Francisco Cavalli, Egisto (1643)

If you want to see this opera, you must be willing to watch a 1982 performance videorecorded from British television and transferred to a digital format, with all that implies about the video and audio quality. Also, it's in fifteen ten-minute segments, because it was uploaded nine years ago, when youtube still had these length limitations. HOW STRONG IS YOUR COMMITTMENT TO BAROQUE OPERA? This will test that.

Right. So Egisto and Climene have escaped from pirates. He's in love with Clori and she's in love with Lidio, and these loves were mutual, but since the kidnapping, Clori and Lidio have gotten together (Climene's brother Ipparco also loves Clori). I think under these circumstances, our contemporary sensibilities would dicate that Egisto and Climene should get together--the love you've been looking for has been right there all the time!--but this is not that, so instead, the gods get involved: Egisto is Apollo's son, and Venus resents him, so she sends her son Cupid to make him go mad. But Apollo wants Cupid to make Clori fall back in love with him. How to square this circle? Well, first he shoots Lidio with a love-arrow so he falls back in love with Climene, and then he makes Egisto mad so that Clori falls back in love with him out of pity (that's how falling in love works, right?). Then, Apollo makes him sane again, and job's a good'un, as my English friend always used to say.

This is the earliest opera I've seen that's just blatantly, straightforwardly a plain ol' comedy. All these gods and mortals bumblin' around. Ipparco's old nurse Dama has several arias about how one lover isn't enough; women should take a bunch of them, just for kicks. To me, it's really interesting to see the form expanding itself like this. Also, I'd note that it's more sexually explicit than you might expect: I mean, not explicit explicit, but, before Lidio falls back in love with Climene, he accuses her of taking her maidenhead (the subtitles use that word, anyway--in addition to being outdated, it always makes me just think of a head of lettuce, which seems not to quite be on point), and he's like, don't put this on me, you had your fun too, and now I'm moving on. You just don't usually expect to see such blatant "sex occurred" language in stuff of this vintage (though the opera does make clear that Clori and Lidio have been in fact Done It, as the middle-schoolers say. (Do they still say that? I'm ancient.) I guess that would've been a bridge too far). Well, maybe you do; maybe I'm just the naive one.

This is all surprisingly engaging stuff, and it definitely feels closer to opera as it would evolve than Monteverdi or Lully do, with regular opera-type singing with arias and everything. The music...well, was more unobtrusive than anything else; it's probably partly just the poor sound quality, but I didn't get as good a read on Cavalli's sound as I'd like to have done. However, I am definitely going to be watching more of his stuff, so there should be plenty time enough.