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.