George Frideric Handel, Saul (1739)

I'd already seen an opera based on the story of Saul, Carl Nielsen's Saul og David(though the Handel is really an oratorio). I must say, I don't find the story itself particularly dramatically compelling. Saul loves David but then when the people accuse him of only having slaughtered thousand whereas David has slaughtered tens of thousand, he gets upset and jealous and then dies after a dead prophet channeled by a witch tells him how much he sucks. Whee. Okay okay, that's a bit reductive, and you certainly could make something of this, but it would definitely need some work.

This doesn't do that work, really, but apparently Handel was really obsessed with this one (apparently, he had a bunch of specialized instruments commissioned just for it), and it very much shows. Lots of great music, choruses especially. It transcends its subject matter, and it's totally great, even if the title character is pretty cartoonish. Well, in fairness, this Glyndebourne production doesn't exactly make him any less so. He's kind of goofy-looking, and sort of flounders around the stage a lot. I mean, Christopher Purves is fine, and acts the role well, but it is what it is. It's a somewhat surreal production, mainly in costume contemporary to Handel's time, but with notable weirdness. Iestyn Davies is very good (GO COUNTERTENORS!) as David, even if he doesn't have the stage presence he might. Then again, that might be the fault of the oratorio itself, which doesn't necessarily give him the prominence he needs.

You (by which I mean "I") sort of feel like an oratorio staged as an opera ought to be instinguishable as anything else, but that's really not true. There's always going to be a level of abstraction that you don't normally find in operas. A chorus that doesn't necessarily correspond to any possible actual characters, people not really talking to each other...I still prefer them to be done as such; gives you something to look at. But still. That said, this production does an excellent job of feeling as opera-esque as it possibly could. My Handel fanboyism has not abated.

Samuel Barber, Vanessa (1958)

I want to watch more American operas. This is because--as is well-known--I am extremely patriotic, and it's interesting to see how my own dang country (RIGHT OR WRONG) has treated this artform that I love. So here's one of our better-known examples. Apparently it was neglected for a long time, but it's coming back into fashion a bit these days.

So it takes place in "a northern country" which seems like it has to be the UK, but which is not specified. In a manor house there live in seclusion Vanessa, her mother the baroness, and her niece Erika. She's been endlessly pining for her twenty-years-past lover, Anatol. It turns out he's dead, but never fear! His son, also named Anatol, shows up instead. He has a one-night stand with Erika but then starts a romance with Vanessa. What will be the fallout from this?

The characters are complicated, and somewhat opaque. It's often unclear what they're thinking or what they really want--which, to be clear, is the point; it's not a criticism. You really see how a good libretto can help bump an opera up a notch (though it's sometimes hard for me to tell how "good" a foreign-language libretto is, in literary terms). This one is by Gian Carlo Menotti, Barber's husband and a composer in his own right of numerous short operas that are still performed (probably the most notable being the charming Christmas piece Amahl and the Night Visitors). It's poetic and adds a lot of mystery and intrigue. This production imagines the opera's vague setting as a fifties-Hollywood-style thing (though there's stuff here that would never have flown in post-Code Hollywood) (All the female roles are played by statuesque blondes, eg.), which to me seems just perfect: even though there aren't any crimes here per se, it has that Hitchcock feel to it.

The music: I like it a lot. There are only a few parts that really stand out (most notably the last-act quintet ("To leave, to break," MY GOODNESS), but it all serves the story and thus works. I think this deserves to be performed more often. Alas, Barber only wrote two other operas: the even-rarelier-performed Antony and Cleopatra(which was considered a huge disaster at its premier) and the nine-minute A Hand of Bridge (which you can watch in a bunch of different performances on youtube--look it up; it's good).

Gioachino Rossini, Guillaume Tell (1829)

Rossini wrote this at the age of thirty-six, and even though he was at the height of his popularity and even though he lived another forty-odd years after that, he never wrote another opera. I gather he may have been suffering from mental illness, though he did rally and wrote some more music towards the end of his life.

Yeah, the one thing you know from this is the overture, or more accurately, the last two or three minutes of the overture. There's a lot of it that would be unrecognizable to you if you only know the doodoodoo doodoo doodoodoo doodoo, doodoodoo doodoo doodoodoo doodoo, doodoodoo doodoo doodoodoo doodoo, doo DOOOOO doodoodoodoo part. WOW trying to write out music phonetically like that DOES NOT WORK. You do have to wonder, though: did Rossini have any inkling at the time that he was writing one of the most iconic pieces of music ever? And it also makes me wonder, in a stoned-college-student kind of way: if he hadn't written it, would it still exist in potentia? It just seems unthinkable that this music shouldn't exist in some way. Duuuuuude. Of course, that raises even thornier philosophical questions, such as: if the William Tell Overture was inevitable, was "Two Princes" by the Spin Doctors likewise? That's a dark road to go down. Doesn't bear thinking about.

Well, anyway, that is a piece that goes on for several minutes; this is a three-and-a-half-hour opera, so obviously there has to be more to it? So what's it about? If someone had asked me that before I saw it, I'd've only been able to stammer out something vague about a guy shooting an apple off his kid's head? Or something? That is a thing that happens here, but it's not the entire thrust of the narrative. A long opera that was JUST about a single incident would seem positively avant-garde.

Well, what it's about is that the mean Austrians (all those goddamn Viennese waltzes I get SO MAD just thinking about it), led by the brutal Gesler, are oppressing the proud Swiss people, including ol' Billy Tell and his wife and son. So they're sad about that. Another Swiss guy, Arnold, is conflicted, because he's in love with an Austrian princess so he's going to fight for Austria but then his father is murdered by the Austrians what's he gonna DO?!? Anyway, Tell is captured and the sadistic Austrians make him shoot an apple on his son's head but he succeeds and escapes and murders Gesler and the princess decides to be on the Swiss side (it's extremely unclear how this works politically), so Arnold isn't conflicted anymore and...well, it wasn't clear to me quite whether they're actually supposed to have achieved liberty or whether they're just going to continue the glorious struggle, but at any rate, it's all very triumphant.

This is the first Rossini opera I've seen that isn't a goofy comedy. I don't think it's peformed that often (but then again, is any Rossini aside from Barbiere and maybe Cenerentola?), but...it should be, because it's pretty much all you could want. I find it sort of funny that it's an opera in French by an Italian about Swiss patriotism, but it's all good. I saw a Royal Opera House performance starring Gerald Finley; he's done all kinds of standard repertoire work, but for whatever reason I'd only seen him in contemporary operas, as the sleazy lawyer in Anna Nicoleand Robert Oppenheimer in Doctor Atomic. I liked seeing him in a "normal" opera. He's good! I hope I will again! The production itself was a bit confusing, with everyone in twentieth-century dress (with the bad guys, perhaps inevitably, in nazi-recalling costumes) and one silent guy dressed in a traditional William-Tell-esque get-up meant, apparently, to symbolize the, you know, Swiss spirit or whatnot. I got used to it quickly enough; it was fine. Perform it more often, I say!

Philip Glass, Akhnaten (1984)

The first three Met Live in HD productions this year weren't of any great interest to me: they showed Turandot, Manon, and Madama Butterfly, all in productions that had already been in HD years prior. If you have a new production, then by all means show it, but I just can't get excited about repeats like this. Maybe they put asses in seats, but considering that there are only ten LiHD productions a year...do something a little more daring, dammit. Something like the Met premiere of a Philip Glass opera. Please. That's more like it.

Actually, I can't claim to have known all that much about Glass before this. I have seen Koyaanisqatsi, which he scored, but that's about all and it was a long time ago. All I know is that his music is supposed to be repetitive and hypnotic. As indeed such it is here. This is about a historical pharaoh who instituted monotheism (Sun worship) in Egypt before being overthrown by conservative forces who did not appreciate this sort of radicalism. Well, that's what they say. I suppose the truth is probably more complicated. But at any rate, that's the story of the opera.

Well, such story as it has. This is very abstract, very slow, very ritualistic. The story is basically the above: Akhnaten becomes pharaoh, is in love with his wife, overthrows the dominant religious order, declares the Sun's supremacy, and is in turn overthrown and killed. This is all on a mythic level, with character never becoming any more specific than that. The libretto consists mostly of ancient texts sung in the original languages, with some parts (notably Akhnaten's centerpiece hymn to the Sun) in English. This Met production isn't subtitled; there are just title cards between scenes briefly summarizing the action. It's not a problem; the specifics of the text are more or less beside the point.

It's an amazing spectacle, perfectly stylized. Words I feel can scarcely do it justice...which is why I'm sticking a bunch of images here what I found on the internet. One will notice that it involves juggling; this is a visually striking element that serves as a great counterpoint to the music.  According to one of the backstage interviews, Glass himself liked it enough that he declared it was now an integral part of the opera. So there you go.

The two most striking pieces are a love duet between Akhnaten and his wife Nefertiti and the scene of his final downfall and death. As noted, the music is very repetitive, and the production is filled with slow motion and it works beautifully. This is seriously one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. Totally mesmerising. I am on the fence about whether or not I would like it if I just listened to the score (well, I'm sure I would if I were stoned to the gills, but that's kind of a given), but as an audiovisual piece it has few peers. All the performers are great, notable countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo in the title role and J'Nai Bridges (in her Met debut--what a way to kick things off) as Nefertiti. A huge triumph. The Met needs more stuff like this. I know a lot of critics really hate Glass, but I've gotta say, I'm a newly-minted fan.

George Frideric Handel, Tamerlano (1724)

Well, Tamerlano's the Timurid emperor. He's captured the Ottoman emperor, Bajazet, and also his daughter, Asteria. There's also some sort of Greek guy, Andronico, whose status is extremely unclear hanging around. Andronico and Asteria are in love, but Tamerlano wants to marry her even though he's already engaged, the cad. A certain amount of angst ensues, there are murder plots, things aren't quite clear about who's in love with whom, Bajazet ends up committing suicide, but Tamerlano repents and everyone else is happy. The end.

When I was writing about Orlando, I remarked that I feel like I have a tendency to lose critical distance with Handel operas, and to automatically declare the most recent one I've seen as my favorite. Well, it is with mixed feelings that I must declare that we now see that this isn't necessarily the case. "Mixed" because on the one hand I'm glad to see tangible evidence that I do in fact have critical faculties, and on the other I'm sad because I didn't like this one very much, for both story and, more importantly, musical reasons. First: the story is really pointlessly convoluted, and just not that interesting (the subtitles for whatever reason suffer from consistent bizarrely tortured syntax--you don't want to have to take time to parse their meaning, but you do--but I don't think that's really the main problem). This could be partially the production I suppose, but I kind of doubt it. The motives for Bajazet's suicide are kind of murky and don't have the emotional impact that you'd hope for, especially given how rare it is to see a good guy die in a Handel opera (is this the first I've seen? Well...do you count Semele as an opera, and do you count the title character as a "good guy"?). Also, while it's common to see bad guys reform in Handel operas--which is something I approve of!--I must say that the title character here is an unbelievable prick throughout, and his abrupt turn is neither believable nor satisfying. Bah.

Of course, if the music were good, all of this would be of relative unimportance, but, well...it's kind of weird how unengaging it it, given how good we know Handel was. There's a distressingly high recitative-to-aria ratio--and, as noted above, not in the service of a particularly engaging story! SO OFTEN it feels like a character is going to break into song and then just...doesn't, or does so so briefly that you barely notice. It genuinely feels like Handel wasn't really trying here. Of course it has its moments, but they're much fewer and further between than they ought to be. It was written in the same year as Giulio Cesare and Rodelinda,but it seems like a disservice to compare it to either of those.

This production is...fine. They got Plácido Domingo as Bajazet, which of course they really play up, even though he's only the fourth-most-significant character. He's fine, but honestly, nothing that special. Probably more than anything because neither is the character. It's a fairly sparse, abstract production that I basically like. There's a giant blue elephant at one point, so what the hey. I don't know; I could be wrong. Maybe if I saw another version everything would snap into focus and the opera would take its place among my favorites. But for now, I remain underwhelmed. Even Homer nods.

Aaron Copland, The Tender Land (1954)

Wait, Aaron Copland wrote operas? Since when? Why was I not aware of this?  Maybe because I haven't paid attention at all.  Hard to say.  Well, in fairness, he only wrote two of them, and they don't exactly occupy a central place in his ouevre, but still. I guess I'm a pretty casual Copland fan; I've always enjoyed Appalachian Spring and Billy the Kid, very evocative, but I can't claim to be super-familiar with his work.

Still, there's this. It's not very widely performed, but you can find a reasonable production by the Lyric Opera of Melbourne in two parts here (with a significant caveat that I will get to later). I don't know anything about them, but I'm favorably inclined because their youtube page includes this, a pro-marriage-equality jazz number from when that was an issue in Australia.

So what's the story here? Well, it takes place in the Midwest, apparently during the depression, though it's not exactly explicit. There are two sisters, Beth and Laurie Moss, who live with their mother and grandfather. Beth is generally more conventional, whereas Laurie is more the there-must-be-more-than-this-provincial-life type. Laurie's going to graduate from high school the next day, so they're having a party, even though there are stories of a couple of strange men in the area causing trouble. As it happens, two itinerant dudes, Top and Martin show up looking for work, and in spite of his initial skepticism, Grandpa Moss agrees to hire them. At the party, Laurie and Martin make eyes at each other and decide that they're in love. But Grandpa, naturally, is PISSED OFF when he see this, especially since, omg, Top and Martin are obviously the guys who've been causing trouble. Then it turns out they're not, those guys were arrested, but STILL, he orders them to leave in the morning. Laurie and Martin agree to elope, but then Top convinces him that that's a bad idea and they should just leave. So they do, and Laurie is sad, but she's going to leave to, I dunno, seek her fortune, I guess, because that's just the kind of person she is. End.

The thing I have no note is that the dumb ol' Melbourne Opera screwed up: the second part isn't complete. It shuts off in the middle of a duet, probably fifteen or twenty minutes before the end. And they have comments disabled, so I can't even yell at them about it! I found another production of the final scene here,but that still means I missed the end of the scene where they plan to elope and the whole of the one where Martin is convinced not to. Bah!

Still, I've seen almost the whole thing; I think I get the picture. It counts. So...well, it's an opera scored to unmistakably Coplandian music. As you'd expect, with some country/folk elements, especially in the dance scene, though not as much as you might expect. But hell, it's fine; I like the music, so I liked that. But I have to say, it's pretty limp in the story department. We don't really get a good idea of who Laurie is or why she wants what she wants (or even what she wants, in any concrete way), and Top and Martin just come across as buffoons. I'm not sure if the romance is supposedto be as totally unconvincing as it is (I mean, it could be), but either way, I don't feel it really adds much. Although, to be fair, I can see how these problems might be papered over with a better production; not that this is bad, but it's pretty amateur-feeling, and while I think amateurs are great, they don't necessarily do the piece any favors. Oh well!

Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Die tote Stadt (1920)

Korngold was known as a child prodigy; he wrote this opera at the age of twenty-three. Like Franz Schreker, his life was disrupted by the nazis, but he was more fortunate than Schreker: he moved to the US in 1934 and reinvented himself as a composer of scores for Hollywood films, for which he won several Academy Awards. Good for him.

It's based on a symbolist novel called Bruges-la-Morte. It concerns Paul, who's just some guy except that his young wife Marie recently died, and he's set up a sort of shrine to her in his house, in spite of his friend pointing out that this might not be healthy. He gets another woman, Marietta, to dress up as Marie for him (shades of Vertigo?). He's sort of torn between his attachment to Marie and being in love/lust with this new woman, and to what extent are these two attachments different? He starts to go somewhat crazy. He imagines himself bringing Marietta back to his house and arguing with her because she wants to get rid of all the signs of his dead wife, until finally, he kills her. When he realizes how deranged this vision is, he resolves to try to move on with his life. The end.

I have to note that in the Operavision performance I saw--no longer online--it is not even a tiny bit clear that the bit with Marietta and her murder is supposed to only be in his head. The traditional-style staging is for the most part good, but boy. I think the problem is that in the last scene it leaves her corpse onstage. If they'd gotten rid of it, it would've been easier to realize that this was all a hallucination. "So what did you thinkwas actually happening?" Excellent question, for which I don't have an answer. I suppose I just thought it was kind of weird and inscrutable. Still, once you realize what's going on, it's certainly more psychologically subtle than most operas.

As for the music...well, it's easy to see why Korngold was able to find success in Hollywood. It's very lush, melodic stuff, that can be meltingly lovely and/or really tense and dramatic with none of the atonal quality of a Berg that you might expect. Here, listento Renée Fleming singing one of Marietta's arias. Kind of stunning. Korngold only wrote five operas; wikipedia says he was working on a new one at the time of his early-ish death in 1957. Am I an elitist for thinking that operas are just kind of...better than film scores, and wishing he'd written more of the former. Ah well. My horizons are expanded, at any rate.

Franz Schreker, Der ferne Klang (1912)

Schreker is largely unknown today, but he was huge in his time. According to wikipedia, at his peak he was the second-most-performed living opera composer in the Weimar Republic, after Richard Strauss. Unfortunately, the rise of naziism was the end of all that; he wasn't directly murdered, but the rise of anti-Semitism and the increased supression of his work undoubtedly led to the stroke that killed him in 1934 at the age of 56. I feel like we don't spend enough time remembering what total worthless shitheads nazis were and are.

Well...be that as it may, let's go back to his breakthrough work. Appreciate the good times. The title means "A distant sound," but I think it's better to translate Klang as "clang," on the basis that it's much funnier-sounding. A distant CLANG! That's really the only comical thing here, though. Fritz and Greta are in love, but he's a composer, and before he marries her he wants to go off to find this mysterious distant CLANG that he senses. Unfortunately, her mother is abusive and her father is abusive and alcoholic, so she runs off and allows herself to be taken to a brothel by a procuress. Skip ahead some years and she's a star courtesan with whom everyone's in love. She's going to marry whoever can sing the most moving song, which several of them do, but then Fritz (not having found the CLANG he was looking for) appears and she agrees to marry him, but he rejects her when he realizes she's a prostitute. More time passes. Fritz's opera is a failure because he just can't find that elusive sound. He and Greta meet again and this time they're really going to marry and he finally hears the sound but dies before he can write it down. Finis.

This stuff with love and music may remind one of Tannhäuser; the music and general aesthetic of the piece will definitely remind one of Lulu(though this is somewhat less grim--a lot of the secondary characters are more sympathetic than expected). I don't think it's ever going to be my all-time favorite sort of music, but I nonetheless like this a lot--more of that good ol' German expressionism. The second act in the brothel is especially effective. Schreker wrote his own libretti; it seems that he had a very distinct artistic vision, and I'd love to see more of his work. This production from the Royal Swedish Opera is I believe the only video recording of any of Schreker's operas. That's a shame, and I hope it's rectified in the future, but at any rate, it's a very good one, one of the best I've seen from Operavision. A handsome traditional production that anyone should like, and Agneta Eichenholz is an excellent Greta,which is a larger role than Fritz--Daniel Johansson is basically fine in that role, even if he doesn't quite have the same stage presence. I am again grateful to Operavision for providing.

George Frideric Handel, Orlando (1733)

I feel like I lose all perspective when it comes to Handel operas. I subjectively feel that I like some more than others, but that may be more a function of my mood and other external factors when I'm watching them than on the operas themselves. Which one is best? Well, at this exact moment, I feel it may be this one, which fucking owns bones. But I may feel differently after seeing the next one!

More interesting to talk about is the story. As much as it's true that almost every opera is based on Orlando Furioso, it's also true that Handal actually only wrote three such (this along with Alcinaand Ariodante; this was the first, but they were all written in a three-year period--was Ariosto-mania sweeping the nation at the time?). And this one is by far the least faithful to the original text. Okay, you think, it's probably gonna be an Orlando/Angelica/Medoro thing, and indeed it is--but of the five singing roles, the other two are made up out of whole cloth: you have Zoroastro, a sorcerer looking after things and fixing problems (they could've just used Malagigi, an actual good sorcerer in Ariosto); and Dorinda, a shepherdess with whom Medoro was involved before Angelica, and in whom he's still ambiguously interested--there's some mention of shepherds in the part of the poem where Medoro and Angelica get together, but no named characters, and nothing like this. Also--this is a small thing and I have no idea why it's here or what to make of it--we are told that Angelica and Medoro are cousins. Why?

Regardless: love it. Love it love it love it. We've got this production here, which is a bit weird, as productions of baroque operas tend to be, but pretty good. It take place in a somewhat abstract modernday setting. Zoroastro is a scientist in a lab coat, drawing diagrams about Orlando's mental state on a chalkboard (including both "Orlando Furioso" and "Orlando Innamorato," a fun callback to the poem of which Ariosto's is a continuation). I was at first slightly disappointed that there were no countertenors--Konstantin Wolff as Zoroastro, in the opera's baritone role, is the only male singer--but I got used to it quite fast (and it shows how much tastes change--can you imagine a post-baroque opera with no tenors?  Is there such a thing?  I mean, okay Puccini's Suor Angelica, but one that has male singers at all?). I especially liked Christina Clark as Dorinda. She's African American, which is great; there need to be more black singers, but unfortunately, there's next to no information about her available online. The one thing in this production I wasn't a big fan of was the decision to make Medoro kind of handsy with her--making him seem like more of a creep than the libretto necessarily mandated. C'mon.

Still and all, GREAT. I think Handel's pretty definitively my favorite composer at this point. GIVE ME MORE.

Kevin Floyd

I first met Kevin when I took his gender theory class as a graduate student (what we call "queer theory" when we want to sound like radicals). I had previously been extremely phobic about critical theory as a general concept, but I'd taken a class in semiotics the semester before and I was kinda warming to it. It was a transformative class: one of those things that really, really influences how you perceive the world. I was honestly a little intimidated by the intensity of his intellect and, let's face it, by his being way more handsome than any English professor has any business being; nonetheless, later when I need a director for my dissertation, he was the obvious choice. We had some very heavy theoretical discussions, and O how he put me through the wringer with regard to my writing, which he perceived--obviously correctly--was not as clear or focused or scholarly as it needed to be. There were times when I really seriously thought I wasn't going to have what it took to do it. But somehow I did, and even if I didn't follow the sort of academic trajectory that he had, I was still lastingly grateful. Mine was the first doctoral dissertation he ever directed, as it happened, but he did not miss a beat.

I wish I'd had more of a relationship with him, honestly, but there was something about him and about my general social awkwardness such that that never happened (okay, we might as well be brutally honest, it was obviously in large part because I felt self-conscious that I had failed as an academic, and I didn't want to feel like I was secretly being judged which again I do because I'm kind of ludicrous). The only subsequent contact I had with him was requesting letters of recommendation (with which he was always extremely conscientious). Well, so it goes.

Anyway, I suppose it's probably pretty obvious where this is going, at least in outline: a year ago or a little less I learned from another of his students that he'd been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor (I did send him a note of general appreciation when I learned the news; no idea if he read it), and today I learned that he'd died on Thursday. He must've been in his fifties; I don't know exactly.  I know the above photo isn't great, but he was extremely not-online, and it's the only one I could find.  Talking about "fairness" when it comes to things like this isn't very helpful or meaningful, but I can only record my subjective reaction, which is that BOY is this ever unfair. Sure it's universal, but the idea that this stupid, random brain malfunction could silence such a strong voice...goddammit. Don't really have much to say here; just felt that I shouldn't let this go by unremarked. Rest in power.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, The Golden Cockerel (1909)

This was Rimsky-Korsakov's last opera. Appropriately, I guess, it's based on a Pushkin poem. It's another fairy/folktale kind of thing--the most mysterious I've seen yet.

So we start with a magician or astrologer who tells us that even though the story is remote, it has an important moral for us to learn. Then, we go to the court of this Tsar (the fact that he's a tsar makes you assume Russia, but a lot of the music has a vaguely "Arabic" sounding theme). He's not happy because he worries the tsardom will be attacked, and his bumbling idiot sons are no help. Fortunately(?), the magician gives the tsar a golden cockerel which will tell whether the land is safe or not (the cockerel is an actual singing role for a soprano). In return, the tsar promises him his heart's desire, to be named later.

So the cockerel convinces them that there will be war, so they decide to preëmptively attack their neighbor. The idiot sons manage to get themselves killed, but the tsar falls in love with the beautiful tsaritsa of the enemy kingdom. There's a lot of abstruse singing. The two decide to get married. There's a very spectacular ceremony back at the court, but then the magician appears and says that he wants the tsaritsa, and will not be convinced otherwise. The tsar tries to kill him, but is himself killed in an unclear way (the wikipedia description says the cockerel does it, but that wasn't clear in the production I saw). The entire court disappears and the magician reveals the shocking (?) truth (?): that the whole thing was an illusion, and only he and the tsaritsa were real people.

Well, if you can pick the moral out of this, you're welcome to it. The music's frequently glorious, though (especially the wedding celebration holy shit), so what else do you need? Well, maybe you would like characters with more of an internal existence, but it's a fairy tale, so it's all good. It wasn't performed 'til after Rimsky-Korsakov's death because the censors didn't like it: supposedly, the stuff with the ill-advised military action was a satire of Russian policies of the time, or at least that's how they saw it. Of course, it was based on a poem from years before, which doesn't preclude that per se, but I dunno.

I have never seen a Mariinsky Theatre production that failed to deliver on the spectacle, and this one continues the tradition. It's also the only one I've seen that includes weird, contemporary touches, however, so some may kvetch based on that. The biggest one here is the cockerel itself: here, she's a modern-day tourist with a chicken-shaped backpack, first seen taking selfies in front of ancient ruins. This works fine, and the body of the thing itself is basically in fairie tale mode, although there is a certain amount of action that's just confusing. Well, it's fine, as are the singers. My favorite is Andrei Popov as the magician; it's possible that he doesn't quitehave the voice for the role, but he makes up for it with stage presence: all very deliberate movements in a very dapper suit. It was wondering why his name sounded vaguely familiar, and then I realized it was because he likewise stood out as the holy fool in Boris Godunov. Nice. I'm glad he's gotten to perform at the Met.

Ivan Zajc, Nikola Šubić Zrinski (1876)

Never thought I'd see another Croatian opera, but with Operavision, all things are possible. This is my religious credo. According to wikipedia, Zajc "is often called the Croatian Verdi." Is he, wikipedia? Is he REALLY? Is he "often" called anything, at least outside of his home country? Hmm. Well. Be that as it may, he wrote a bunch of operas, of which this seems to be considered the best.

So here's what happened in 1566: Ottoman forces led by Suleiman the Magnificent wanted to invade Vienna, but first they had to get through a fortress in Hungary called Szigeth. And to do that, they had to get past a force of Croatians commanded by Zrinski (it's not quite clear to me why you had Croatians fighting in Hungary, but apparently these events are celebrated in both countries). They were badly outnumbered, but they managed to hold off the Ottomans for over a month; Suleiman himself died, albeit of natural causes (well, presumably stress-induced also, but still, a bit anti-climactic); the Ottomans won the final battle and Zrinski was killed, but it was a Phyrric victory, and they turned back without reaching Vienna.

It's certainly an irresistable subject for a patriotic opera. This is kind of what you'd expect: a lot of boilerplate about the unstoppable Croatian spirit, which doesn't exactly speak to me in itself; nonetheless, there are some very rousing choruses here that make me want to shout CROATIA FUCK YEAH! I enjoyed this quite a bit more than Ero the Joker,the other Croatian opera I've seen. The singing was maybe not quite world-class, but it seemed better to me (although in both of them, the really obvious microphones the singers are wearing distract). This actually features two singers in common with that one: Stjepan Franetović, who played the title role in Ero, as Suleiman's second-in-command; and Ljubomir Pušarić (whom I singled out for lukewarm praise in Ero) as the title role here. They both seem better to me, somehow. Maybe it's just a better opera. It is kind of notable that the singer playing Zrinski's wife is extremely blatantly younger than the one playing his daughter, but what the hey!

One weird, notable thing is that, per wikipedia, the rousing climactic chorus--which apparently remains popular in Croatia--is also a fixture of Japanese glee clubs.  You can read all about it in an article entitled "Jedan odlomak iz povijesti suradnje Japana i Hrvatske: Hrvatska pjesma "U boj" i japanski muški zbor," or "An Episode from the History of Cooperation Between Japan and Croatia: Croatian Song "U Boj" and Japanese Male Choirs."  How many episodes are there, do you think?

The Croatian Verdi? Well, I don't know about that. I was more reminded of Rimsky-Korsakov, especially in the lengthy dance sequence that opens the second act. But that is NO. BAD. THING. I'd be happy to see more of his work should the chance arise. This is what Operavision is good for. The standard-repertoire stuff they put on is all well and good, but it's, you know...standard. You can see it anywhere. Things like this are why I like them.