Svetislav Bsara, The Cyclist Conspiracy (1987)

Here's a Serbian novel published by Open Letter Books, also responsible for The Museum of Eterna's Novel and The Island of Point Nemo. I really like this press in theory--let's introduce some foreign novels of note to the English-speaking world--and yet the first of those was a mild disappointment to me and the latter just fucking awful. Is the third time the charm?

This is a story--if that's what you want to call it--told through found documents about--well, see title. There's this sect that heretical sect that centers around bicycles, that has a rather abstruse theology, that believes that future events can effect the past, and the power of doing things through dreams. You have alleged ancient manuscripts, an unpublished Sherlock Holmes story (sort of), a Sigmund Freud casefile, a biography and the collected works of a poet involved in the sect, an ideolgical analysis, sundry illustrationg, and...like that.

I'll say that I did definitely enjoy this more than I did those other two books. It's pretty obscure stuff; I wouldn't say I grasped it all, and it does have the typical problem you run into, which is that there's really not much story and there's no way to get emotionally involved or anything like that. But hey, it's a fairly quick read, and not long enough to wear out its welcome. It's not unlike Foucault's Pendulumin some ways--though certainly less ambitous--but I probably liked it more. Okay.

I want to say one more thing however. Imagine, dear reader, that you are going to publish an English translation of a novel from an obscure language that is considered important in its homeland but totally unknown outside of it. You're a non-profit, you're not trying to make money here; you're basically doing this out of love. So...you probably want your readers to get the most out of this book that they can. You want people to understand why this is an important book, which is especially important given that there's going to be little or no material about it already available in English. Does that not seem like a reasonable assumption? So why--WHY WHY WHY--would you publish it with absolutely NO critical apparati or anything that would provide readers with any kind of context that they might need to fully appreciate the book? This isn't the first time I've come across a situation like this, but it just seems perverse whenever it happens. I strongly suspect that there is indeed cultural context here that a Serbian reader would get but that I don't. But if you think Open Letter is going to give you any help with that? Tough shit, you are wrong. WRONG WRONG WRONG.

I'm also not sure about the translation; at the end there's a list of people who are members of this group, and it includes, along with a bunch of Serbian names that may or may not mean something to Serbians, people who wouldn't have been known in 1987 (George W Bush, Michael Moore) and at least one (Homer Simpson) who didn't exist. I don't know! Maybe fucking around with the original text like this is justifiable. But, again, if there's no justification included, how am I not going to assume the worst?

Gioacchino Rossini, Le comte Ory (1828)

This is Rossini's penultimate opera, followed only by Guillaume Tell with its famous overture. This 2011 production was its Met debut, however. "One of the reasons it took so long to get here is that you need to assemble three bel canto virtuosos," Renée Fleming claims in the introduction. Two things: first, you don't need to make excuses, I'm not mad at you over this; but second: if you're goingto make excuses, try to make less lame ones. I don't for a moment believe that there was a single period in the Met's history in which they couldn't have mustered the necessary cast had they wanted to. Sheesh.

Anyway. Most of the men are off at the wars, so the lecherous goofball Ory is trying to take advantage of the wimmenfolk left behind, mainly via goofy costumes: first as a wise hermit and then as a nun. He has his eye especially on a comtesse, Adèle, with whom his page Isolier is smitten. Everything works out for them. Ory doesn't get anything he wanted. The end.

Ory is clearly comparable to Don Giovanni, but with a difference: while you can easily picture the Don trying any of the shenanigans that Ory does, if he did, they would actually work, or at any rate seriously threaten to. But this just isn't that kind of opera, and Ory, while similar in very broad outline, doesn't get to be powerful or menacing--which is why he's able to come across as at least semi-sympathetic. Actually, the most dubious thing about this opera is the fact that the "wars" the men are off at are actually the Crusades. At the end of the first act, we learn that they're coming back. "We have liberated the Holy Land," their message says. "Our swords drip with Saracen blood," to which I can only say YIKES. But it's not a big enough part of the opera that it detracts from one's enjoyment, of which there is a lot. I'm not going to sit here and tell you this is quite on the same level of Barbierior indeed Cenerentola, but it's a lot of fun.

This is a sort-of meta-production, set on what's supposed to be a period stage on the regular stage itself. As these things go, this is a lot better than Sonnambulawith opera singers in contemporary New York; it doesn't detract from anything. But it definitely does make you wonder: okay, but what's the point? Why is this? Cast is great; of the main characters, Ory probably actually makes the least impression, though Juan Diego Florez is solid as ever (it seems his first child was born less than an hour prior to this Live in HD production, which certainly must have had some impact on his performance). Joyce Didonato is really fantastic en travesti as Isolier. As far as women playing men go, I don't think I've seen better (well, Isabelle Leonard as Cherubino might have been comparable). The character's really appealing and she's really convincing. But the biggest prize has to go to Diana Damrau as the Comtesse. She's great and hilarious in the role; I've long had issues with Damrau, but full credit: she knocked it out of the park with this melodramatic, somewhat dippy noblewoman.

Is this opera a bit slight? Yeah, probably; but whatever. It's still a winner.  There's no reason not to see it.

Vincenzo Bellini, Norma (1831)

Here's some more bel canto for you! For me, for you, for everyone! This one is about druids in Gaul. I was a little confused because I always associate druids with Britain, but I suppose it just depends on whether your major cultural touchstone is Spinal Tap or Asterix.

Be that as may, the head priestess, Norma (which name maybe only sounds so bizarrely prosaic for a druid priestess because it sounds like "normal?" And yet Italian has basically the same word, so it's just weird all 'round), has had a secret romance with Pollione, the proconsul of the invading Romans. This has resulted in two secret pregnancies and children. That's a lot to keep secret. I guess she probably used Druid Magic to do it. So anyway, that is what it is, but unfortunately, it turns out that now Pollione, the cad, is in love with Adalgisa, the subordinate priestess, and wants to run off with her. There are consequences.

You can really, really tell from this why Bellini is so venerated, and it's obvious why this should be many people's favorite opera. The music is divine; everyone will point to Norma's aria "Casta diva," but I think at least as good is her and Adalgisa's duet "Oh! Rimembranza!" Bellini fuck yeah! This traditional David McVicar production is very good, and the three leads--Sondra Radvanovsky, Joce DiDonato, and Joseph Calleja as, respectively, Norma, Adalgisa, and Pollione. DiDonato is going to star in a Live in HD production of Agrippinanext year; I can't wait to see it.

I will say, I find it kind of disappointing that Adalgisa just disappears midway through the second act. I feel she deserved more, especially because the friendship between her and Norma in spite of their obvious conflict is one of the opera's highlights. Also, let's face it, the ending is kind of...less than edifying, by contemporary standards. Or, I'd think, standards of the time. So Adalgisa has given up on Pollione and wants to become a priestess again. Pollione is taken prisoner; he's going to be sacrificed 'cause you need a sacrifice to go to war, but Norma is of course conflicted. She decides that she's going to squeal on Adalgisa and sacrifice her instead, but then she realizes what a hypocrite this would make her and confesses her own sins--having broken her vows. So she's going to be sacrificed, and she begs her father to look after her children, but he's like, no no. But eventually he relents and she's like yay! I'm forgiven! This is great! And he's like your burning will purify your sins. So she and Pollione (who has decided he's still in love with her) go off to be sacrificed, and it's...triumphant? Positive? Joyful? I mean, it's a really strange message. I feel like "well, maybe we actually don't need to do blood sacrifices anymore" would be more rewarding. It's just supposed to be about transcendent love, but that's in the context of this brutal ritual, and...huh. I don't know!

This is based on a French play that was popular at the time. I can't say I'm super-interested in seeing it. I don't think I would find this story very compelling without Bellini's music. But--this is the key point--in this version there IS Bellini's music, and as such it's kinda great in spite of whatever narrative shortcomings it might have.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, L’oca del Cairo, ossia Lo sposo deluso (~1783)

Here we have a production that uses material from two unfinished Mozart operas. L'oca del Cairo--of which there are about forty-five minutes of material--whereas there are only twenty-ish of Lo sposo deluso. Together at last!

I was really looking forward to this as soon as I saw it coming up on Operavision, but having seen it, I still have questions. My biggest question--and I wish there were some background information available on this production: how did they do this? Obviously, there has to be a certain amount of revision in order to make the two things fit together, since they don't have the same characters or anything. You look at this summaries of the two, and you see that the opera really doesn't use the plots from either. But to the extent that it's based on either one, it's L'oca, and I really have no idea how the Sposo stuff figures into it at all. So yeah, it's not very clear. And the other big question: if Mozart only wrote sixty-five minutes of music total, then how come this is an hour forty-five? Where does the rest come from? I know that opera length is at least somewhat variable, but that seems like a lot. So...I don't know.

Well, questions notwithstanding, what do we have here? So the plot: Celidora wants to marry Biondello, but her guardian, Don Pippo, wants her to marry A Rich Guy, as is typically the case. Meanwhile, Pippo himself is also getting married, only it turns out--for very unclear reasons--that his fiancée is actually the erstwhile paramour of his secretary, Calandrino. There's also another couple, the chambermaid Auretta and stableboy Chichibio. So Don Pippo tries to stop love from winning out, but then--spoiler!--it does. To the credit of the producers here, the plot does more or less hold together, in spite of seeming very incoherent at first and, naturally, being somewhat sketchy and fragmentary all-told.

Predictably, you will be disappointed if you're looking for something on the Figaro-level, but once I got into this and learned to accept it for what it was, I found it perfectly pleasant. There are a few moments where you can really see how Mozart could have made something truly great out of this if he hadn't given up on it. I will say, though, that I don't think the production really serves the material as well as it might. It's pretty goofy in a sometimes-amusing but oft-distracting way. The main...thing here is a giant portrait of Mozart made up of large, removable, square tiles and characters are messing with them and taking them out and putting them back in throughout. And for unknown reasons, there's an ocean in the background behind it. This is okay, I guess, but I feel that the opera really would have benefitted from having more of a sense of place and character: the thing itself is unavoidably thin and unfinished-feeling, so I think that the production would ideally do a lot more to pick up the slack. On another note, I feel that the singers aren't more than adequate: I'd love to see this done with a star cast.

Still, let's be realistic: this wasn't likely to ever be much more than it is, so let's just enjoy it on that level. As a Mozart-delivery system, it certainly delivers some Mozart, and you'll never catch me complaining about that.

Jean-Baptiste Lully, Cadmus et Hermione (1673)

The wikipedia entry on French opera says that this is "often regarded as the first French opera in the full sense of the term." That's an awful lot of qualifiers, but I suppose it's probably safe to regard it as historically significant.

So this starts with a prologue featuring nymphs and satyrs and Pan himself frolicking around and singing about how great frolicking is, and also being in love. Then, Envy tries to ruin their party, and they're scared, but Apollo stops him, and they're happy again. Per the wikipedia entry, Apollo is meant to represent Louis XIV, 'cause you GOTTA praise the king. I guess. It's just hard to conceive of: can the level of megalomania that would accept that as a fitting tribute REALLY be real? Well, I guess if you've been inculcated into that milieu from the beginning, it can.

Anyway, then we're off to the main thing. Cadmus is the legendary founder of Thebes. He's also the brother of Europa, kidnapped by Jupiter, and he's off to find her and bring her back, and he's ALSO in love with Hermione, daughter of Mars and Venus, but she's supposed to marry a bad giant, so he has to win her in spite of the odds. Various gods take sides. There's the bit with a dragon's teeth that turn into warriors when planted. And there's also his comic-relief sideick Arbas. I mean, I wouldn't say hilarious relief, but give them a break; they were still trying to work these things out. In any event, then everyone is happy, as seems to always be the case in these baroque operas.

I like the music here. I have to say, as much as this would've annoyed both Lully and Rameau partisans, I don't really see any particular difference between the two. I mean, maybe if I listened to them back-to-back, I would, but they really are pretty similar. Anyway, I liked the Rameau music, and I like the Lully, but I do have to say about this one: it isa little boring. My favorite part was actually the prologue (which, unlike the rest, features rhyming singing); after that...eh. It's okay. But, as I say...a bit dull. That may be in part due to the production itself (this one). It's a very traditional thing, but it really does come across as a bit silly, the way its stylized; not a problem I had with Castor et Pollux. These early operas really don't have the sort of heightened emotion that you generally associate with the form, so a lot of the time it's a bit of a tall order for them to be super-engaging. Or so I think. But whatever the case, I didn't love this.

Salvatore Sciarrino, Luci mie traditrici (1998)

So I watched this with zero background knowledge. I guess I kind of thought, oh, here's an Italian composer; maybe he'll be in the tradition of Verdi and Puccini. I freely admit that this was kind of a dumb thing to think; still, there's no way I could possibly have predicted the sheer magnitude of my wrongness.

The plot here is very simple: Renaissance duchess cheats on her husband with a guest; he kills them both (based on real events). So far so typical, but that is absolutely as far as the typicality goes, because this is the most avant-garde opera I've ever seen. It's arguable whether you'd actually call it an "opera" if there were a better term. But anyway. The music is...well, that might be overstating it. The "music" consists mainly of sort of ambient noise, punctuated by little squawks and chirrups. Occasionally there's a moment that's punctuated by something slightly more substantial, but only occasionally. I have no idea what the score here could possibly look like; most of it sounds completely random. And as for the singing: there are no extended musical numbers of even phrases, really: everything is clipped, dispassionate lines of mostly elliptical dialogue, with any emotion being carefully sublimated.

If this sounds like something you'd absolutely hate, well, maybe so. I think there would be something wrong with you if your initial reaction wasn't something like "what the shit is this? Seriously, is this a joke?" It certainly was mine, and honestly, if it were a full-length opera, I probably would've given up on it after just a few minutes. But it's only sixty-five minutes total, so I decided to stay the course and see if I could figure out what the heck was going on.

I often say that I like completely new artistic experiences, and this is definitely that. Be careful what you wish for? Well...maybe. And yet, after watching the whole thing and thinking about it for a while, I do feel that there's something here. Probably. It really does create this sort of poisonous Renaissance atmosphere. Sometimes, even in its less macabre moments, it reminded me of an Edward Gorey story, where you get a similar feeling of disembodied unease. I wouldn't want every opera to be like this; I probably wouldn't want anyother to be. And yet, on the whole, I'm glad it exists, and I'm glad to have seen it.

Antonio Vivaldi, Juditha Triumphans (1716-ish)

This is based on the Book of Judith, a part of the Old Testament that may or may not be apocryphal, I can't be having with your religious debates, but I'm going to take it as such because it's kinda badass. The plot--which is basically the plot here--is that Assyrians are trying to fuck up Israel, but then this young widow, Judith, goes to beg mercy from the general, Holofernes; he falls in love with her and she ultimately beheads him when he's in a drunken stupor, breaking the back of the invaders. I feel like whoever wrote this didn't have a clear conception of how hard it would be to literally sever someone's head, as opposed to just cutting their throat, which would do the job just as well. This was written to celebrate a victory of the Republic of Venice against invaders, and at one point towards the end this is specifically spelt out, lest you should miss it.

Anyway, there's a really great Caravaggio painting of Holofernes' sorry end:

Yeah! I would characterize her expression as "annoyance at having to perform a mildly distasteful task that proved to be a little more difficult than expected." Whereas the old guy is just straight-up pissed. Good stuff.

This isn't actually an opera, or at least it wasn't originally; it's an oratorio, a musical composition that may have a loose story but is intended as a concert piece. But hey, operas are performed as concerts all the time, so why not the reverse?

Well, why not indeed? However, it must be noted, this really doesn't feel so much like an opera. The production I think does the best job I can imagine making it into one, but that only goes so far. In addition to the extremely thin plot, you'll notice that characters almost never speak to one another; often when this production has them do that, it's obvious that they're not actually talking to each other; they're just speaking non-dialogue lines at their interlocutor for no clear reason. It also adds a lot of background action, which makes sense, and mostly works, but...not always. There's one subplot which is definitely made up out of whole cloth where a woman who's either the wife or sweetheart of the priest Ozias (here just a regular resistance fighter) and who is being abused by the invaders. This mostly works okay, but there's one part in particular that's a bit weird: Judith and Holofernes are having their tête-à-tête when they're interrupted by the soliders outside singing a drinking song. That part's in the libretto, obviously, but what's not is them abusing this woman. If it were, Judith would make more of an effort to stop them, and Holofernes--if for no other reason than that he's trying to win Judith's favor--would intercede on the woman's behalf, but that wouldn't work with the music, so they just all just sort of go away as things continue. Hmmm.

This production--I did not mention--is set in World War II and involves nazis or something close to that, which works fine. In the youtube comments (this was an operavision thing, but it's expired at this point), people were complaining about that, but REALLY, the "original context" is a military action in what's now Italy that nobody remembers. I think there's nothing wrong with changing things up. All of the singers here are women, interestingly enough (the chorus is mixed-gender, but that was originally all-female too). Mezzo-soprano Gaëlle Arquez shines in the title role, bringing grit and vulnerability as appropriate. But the whole cast is very good.

Still, you can't complain too much. It's hella great baroque music; what more do you want? And, really, even if it doesn't always totally work, it just seems more interesting to see it in opera form. Also, it's the first opera (I'm just going to treat it as such!) that I've ever seen in Latin, so that's pretty cool as well. Of the four oratorios Vivaldi wrote, this is the only one that isn't lost (a lot of Vivaldi's music is lost), which is a big shame.

Joseph Haydn, L'infedeltà delusa (1773)

That's "deceit outwitted," a title which really doesn't relate to anything in the opera.  Like the Rameau opera, I watched this with French subtitles, but there's a big difference: in the former, the subtitles were just a transcription of the libretto; hence, eighteenth-century French. But here, the libretto of course is in Italian, so the subtitles just translate it to contemporary French--which is just a shitloadeasier for me to understand. So that's good.

You have seen this plot before, more or less, probably more: Sandrina is a peasant girl whose father has arranged for her to marry Nencio, a rich guy. But she and another peasant, Nanni, are in love with each other, and also, Nanni's sister Vespina is in love with Nencio. Via a series of disguises, Vespina is successfully able to manipulate the situation so everyone gets married to the right person. And that is that.

A perfectly legit plot for a great comic opera, but I'm sorry to say, I found this reallydisappointing. This may have been related to the production, which was a very confusing thing with a glass box in the middle of the stage with ladders in it and the floor throughout most of it being littered with what appeared to be sugar cubes; also, I think the cast was really just okay at best--more charisma might've sold it better. But I don't know; I found the stuff with Vespina's disguises pretty tedious--an effort at zaniness that did not, for me, work--so I'm not sure. It doesn't have the sort of fun comic music that Orlando did.

I am undeterred, though, and will see more Haydn operas if I can find them. You know, he wrote almost all of them for the entertainment of the fantastically rich Eszterházy family, for whom he was court musician for many years. JUST IMAGINE. I'm sure they got up to some shady shit in their time--basically a prerequisite for amassing such a fortune--but THEY EMPLOYED JOSEPH HAYDN! Whatever else they did, this was a gift to the world. What the fuck do our plutocrats do today that has anyredeeming qualities whatsoever? Shooting cars into space doesn't count.

Joseph Haydn, Orlando Paladino (1782)

Haydn is an extremely well-regarded composer. Perhaps you've heard of a little thing called The Creation?  And yet for some reason nobody thinks about his operatic career. But he wrote sixteen operas (the first of which is lost), so, I mean...why wouldn't you be interested?

As you would anticipate, this is based on bits of Orlando Furioso. The plot's a big baggy, and fudges of lot of the details of Ariosto, but basically, Angelica and Medoro are happy together, but Orlando, having been driven furioso with unrequited love, is after them, and Rodomonte (from whom, of course, the word "rodomontade") is there to stop him. Also, there's a shepherdess, Eurilla, and Orlando's erstwhile squire, Pasquale. Oh, and a sorceress, Alcina, who makes sure that there's a happy ending. Of course, the poem had a happy ending too, but it's funny to me that Haydn or the librettist felt the need to make it even happier: there, Rodomonte is a villain who dies; here he's just a comic blowhard who...doesn't.

It's pretty terrific. As you might expect, it sounds a lot like Mozart, or, it would probably be more accurate to say, Mozart sounds a lot like this. It's more or less equally divided between romantic drama and comedy. The latter is, to my ears, a lot better than the former: it involves Rodomonte's blustering and the comedy couple of Eurilla and Pasquale, and those latter two--as played here by Sunhae Im and Victor Torres--absolutely run away with the show and refuse to give it back. There's some great patter-song-type stuff which seems to prefigure the likes of Donizetti (at one point, Pasquale remarks "not even a castrato sings as well as me," which I thought was really culturally interesting). I love it. The drama is a bit uneven, especially because Medoro as a character is pretty gormless. Angelica (Marlis Petersen, I believe the only singer here I've seen before, as the title role in Lulu and Susanna in Figaro)does have a good aria near the end when she thinks he's dead, and Orlando himself certainly has his moments.

This production (part one,part two--not available in the US, unfortunately) is kind of goofy but really good, I think. It does a great job of bringing out the humor in the opera. Everyone's fine, although as noted above, some roles are clearly more rewarding than others. Sunhae Im definitely gets best-in-show as Eurilla. The point is: if Haydn's other operas are anything like this, the neglect of this aspect of his work is criminal.

Jean-Philippe Rameau, Castor et Pollux (1737)

French opera is almost as old as Italian, and yet for whatever reason, you don't hear much about the French baroque. Or at least I don't. So I watched this. As far as I can tell--and I know it's absurd to generalize from a sample size of one, but the wikipedia entry on French opera confirms that this is the norm--the three biggest differences are:

1. A lot more time given over to elaborate dances;

2. Much more straightforward plots than the byzantine opera seria style; and

3. Probably most significantly: no castrato roles. More because for whatever reason the French didn't like the style than any moral reasons, but still, they weren't complicit in that particular evil, so good for them. It's a very intriguing and probably unsolvable mystery, though: what reasons would there be for that cultural difference?

I watched this performance. It only has French subtitles, but I figured I'd still be able to follow along. That...was not as true as one would have hoped; it turns out that eighteenth-century opera is harder than Disney comics. Go figure. Nonetheless, with what I was able to glean from the subtitles plus the wikipedia summary, I could basically tell what was happening.

Well, it's the story of Castor and Pollux, though Rameau presents the story a little differently than I know it. So Castor has a lame human father, and therefore is mortal. Alas, he dies. Well, it was bound to happen. Pollux is the son of Jupiter and therefore immortal. He's in love with Télaïre (there's also another woman, Phébé, who's in unrequited love with him, but she doesn't amount to much) but alas, she's in love with his dead brother, and asks him to get his dad to bring him back. Though conflicted, he agrees to this, Pa says nope, laws of fate, not gonna do it, wouldn't be prudent. The only solution of sorts is for him to replace his brother in the underworld. In the Elysian Fields, Castor is nonetheless sad for having lost his love. He agrees to go back up, but only for a day, to say farewell to her. Nobody's really happy about the situation, but then Jupiter appears on the scene and says, okay, you can both be immortal, but you have to be a constellation. Jupiter seems to have a weird sense of humor. But anyway, there you go, problem solved. Sort of.

The plot is, I mean, perfectly serviceable. It works. But, my god, the music is just utterly sublime. Don't know that I could determine whether it was French or Italian from listening to it, but it's really, really gorgeous, and I was highly satisfied. There's no reason this stuff should be less known (at least in my head) than its Italian counterpart. This here production is...well, probably not all that far off from how it would originally have been performed; very traditional and minimalistic. Beautiful singing. To say I wanted to see more operas by Rameau would be...accurate.

Here's a kind of funny bit from the opera's wikipedia page:

Castor et Pollux appeared in 1737 while the controversy ignited by Rameau's first opera Hippolyte et Aricie was still raging. Conservative critics held the works of the "father of French opera", Jean-Baptiste Lully, to be unsurpassable. They saw Rameau's radical musical innovations as an attack on all they held dear and a war of words broke out between these Lullistes and the supporters of the new composer, the so-called Rameauneurs (or Ramistes). This controversy ensured that the premiere of Castor would be a noteworthy event.

It just goes to show: today, this argument is utterly meaningless to the layman, and even a trained musicologist would only be able to understand it on a theoretical level. But they really cared! Consider this the next time you see a youtube comment to the effect of "I wish music was still like this and not garbage like Justin Bieber." It's always Justin Bieber, for whatever reason.

Mark-Anthony Turnage, Anna Nicole (2011)

First question: is this really a contemporary opera about Anna Nicole Smith? It sure is! Second question: seriously, is this a joke? Well, if it's a joke, it's a joke commissioned and produced by the Royal Opera House and starring Eva-Maria Westbroek. So...really not a joke at all. And actually, the concept fits neatly into the operatic tradition. La traviata. It's the single most-performed opera in the world. And it's based on the life-story of a woman who had only recently died who was considered to be morally disreputable (yes, filtered through Dumas and then the censors, but STILL). And in terms of character, there are obvious comparisons to operatic women like Lulu or Manon Lescaut. So I think this is a wholly justifiable operatic subject.

But, of course, that's only in theory. How is it in practice? It follows Smith's life fairly closely, but--inevitably--in a kind of fragmented, postmodern way: her humble origins, success as a Playboy centerfold (first last and only breast augmentation sequence you'll ever see in an opera), marriage to an eighty-nine-year-old billionaire and subsequent lawsuits with his family, involvement with her sleazy lawyer, the death of her twenty-year-old son by overdose, and her own subsequent death by same months later.

So obviously, all of us are products of our environment, but somehow that seems more obviouswith someone like Smith: our toxic culture made her and then broke her. The opera is very good at bringing this across, while at the same time depicting it in an exhilarating way. Her story is a tragedy, but you can't pretend that there isn't an awful lot of black humor here. I would also say, however, that it does a good job of representing her humanity--certainly, Westbroek is electrifying in a role that requires laying bare all kinds of vulnerabilities.

I...kind of loved this? Is that right? I'm not quite sure. It's hard to really conceptualize this as being in the same tradition as Mozart or Puccini. As seems to be the norm, it took me a while to get into the idiom of the opera, but once I did, I was very impressed. The music is quite a thing, veering between jazziness (with, inevitably, a certain amount of striptease music) and drama and comedy. I don't know Turnage from Adam, but he seems like quite a composer. The cast is all strong; most of the roles other than the title are pretty small, but Gerald Finley (who sang the lead in Doctor Atomic) is good as Howard Stern (not that one), her lawyer; and Alan Oke is weirdly sympathetic as her geriatric husband.

I dunno; this is only the fourth contemporary opera I've seen, so I'm really in no position to judge, but I find it fairly easy to say that it's the best one so far.

George Frideric Handel, Agrippina (1709)

So almost immediately following the release of the 2019-20 Met in HD schedule, which includes this opera, thisis announced on Operavision. COINCIDENCE?!? Well, I suppose it pretty much has to be, but it still seems pretty weird: Handel wrote forty-some operas, and you both just happened to hit on this one RIGHT NOW? Hmm! Well. Anyway.

So the title character is the scheming wife of the emperor Claudio (using the Italian legislature) and mother of the dimwitted Nerone, whom she wants to be emperor. The likewise-dimwitted Claudio died in a shipwreck, so things seem to be going her way, but then, whoops, he didn't die, and he's back (worth noting that their dimwittedness is at least in large part more in the production than the libretto--this could legitimately be played very differently). Also, there's Poppea, lusted after by both Claudio and Nerone, but in love with Ottone, and their romance is the central emotional thing. Anyway, in the end, Claudio agrees to make Nerone emperor for somewhat shaky reasons, and everyone's happy. No need to point out what a hash this all makes of real history! That's one of the most surprising and delightful things I've discovered via opera: the way these baroque composers were so willing to make history into this absolutely crazy fan-fiction.

This is a banger of an opera. There's just one killer aria after another, and the comedy works really well (though, again, it's not clear to me how much of that is from the text and how much of it wasi facilitated by the producer). I'm very willing to call it the best Handel I've seen. It's also, interestingly enough, by far the earliest Handel I've ever seen: Giulio Cesare is from 1724, Rodelinda 1725, and Serse 1738. I don't know if that's because of fundamental stylistic changes in his writing, but I'd love to see more and find out.

The production is...unusual. First, it's a modern-dress thing, which is cool and fine and fairly normal (Ottone is wearing a Tristan und Isolde t-shirt--I want one). What's odd is the staging; it starts out in an auditorium, which eventually starts revolving around for, presumably, reasons; later, we switch to a plain set of low stairs, with cheap columns that topple over when characters try to lean against them. It's all very strange; this review claims that it "mirror[s] the auditorium and enable[s] us to see our own agendas reflected in Agrippina’s machinations;" I can believe that that was the intent, I suppose, but to my mind, it really doesn't work in that sense.  I know my personal agenda has never been to get rid of the emperor that my son might ascend to the throne.

In spite of all this, I thought it was fine; I had no real problems. This is helped out a lot by a brilliant cast, especially in the comic roles: Ashley Riches and Raffaele Pe are great as the buffoonish Claudio and Nerone; the latter in particular is hilarious, and he has a really strong, assertive countertenor voice that somehow sounds different than anyone else I've heard in the register. Then there's Stefanie True as a sneaky Poppea (probably a more important role than Agrippina herself, actually), likewise great. It's interesting to note that Ottone was originally a contralto role, though here's it's another countertenor--hey, you can't find any actually castrati, but there are plenty of contraltos about, so why not give the role to one of them? That would be my preference.

Still, whatever quibbling I can do aside, I loved this. It'll be very interesting to see how the Met production compares; however they do it, I anticipate significant tonal differences, bolstering my theory that Handel is in large part what you make of him.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Idomeneo (1781)

Well well well! This one is innn-teeerr-esst-ing! This here is some opera seria. So we're on Crete, following the Trojan War. The prince, Idamante, and a captive Trojan princess, Ilia, are in love, and also, Elektra (or "Elettra") is there for reasons that are entirely unclear. She's also in love with Idamante. Idomeneo, the Cretan king, was killed in a shipwreck, except nope, turns out he survived, but only by swearing to Neptune that he'd sacrifice the first person he sees, which then turns out to be his son, causing him great distress (side note: does this mean that had circumstances been different, he'd happily have murdered a stranger? He's supposed to be a hero, but that doesn't seem too heroic). In any event, he's going to send Idamante away so he'll be safe, but Neptune sends a monster who kills, we are told, thousands of people, so he's reluctantly going to sacrifice his son when Neptune says nope, wait, changed my mind, Idamante should marry Ilia and be king. So that happens. And everyone's happy except Elektra, who goes insane.

It would probably be instructive to contrast this with La clemenza di Tito, Mozart's later opera seria. In that one, the title character feels obligated to have his friend put to death, and the drama is whether mercy will prevail. Whereas the drama here, if you can call it that, is whether a vengeful god will relent for no reason. I mean SERIOUSLY (or seria-ly), Tito has a pretty clear message: mercy is laudable. What's the message here? Psychopathic blood gods will fuck your shit up if you don't obey their whims, but then maybe if you're lucky they'll stop fucking your shit up? It's...possibly a tiny bit less dramatically compelling.

Also, let me ask: why is Elektra a character in this opera? WHY? She seriously does nothing; she could easily be removed with zero impact on anything in the story. I'm not sure she actually interacts with anyone ever, and if she does it's barely. Still, give her this: she has a lengthy going-insane aria at the end after Idamante and Ilia become a done deal, and it is definitely not supposed to be hilarious (though I couldn't tell you what dramatic effect it was meant to have), and yet it is probably the funniest thing I've ever seen in an opera. I guess it's partially the way Elza van der Heever plays it, but this whole unhinged rant, totally unearned, is just so incongruous. The other characters just sort of stand around and don't really react, which I suppose is fair: what do you possibly dofaced with something like that?

Still! As silly as it is, if you actually listen to the music behind it, it's awesome. That's the thing: the fact that this is Mozart is enough to forgive an awful lot, even if it's obvious why this is not one of your better-known Mozarts. This production is probably about the best it's going to get, with good traditional sets with solid performances from, in addition to van der Heever, Matthew Polenzani in the lead Nadine Sierra as Ilia; Alice Coote is fine as Idamante, though I do wonder if she ever gets tired of doing these trouser roles. I don't think I've ever seen her play a woman.

So, yeah. On the bottom of my Mozart list, but still strangely watchable.

Vincenzo Bellini, La sonnambula (1831)

I needed something light after Parsifal, so I hit on this, Bellini's opera with the goofy-as-hell-sounding plot: Amina and Elvino are going to be married and they're rapturously in love, but SCANDAL! Amina is found sleeping in the bed of Count Rodolfo, who was staying at a local inn! Now Elvino won't marry her and they are sad. Oh, wait, turns out she was only there because she had been sleepwalking. Never mind.

A few surprises watching this: first, I'd kind of assumed it was going to be a zany, Donizetti-esque comedy, but it's really not that. It's a romance with a happy ending, but there's a fair bit of pathos and little overt humor. Second, it's actually not as goofy as all that. Sure, the sleepwalking business is a little silly, but it's pretty easy, I found, to get past that, and it doesn't make the whole thing seem excessively silly. I feel like people at the time were just learning about the concept of sleepwalking and being taken with the novelty. There's a scene here where the Count is explaining the concept to the townspeople and they're all "you're shitting us; that's not a real thing." You may know a rather famous nineteenth-century novel the denouement of which revolves around it. But anyway, the whole thing was okay by me, and the music is spectacular, so what more do you want?

Well, funny you should ask...this performance features Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Flórez being effortlessly charming, so that's all right. But it's a meta-production. It's set in a rehearsal space as singers are preparing to perform this very opera (better not think too hard about that). I get the unavoidable impression that the producers thought that the opera was too silly, and that therefore they needed to add this layer of postmodern ironic distance, but it's just incoherent, and seriously, the opera is not that silly, dammit. The most I can say for it is that at a certain point I got into it sufficiently that I was mostly able to see through all this to the story underneath, but boywould I ever have preferred something more traditional. I mean, you could probably find a way to poke a little fun at the story (which would only be fair) without going to these extremes.

Richard Wagner, Parsifal (1882)

Don't look now, but it's my one hundredth opera, so I wanted to choose something that would seem appropriately momentous. So, I watched this. And I didn't feel as though I'd really grasped it, so I watched this. And as a result...I still don't feel like I've really grasped it, but man alive have I ever seen a shit-ton of Parsifal.

So there are these grail knights. The main one that we see is Gurnemanz. They're keeping the Holy Grail; they're supposed to also be keeping the holy spear that pierced Christ's side, but unforunately, it has been stolen by the evil sorcerer Klingsor, who also used it to stab the boss of the knights, Amfortas, who is now plagued by a wound that will never heal unless the spear can be recovered. There's also Kundry, a mysterious woman who sort of comes and goes and tries to help and is enigmatic and maybe bad. Parsifal "the pure fool made wise by compassion" (and if nothing else that is a beautiful turn of phrase) appears, having shot a swan, to everyone's consternation. He doesn't know who he is or anything about himself or anything, and Gurnemanz thinks he's hopeless. That's the first act. Then, we're in Klingsor's den, and we see that Kundry is under his power. Parsifal appears and these flower maidens try to seduce him but fail and then Kundry, at Klingsor's behest, does the same, but fails (and yup, the sex=sin theme is strong here), and then he defeats Klingsor and recovers the spear. That's the second act. Then we're back at the grail knight place on Good Friday. Parsifal reappears with the spear. Amfortas is going to die but then doesn't 'cause of spear power. Kundry dies for no reason. And that, my friends, is about that.

Let's start by comparing these two versions. It was pretty inevitable that, if choose just one, I was going to go with the new version, because, you know, Jonas Kaufmann. It's not that Siegfried Jerusalem is bad in the role, far from it, but I have to admit, the aesthetics of some of these older recordings (not that 1992 is particularly old!) just don't do it for me. Still, if I have to choose, I do think the new cast is stronger: I might prefer Waltraud Meier in the old version as Kundry, but the new one has not only Kaufmann but also René Pape as Gurnemanz and an unnervingly intense Evgeny Nikitin as Klingsor.

Productionwise, the situation is a little murkier. The recent production takes place in a non-specific but vaguely post-apocalyptic wasteland (with big pools of blood in Klingsor's lair!). It looks cool, and it's nothing inappropriate, I certainly wouldn't call it Eurotrash, but it is a bit jarring, given how often characters comment on the beauty of the nature all around them, for them to actually surrounded by nothing but bare, cracked earth. The older one is by Otto Schenk, and as with his Ring production, it's a bit kitschy/amateurish-looking, but possibly a better fit with the piece. Overall, though, I'd still go with the new one, given the choice.

Well, you know. Wagner wrote some sublime music for this, if less iconic or instantly attention-grabbing than some of his previous. And there are some great bits here and there, especially in the second act, which, after all, features an evil sorcerer. But you know...I feel like a bit of a philistine saying this, but screw you, I've watched a hundred operas (actually a hundred one; I saw Attila after my first viewing of this), I can say what I want: more often than not, good god this is boring. I was unable to watch it in its entirety in one sitting either time, because my eyes just kept glazing over (hey, I thought it would get better the second time! I'm not a nut!  You're the nut!).

On the wikipedia page, Mark Twain is cited as saying "in Parsifal there is a hermit named Gurnemanz who stands on the stage in one spot and practices by the hour, while first one and then another of the cast endures what he can of it and then retires to die." That's not really an accurate summation, but somehow it feels right, at least emotionally. Truthy, if you will. And it made me laugh, so let's go with it. The spirituality doesn't do much for me, and as much as I love the phrase "made wise by compassion," this plays out, I would say, pretty thinly. Also--I know this is a weirdly specific thing to mention, in the context--there's this one line that struck me as bizarrely mean and juvenile both watchings: Gurnemanz is questioning Parsifal about his identity and not getting anything, at which he concludes "a duller wit I've never met, except Kundry." Da hell, dude? She's right there! And it's not like the opera's done anything to make her seemespecially dumb, so...? I will say, though, that I do not detect anything that looks like anti-Semitism here (people suggest that Klingsor is meant to be a Jewish caricature, but I don't see that at all). As far as I'm concerned, Mime is the only questionable element in any of his music.

I dunno. Now I've seen eleven out of thirteen Wagner operas (Die Feen doesn't seem to be available except in an attenuated children's version; I could get a dvd of Rienzi, but I'm not sure I care enough), and my feelings are definitely mixed; his talent is impossible to deny, but OOF. For the non-obsessive, I might recommend just Rheingold, Walküre,Meistersinger, and probably Tristan.

But anyway, here's to a hundred more operas, assuming I don't abruptly get bored with the form for no particular reason.

Guiseppe Verdi, Attila (1846)

Right, so it's about Attila. Of course. Sometimes known as The Hun. Certainly a Hun. The story is that the Huns have been sorta ruining people's cities and stuff, and they have a female prisoner, Odabella, whose father they'd killed, and there's also Foresto, her lover, another survivor of this violence, and there's also Ezio, an ambassador of Rome. And long story short, some stuff happens, then there's some violence, the end.

Well, that summary could've gone better, obviously. But you must forgive me, because--sorry to say it--this is not a good opera, and that's largely because of the plot. I mean, the music's okay, it's Verdi, though not his all-time greatest, but I don't think I can adequately express just how choppy and non-productive the story is. It's like when you're watching a dog who just keeps turning in circles trying to find the optimal way to lie down. Why are you doing this? What is this accomplishing? Ezio wants to join Attila but oh no he's actually pro-Rome no he's not yes he is Foresto is angry at Odabella because he thinks she's betrayed him no he's not yes he is they're going to kill Attila no they're not yes they are there's a love triangle no there's really not oh look Attila's being haunted by spirits but only in one scene and FOR GOD'S SAKE SOMEONE JUST STAB SOMEONE ALREADY. But alas, they don't until literally the last minute.

It's not just because this is early Verdi; it post-dates Nabucco, which I thought was great, and comes just before Macbeth which likewise. A better libretto might have saved it, but as it is, I'm sorry to say that it's pretty definitively the worst Verdi opera I've seen. At least it LOOKS good in this production, as Mariinsky Theatre pieces seem to reliably do. The whole cast is game, but I don't know, man. Even the great ones stumble occasionally.