be able to experience a work of high art because I live in the wrong arbitrarily-assigned "region."  Dammit.

Richard Strauss, Der Rosenkavalier (1911)

It's very impressive, really, how versatile Strauss was. He could write intense tragedies, but also this sophisticated romantic comedy, and then a kind of meta-opera with Ariadne auf Naxos (even if that last one is maybe not a total success). Quite a thing.

So the idea is that this teenage count, Octavian, is having an affair with the much older, married Marie Thérèse, usually referred to as the Marschallin (ie, the wife of a marshall), and if there's another opera which treats an adulterous couple sympathetically and isn't a tragedy, I haven't seen it. Which is interesting enough, and shows that you're dealing with a different kind of operatic sensibility. None of the kind of Victorian attitudes towards these things that you see so often; not that I don't think many such operas are great anyway, but a different outlook is actually quite refreshing. The Marschallin has it in the back and sometimes front of her mind that, given their age difference, this romance is an extremely temporary thing, and that at a certain point he's definitely going to leave her (you'd think that the fact that she's married might also play a part in her reckoning, but that never becomes relevant, and her husband, who's off hunting somewhere, is never really treated of).  Then the Marschallin's oafish, womanizing, totally self-absorbed cousin, Baron Ochs, blows in; he's going to get married (he needs the money), and the Marschallin volunteers Octavian to be the title character--ie, the guy who, per tradition, is meant to see the bride-to-be before her husband does and present him with a silver rose symbolizing their union. So, he's off. What happens next...okay, that joke is getting a bit repetitive. Anyway, the two of them fall pretty much instantly in love. But how to deal with the inconvenient baron? Maybe send him to a brothel and come up with a fun trick to make him feel like he's losing his mind to break things off, maybe! And then, an awkwardness amongst the triangle of lovers until the Marschallin graciously withdraws.

This performance I saw--this specific performance, from May 13, 2017--was Rene Fleming's last performance as the Marschallin (a signature role for her), and possibly--at least to date--her last operatic role period. The symbolism seems almost too perfect. Oddly enough, I don't think I'd actually seen her perform 'til now, although I didsee her as the introducer to the HD performance of the first-ever opera I saw--Tosca--and as a result, I've always sort of associated her with opera writ large. It certainly makes sense to retire on the top of one's game, and for the record, she still sounds great. This is also Elīna Garanča's last performance as Octavian, which I suppose makes sense, but I've gotta tell you: for a forty-one-year-old woman, she is eerilyconvincing as a seventeen-year-old boy. It's common for outlandish villains to steal shows; given how good the cast is in general, I don't know if he quite does it, but Günther Groissböck certainly comes close as Baron Ochs. I don't have any basis for comparison, but per the interstitial interview with with Groissböck, this is an unusual way to play the character--he's typically presented as mostly a clueless old fogie, but here he's younger, more active, generally more obnoxious. Whatever it is, it's quite good. Finally, Erin Morley as Sophie is eager to obey her father's wishes but also independent-minded in an appealing way. Interesting to note that there are no large tenor roles here, which is very unusual. Strauss's music is Strauss, complementing well the manic tone and pace of much of the piece.

Here's my question: how old do you think the Marschallin is or should be? Fleming was fifty-eight at the time of the performance, and with my trademark excessive literal-mindedness, I kind of just thought of the character as being that age. But of course, you could play her much younger; somebody or other claims that she's "supposed" to be thirty-two; I can't find any confirmation that that was Strauss' intent, but...maybe. It would probably make more sense for a teenager to be attracted to someone who's only moderately too old for him. On the other hand...she really would be only very moderatelytoo old, which seems to attenuate the whole thing a little. And the whole business about the transience of their love seems to lose a bit of its poignance if you realize that, oh, she's still young; she can easily find another lover if she wants to. Difficult to say, really. Not difficult to say that I love Strauss, however.

Christoph Willibald Gluck, Orfeo ed Euridice (1762)

Man, no sooner do I say that something is the first opera I've seen with an all-female cast than I see another. Although admittedly, this one isn't as "pure" as Suor Angelica in that regard. Orfeo was originally sung by a castrato and is today sometimes sung by a countertenor, but here it was a mezzo-soprano. Also, there men in the chorus. BUT IT STILL COUNTS. Kind of. What to the evs, foax.

In a baroque opera like this, there's always going to be a lot of dancing and whatnot. This is...I hesitate to call it a "modern-day" production, since a mythological story like this kind of exists in a historical null-space where talking about a specific time period isn't meaningful, but at any rate, they were in modern dress. The other thing of note is that there's a large chorus (a hundred-odd members, probably); here, they were on the three different levels of a big three-tiered platform thingie, and--this is the main thing--they were each dressed as a different historical figure. Some were recognizable, more or less, some not; but we have Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi, Cleopatra, Frederick Douglass, Jonn of Arc, &c. The idea--per the director (who characterized himself as an "opera queen") is that these are all the spirits of these people observing and commenting on the action. The fact that they come from different eras of history emphasizes the ahistorical nature of the whole thing. This is a cool idea in theory, I think, but in practice you do have to wonder whether it was actually worth the effort, to do this thing that absolutely nobody is going to appreciate as a whole. Well, maybe that's not necessary.

Still, honestly, I didn't find the business of the production that rewarding. The dancing left me largely unmoved. Still! It's redeemed by the performances themselves. There are actually only three foreground singers: Orfeo, Euridice, and Amour, the god who gives them another chance. You almost certainly know the basic plot: Orfeo mourns his lost love, goes to Hades to retrieve her with the stipulation that he can't look at her until they've gotten back to the surface (or tell her why); he does, of course, but--veering from the original story a bit--Amour decides to give him a mulligan, what the heck, and they are happily reunited.

All three of these singers are pretty great. Stephanie Blythe as Orfeo did--to me--take a little getting used to; this largish woman en travesti is...well, a bit unusual. But I did, it is no joke, get swept away in the end such that that no longer mattered. Danielle de Niese is appropriately ethereally lovely as Euridice, and a very forceful soprano to boot. Finally, Heidi Grant Murphy is a hoot as Amour, dressed in slacks, a pink polo shirt spangled with glitter, and intentionally (you've gotta assume, right?) chintzy-looking Cupid wings. The best part of the production, for me, was the only one with no extraneous singers on stage, where Orfeo and Euridice are escaping from hell as she begs him to look at her. Blythe's and de Niese's voices intermingle most bewitchingly. And Gluck--a composer you don't think about every day, or at least I don't--wrote some great baroque music. I like. I should watch Monteverdi's Orfeofor comparison purposes.

Giacomo Puccini, Il trittico (1918)

So Puccini had a cool idea: how about the musical version of a triptych, three short operas with different takes on a common theme to be performed together?  And that...is this. I saw a version from Covent Garden in 2012.

The first opera, and the most conventionally operatic (if there can be such a thing) is Il tabarro, a tragedy of infidelity and murder--two great tastes that taste great together. It takes place on a waterfront, where the head waterfront guy (that's a job title, right?), Michele, and his much younger wife Giorgetta are having a tough time of it following the death of their child. He's making a doomed effort to rekindle their love, but Giorgetta tries to escape via an affair with one of the stevedore's, and the result is...not really great for anyone involved. The thing is psychologically sharp, and Eva-Maria Westbroek is, as ever, good as Giorgetta. As Michele, Lucio Gallo is a new one on me (not sufficiently well-known internationally to have an English-language Wikipedia entry), but he's a commanding presence and a very good physical fit for the role. Irina Mishura is also charming as Frugola, one of the other longshoremen's wife. The whole is short (obviously) but potent (almost as obviously).

The obvious first thing about Suor Angelica is that it's the only opera I've ever seen or heard of with an all-female cast. Are there others? You'd think, but who knows? Of course, I've never seen an all-male cast either, but that's somehow easier to imagine.  At any rate, I think this little oddity is cool.  Well, this is also a tragedy, but of a very different sort. It takes place in a convent--a children's hospital in this production--where the nuns are basically doing nun things. Sister Angelica (Ermonela Jaho) comes from a rich family, but she's there as punishment (you wouldn't think this should be a punitively-assigned calling, but that's religion for you) for having had a child out of wedlock seven years ago, whom she has a desperate, buried desire to see again. But when her aunt (Anna Larsson, in one of the larger contralto roles you'll see in an opera) comes by about a matter of inheritance and reveals that the child had died some time ago...well, things really come to a head. According to the little introduction, this was Puccini's favorite of the three; mine too. Jaho is unbelievable in the title role, making you feel the emotion of the situation very palpably; how have I not seen her before?

So this is incredibly dumb, but I can't resist: at the end, having taken poison, as she's dying she sees a vision of her son that may be something numinous or may just be a delusion; take your pick. In this version, the vision is actually one of the children in the hospital. Now, that's not too different. I suppose it pushes the scales, maybe, in the direction of delusion, but it's really not too different. But man, there was an amazon review that was PISSED OFF, because apparently the message of the original staging is HOORAY GOD EXISTS! and that of this one is BWAHAHA GOD IS DEAD! The rigidity of some people's thinking is truly unbelievable to me.

ANYWAY...after that, we come to the comedy of the set, Gianni Schicchi. It has the feel of a farce, and it's kind of startling how contemporary it feels. Gianni Schicchi is actually a character from Dante's Inferno, in hell for having impersonated a Buoso Donati and making his will favorable to himself. This is a highly amusing extrapolation of that story: Buoso is dying and then dead, and his large, grasping family are all jockeying for favorable inheritances, with the one somewhat more sympathetic son (or something; it's hard to keep these relationships straight) wanting them to get the inheritance so they won't object to his marrying his working-class sweetheart...whose father is Schicchi himself (given his general character, I feel like he should be a low-level mafioso named "Johnny Skeeky") (Gallo again, hamming it up in a completely different kind of role), who helps the family out when it turns out Buoso has left everything to a monastery. It's not bad, and the production is appropriately chaotic, but I have to admit, I like it the least of the three. Aside from Schicchi himself, none of the characters really stand out, and there's one odd problem I've never seen in an opera before: the thing about opera is, it doesn't matter if you're coughing up blood and dying of tuberculosis; you still need to sing like an angel. But Gallo, when impersonating Buoso, effects this sort of strangled voice which is...not that pleasant to listen to, honestly. I have no idea if this was how Puccini conceived of the character, but either way, it seems like a bad choice.

I do want to give a shout-out to shortness.  The average length of an opera is, what, three hours?  And that's fine; I have no problem with it.  But there's definitely something to be said for compressing all that operatic goodness into small chunks, as here.

However...I know Puccini was a genius and I'm not, but I feel like he sort of out-smarted himself here: he was very insistent that these three should all be performed together, but I don't know: I think the first two are resonant enough that it's better to watch them singly, to give them time to sink in. Shouldnta made 'em so memorable, Giacomo! Also, the overall theme--deception, if it wasn't obvious--seems a bit strained. I'm not sure the conceit of the whole thing actually works that well, but when the material's this good, I don't suppose it matters much.

Giacomo Puccini, Manon Lescaut (1893)

So...this was Puccini's first big success, although these days it's lesser-known than his realhits (Tosca, Butterfly, Boheme, Turandot). But it's still Puccini, yeah? You can't complain too much, can you? Well...sort of. But actually you can, and this particular production, from 2014 at Covent Gardens, compounds the issues, such that it's sometimes difficult to tell whether it or the opera itself is at fault.

So I've said that I have no problem with operas being transplanted in time and space, and this remains true. In fact, I'll go further than that and say that sometimes this is preferable. Depending on the what and the when, operas being performed in their original settings can feel somewhat stuffy, such that their dynamism is blunted. It's easy to overlook small disjunctions between libretto and action; so characters are singing about swords while waving guns around; whatever. It matters not. AND YET. There are always exceptions to prove these rules, and, well, here's one of them. Because the production is just so massively out-of-sync with the action, that...well. It's a modern-day thing, is what it is. Or perhaps the nineteen-seventies, as it seemed to me; I'm not sure it's totally clear itself. But let's just say modern-day. The problems are exactly the same either way. It actually lookspretty good to me; very glammy and candy-colored. But...hmmm.

So here's the basic story of Manon Lescaut: the male lead, de Grieux, is feeling melancholy and stuff when, whaddaya know, he meets Nofirstname Lescaut and his sister Manon, who is being sent to a convent. Natch, de Grieux instantly falls in love with her, but a skeezy old guy, Geronte, also has designed on her. In the end, de Grieux and Manon get away together, but then it's the next scene, and now Manon is Geronte's mistress. Lescaut appears and they're going to escape together but oh no, the guards come to arrest Manon (for being a prostitute apparently; maybe this was obvious to viewers of the time or to people who are more familiar than me with these conventions, but it felt disorientingly arbitrary to me). So she gets exiled to America, as you do (Louisiana supposedly, but if there's any explicit mention of this in-text, in passed me by), and in the next scene she and de Grieux are staggering through the desert (you know--the Great Louisiana Desert), and then she dies of desert-related causes; the end.

I haven't read the novel on which this opera was based, but a quick look at the wikipedia entry indicates that it's a lot more coherent than this is. Granted, that's not a wholly rare problem in operas (the somewhat confusing thing where we're supposed to just assume that the main couple had been together for some time between the first and second acts is very reminiscent of Traviata), but the fact that this had five different libretticists certainly can't have helped. It's all very muddled, from the fact that the central relationship is just kind of assumed to--of course--the final desert scene, which, it really can't be overemphasized, is a truly bizarre non-sequitur. And then there's the production: as I said, I can overlook a lot, but I just can't ignore the fact that French prostitutes are not being exiled to America in the twentieth or twenty-first century. I mean, the idea that she's being made to join a convent seems weirdly old-fashioned as well, but on its own that would be overlookable; combined with everything else...I don't know.

The cast. Right. It certainly stars big names: Manon, de Grieux, and Lescaut are sung respectively by Kristine Opolais, Jonas Kauffmann, and Christopher Maltman. And, you know, they're all good actors and they all do what they can, but I can't help but feel like there's an extent to which they're overshadowed by the flaws in the thing itself. Take Maltman in particular: I always like his performances; he has a very good physical presence for playing sneaky or cunning characters (you could say I'm a Christopher Maltfan Jesus that was lame). And yet, what the hell is the deal with Lescaut? First he's trying to pimp out his sister, then he's helping her and de Grieux, I mean SERIOUSLY, this could be character development, but it seems more like the incoherence of having too many writers. I would like to see a somewhat more normal production of this; certainly, some of the problems would clear up. But it might, in the end, be one that's better to listen to than watch, and that one certainly shouldn't think too hard about.

Pietro Mascagni, L'amico Fritz (1891)

Mascagni is almost entirely known--outside of Italy, anyway--for his first opera, Cavalleria rusticana, an overheated drama of adultery and murder. I don't mean "overheated" in a pejorative sense; it's great. But you know, whenever I hear a one-hit wonder's one hit what won, I wonder whether they've done anything else worth hearing--and more often than not, they have. So here's his second opera, and boy, it could hardly be more different than Cavalleria.

There is no murder or adultery to be found here. There's this rich guy named Fritz who's everybody's friend, kind to orphans and everything. The only thing, if thing it be, is that he doesn't want to get married; he prefers chillin' with his bros. The local rabbi, David (yes, apparently these characters are Jewish, which I found kind of interesting and surprising), wants him to get married, but he's all, NO! I will NEVER fall in love with the daughter of a tenant farmer! What happens almost instantly after that...may surprise you.

This is seriously the lowest-key opera you will ever see, possibly the lowest-key that it's even possible to imagine--maybe because Mascagni wanted to show that he wasn't just capable of writing over-the-top melodrama? The only conflict, if you can call it that, is Fritz getting miffed at David for messing with his affairs, but...I really don't think you can call it that. It took me a little while to appreciate the aesthetic--in which, seriously, nothing happens--but I got used to it quickly enough, and then I found it rather sweet. The music is very reminiscent of Cavalleria--mostly the quieter passages thereof, but there are also some intense crescendos, which can sound a little incongruous, accompanying as they do Nothing Much. That's no biggie, though; the score is a winner. The so-called "Cherry Duet" in the second act remains popular as a stand-alone thing, and no wonder; it's a highlight.

It's lucky for us that there's a DVD of this at all. It's not by a big company, and it doesn't feature any big names, but despite that, it's fine. Yes, it would be interesting to see it with the full firepower of a Met production, but I have no big complaints. The cast does demonstrate the difference between perfectly competent opera singers and opera stars,but José Bros and Dimitria Theodossiou are perfectly good as the leads, though my favorite may be Alessandro Paliaga as David, who brings a certain gravitas to the role. The only serious criticism I have is that the sound mixing is...not great. To really hearthe singers over the orchestra, you have to really pump up the volume, and this leads to high notes sounding kind of raspy. It's worth persevering, though. It's easy to see why Cavalleriawas the big hit and this was not, but don't neglect it if you're a fan.

Georges Bizet, Carmen (1875)

You know, I've seen 'round about thirty operas. Slightly more. But about that. OKAY OKAY, according to my list, I've seen thirty-three. ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?!? It's conceivable that I've forgotten something near the beginning, when I was a bit fuzzier. But thereabouts. So naturally, there are a lot of big names I haven't seen. This being one of the biggest. Until I saw it, via the Met's Live in HD transmission.

Well, it's Carmen. There's a reason it's popular. The music is glorious, including a number of parts that you (or me, anyway) knew but didn't know where they came from, resulting in that "Ah ha!" moment (specifically, Carmen's first aria and the toreador song). You probably know the story: the soldier Don José falls in love with/is seduced by the beguiling gypsy Carmen, leading him to desert the military and go off with the gypsies to Do Crimes and things (yes yes, the Problematic aspects are obvious, but sometimes I find stuff like this just really tedious to talk about). However...things do not turn out as more or less anyone would have hoped they would. Hmm. Yes. Indeed. It's kind of funny that the opera was originally written for Paris' Opera Comique. It's...not what most people would consider "comique." Very far afield from La Fille du Régiment.

The title role is--or so I'm told--a specialty of French mezzo-soprano Clémentine Margaine. I think it's a difficult role to really wrap one's head around (more on this soon), but she's, you know, fine. In my experience, less than fine operatic performances are rare. I mean, honestly, she didn't make my head explode with awesomeness, but that's okay. There was some sort of quirk with the HD thing, I assume, such that you could really noticeable hear her inhaling between lines. It wasn't super-disruptive, but it was a bit irksome, and once you noticed it you couldn't stop noticing it. Roberto Alagna is very good, very tortured as Don José. You can see how this guy would be driven to murder. Russian bass Alexander Vinogradov is, I guess, okay as the bullfighter Escamillo, though I'm sort of prejudiced against him due to his asinine comments about bullfighting in his interstitial interview (it's good because both the bull AND the toreador put their lives in danger--yeah, let's put YOU in a ring against your will where some dude's trying to murder you and THEN we'll see how you feel). But the real surprise of the show was Aleksandra Kurzak (Alagna's real-life wife) as Don José's fiancée Micaëla. On paper, it looks like kind of a thankless role--the pure, virtuous woman to contrast with Carmen herself--but Kurzak endows the part with considerable strength and grit, such that I kind of wished there were more of her.

This production is set in the 1930s.  I don't know what else to say about that.  Even more than Shakespeare plays, directors feel absolutely free to move the settings of their operas to whenever.  I personally have no problem with that, and I think people who do are excessively narrow in their thinking.  It's such an artificial form anyway, that worrying about verisimilitude seems kind of incoherent.  Still, if setting it during the Spanish Civil War is meant to say anything in particular, I don't know what it is.  

So but the very big question is: why does Carmen allow herself to be killed? She has every opportunity to avoid her deranged ex-lover, and even if she doesn't take it to nonetheless avoid goading this obviously unstable dude--but she doesn't. She seems to be embracing death. This is a question that I find extremely difficult to answer. It seems to demand some kind of concrete response--the answer should certainly inform the performance--but I just don't know. I mean, one of the main things about her is that she flits between lovers like a bird ("L'amour est un oiseau rebelle," goes her famous first aria). It seems like if she's gonna let this guy do her in, there hasto be something--beyond increased murderousness--differentiating him from previous lovers. There's a scene where she reads cards and reflects on the inevitability of death, but that is not a theme that is exactly well-formed. If at all possible, I really want to resist the temptation to say, well, it's just because the libretto is kind of incoherently written, but I dunno, man. And the fact that it's hard to really get her deal seems to make her just a hard character to play. As I said above. On balance, the music is great so it doesn't matter, but it's definitely a thing.

George Frideric Handel, Giulio Cesare (1724)

That's "Julius Caesar" to you greasy proles. There are a lot of operas based on Shakespeare plays, so you might think this would be one of them, but holy shit you would be wrong as heck. Actually, the full title--which seems to never actually be used--is Giulio Cesare in Egitto (in Egypt), which might give you a hint. But, really, no title could ever give you more than a hint.

This is a comedy. Well...kind of. We'll get back to that; it's very interesting. BUT: Caesar and Cleopatra fall in love and have to defeat her louche brother Ptolemy and also there are the widow and son of Pompey, whom Ptolemy had had killed to try to curry favor with Caesar, which--clearly--backfired. It seems almost like Julius Caesar fanfiction.

I haven't seen a lot of pre-nineteenth-century opera. Dido and Aeneas and some Mozart, of course, but that hardly seems to count. This is certainly stylistically distinct from later operas I've seen. It features a lot of sequences with characters repeating the same phrase multiple times which are really just excuses for Handel's beautiful score to roll over you as they embellish their singing.  A lot of later operas do this to an extent, but this is on a different level.  It also features a number of roles, including the lead, that were originally written for castrati--that is, men who'd been castrated pre-puberty to prevent their voices from changing. I know the past is a foreign country, but it still boggles me that this was ever considered acceptable. Art is important, but the idea that mutilating people in its cause could ever be acceptable--my goodness. You can hear possibly the last-ever castrato singing,and while it's certainly distinctive, the idea that it's so mind-bogglingly sublime as to justify that? I mean, to be clear, I don't think anything would be, but if it were, it certainly wouldn't be that. Anyway, these roles are now sensibly played by countertenors--men with naturally high singing voices like women or boys. Those guys are lucky pieces like this exist, because there are very few later operatic roles specifically calling for their talents. But you have to ask: if these guys make acceptable substitutes--and I think they pretty clearly do--maybe don't just start cutting kids' balls off in the first place? Just a suggestion.

Anyway. Caesar is played by David Daniels, and it must be said, at first hearing this super-high singing coming from this largish bearded dude is verystrange. One does get used to it, but it never stops being at least a little weird. Obviously, people in the eighteenth century had different aesthetic sensibilities than we do. Still, he's very good in the part; even better, probably, is Ptolemy, deliciously hammed up by another countertenor, Christophe Dumaux, who is made up (intentionally?) to look very much like Sacha Baron Cohen (and whose incestuous attraction to his sister is obviously a directorial decision, but one that works). Natalie Dessay--we can admit it, surely? was kind of miscast in La Fille du Régiment, but she's just perfect as Cleopatra; the fact that the historical Cleopatra was long dead by Dessay's age could not be less relevant. Also of note is our third countertenor, Rachid Ben Abdeslam, as Cleopatra's faithful (and strongly coded as gay) servant Nirenus.

Right. So this production is set, sort of, in the nineteenth-century, amongst British imperialism. But it's certainly not wedded to this setting: at one point you see battleships and zeppelins in the background, and after their first meeting Cleopatra makes the "call me" sign at Caesar. Also, much of the comedy comes from bits and pieces of Bollywood-esque dancing, especially from Dessay, who had trained as a dancer when younger.

So about that, here's what I wonder: to what extent is the piece as written by Handel actually a comedy, and to what extent is that a function of David McVicar's production? I was not around in the early eighteenth century (yes, it's true!), but--in spite of having absolutely no expertise in this area!--I have the strong feeling that the production would've been a lot less elaborate. Certainly, whatever stage direction the libretto includes must be pretty definitively drowned out by contemporary embellishments, and such comedy as there is really doesn't have much of anything to do with the sung text (okay, Cleopatra initially visits Caesar disguised as a serving woman, which at least sort of has the shape of comedy, but that's about all). And for a comedy, there are sure a lot of scenes of characters bemoaning their doleful fates. I know anything with a happy ending is generally thought of as "comedy," so in that sense this would qualify. Then again, anything considered a comedy also doesn't typically include a body count. So...what? I find this whole thing intriguingly uncategorizable. Obviously, there's a lot of leeway for creativity in the production of any opera, but I think more than any other I've seen, the whole has to be considered a collaboration across the centuries between Handel and McVicar rather than a Handel thing tout court. And that is hella cool.