Gérard Pesson, Trois Contes (2019)

This one was on Operavision a while back; it's not there now, but I'd downloaded it, so I decided to watch it. Of course, the title just means "three tales," but people generally associate that name with Flaubert's collection of three stories by that title. This is...not that. It's three stories, kind of, but if it has anything to do with Flaubert, you'll have to tell me. There's not that much information on it online, and what there is doesn't give much of an idea of what it's about. There may be a reason for that.

The first tale is "The Princess and the Pea." I sometimes wonder why there aren't more well-known operas based on fairy tales. You've got several Cinderallas, Hansel und Gretel, Rusalka at a stretch, and...? Sure, plenty of others exist, but I think that's where most people are going to have to start googling. They're certainly not in the common repertoire. "The Princess and the Pea," however, is inherently funny as an operatic concept, as it is as a Disney movie, not just because of the painful sexism, but because it's barely even a story. There's nothing to it. It's strange to me that it's one of that small handful of fairytales to which everyone knows the plot. Why do we have to know about this dopey piece of ephermera? It's not fair!

Actually, though, while this opera's handling of the story is pretty darn strange, it's probably the best you could do. It consists of a series of "variations" on the story: first, we just see the story play out as you'd expect, and then we see different versions of it--this, I surmise, because fairy tales tend to come in many different versions. Some of them are barely different from the original, and some are extremely strange. Like in one they've LOST the pea, and oh no, what can have happened to it?!? Oh, wait, we can just buy another. Problem solved! And then there's one where the prince comes back having found a princess to marry, and it's actually TWO women, but he and his parents keep talking about them as if it were only one. The characters aren't portrayed at all "realistically" (even in an operatic idiom); they're like weird marionettes playing out this barely-a-story and calling attention to its texuality. It's extremely goofy, but pretty entertaining. This is the longest of the three sections, which is good, since it's also the best.

The second story is based on--of all things--a non-fiction book called Proust's Overcoatabout a collector's efforts to find Proust's personal effects after his death. Um...I don't know what else to say about that. It's certainly not an operatic subject you see every day. Like the first story, you can't exactly take it seriously, but it's less obviously cartoonish than the first one, and so less interesting, to me at least. Also...there's a part of me that understands why one would want to find artifacts associated with famous writers (when I visited the Brontë house in York, which has been made into a museum, they had recently acquired the table where the sisters supposedly wrote many of their novels, which was kind of cool), there's another part of me that thinks, so what? The overcoat in question is the collector's ultimate goal, but...I dunno. What can you do with it? Do you plan on trying to find Proust's DNA on it so you can clone him? Granted, it wouldn't make for the worst Jurassic Park sequel...

The third act is based on short story by Poe called "The Devil in the Bellfry," about a stultifying town called Vondervotteimittiss ("wonder what time it is") where everything is precise and regimented until the devil comes by and makes the clock strike thirteen, throwing everything into chaos. Most of it consists of a guy narrating the story; I found it definitely the least interesting thing here. Also, if there's any connective tissue between these three, it's pretty obscure. Maybe you could say they're all, in some sense, about storytelling, but that seems kind of thin to me.

The music isn't my thing, let's be blunt. It's not anywhere near as avant-garde as Luci mie traditrici, but I feel that it's sort of trending in that direction, and without the poisonous atmosphere that made that opera (or opera-like object) sort of intriguing. I'm all in favor of inscrutable art, but eh...I did sort of like the first act in spite of everything, but the other two were not very interesting to me, and I feel that the lack of inter-act cohesion is a problem.  Apparently, this was actually commissioned, by the Opéra de Lille, which boggles my mind.  What could they have possibly asked for?  Or did they just request that Pesson go nuts?  Well, if so, they certainly got what they paid for. Hard to imagine this taking a place in the repertoire (why would you possibly produce this when instead you could produce any other opera?)  But hey! They said the same thing, more or less, about Tristram Shandy! And yet, I doubt this is comparable to that. Why isn't there a Tristram Shandyopera? Apparently there's long been an unfinished one.