Jules Massenet, Don Quichotte (1909)

Oh look, it's more Massenet. Don Quixote feels like an obvious subject for an opera, although, as with Orlando Furioso, you clearly have to pick and choose what parts of the long, baggy source material you want to focus on. Apparently this one is based more on a play sort of based on the novel than the novel itself.

So it starts in media res. Quichotte wants to court a local girl, Dulcinea, who in the novel was just some random peasant woman who never even appeared, but here is supposed to be a beautiful sophisticate. She doesn't take him seriously, but she tells him that he can go and get back her stolen necklace for her if he wants to. He and Sancho Panza go to do this, but the bandits capture him. They're going to kill him but are moved by his piety, so they give the necklace back. He takes it back to Dulcinea, who admires him but still doesn't want to marry him, or anyone. He is heartbroken and dies. And there you have it.

As to the "noble or just pathetic?" question, Massenet emphatically goes for the former. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but the way it's presented--Dulcinea calls him "a fool, but a sublime fool" and Sancho specifically compares him to Jesus--is very hamfisted, and to me it seems to point to Massenet's perennial problem: he's not a bad composer, but his operas seem to all suffer from clumsy, meandering plotting; and he's just not good at writing for singers (even the supposedly show-stopping arias are not, to my mind, particularly memorable, and that for me has been a constant with Massenet). That's very much how I felt watching this.

At any rate, this production is enjoyably Eurotrashy: modern-dress, Dulcinea and her crowd dressed as showgirls (who shows up in a real car at the beginning), the bandits mobsters at a casino, a backdrop of skyscrapers throughout much of it. The inevitable tilting-at-windmills bit is presented very dramatically, and when the Don and Sancho first appear on-stage, they are indeed dressed in old-timey costumes, but they're wearing modern-day backpacks and they're riding segways in lieu of horses. That's a joke that really lands.

Well, whatever else you can say about it, it is my fourth opera starting with "don," after Carlos, Giovanni, and Pasquale. Any more? Well, there is an early Bizet opera called Don Procopio, apparently a shameless rip-off of Pasquale, but good luck finding a production of it. I fear I may be stalled out on dons for the foreseeable future. This is the first time that anybody has written that sentence.

Pascal Dusapin, Macbeth Underworld (2019)

Well, here's this. It seems like the kind of thing you'd find on Operavision, especially because it's from La Monnaie De Munt, the Belgian opera house that they get a lot of their stuff from. But actually, they also stream a lot of their productions from their own youtube channel, so I must've downloaded it from there. It's not currently available, I'm sorry to tell you.

Do we need another Macbeth opera? Well, this is extremely different from Verdi's, I'll tell you that much. Specifically, it purges the story of its real-world, human elements to make it as purely as possible an allegory about evil. As the title suggests, there's the strong suggestion that in fact Macbeth and the Lady M are already in Hell, and that they're doomed to endlessly repeat the actions that led them to this fate. It tells the story of Macbeth, basically, but in very stripped-down form, with just a few characters. It uses some Shakespearean dialogue, but not in any comprehensive way. I can't help but feel that this whole conceit may be sort of redundant: isn't it the case that, in Shakespeare's play, they're basically already in Hell?

Still, it's an interesting idea. If you're going to retell the story, you might as well do something different with it. And yet, I have to admit, I wasn't overly taken with this. The music is...well, it's fine. Sometimes ambient, sometimes sort of ghostly, a bit atonal, but nothing that I found very memorable. And the drama I found to be far more theoretically than practically interesting. If the characters are barely even characters, what's the interest in watching their downfall? I'm not so sure.

I will say, however: the opera's sung in English, but I watched it with English subtitles--that were very clearly google auto-translated from French. So someone decided how the dialogue should be translated into French, and then a computer decided how that translation should be rendered back into English. This results in the usual mostly-readable, somewhat awkward result, with a few standout moments.

"I have done the deed" becomes:

You know! The thing! With that one guy? In the place? You remember!

Even better: Lady Macbeth sings "come to my woman's breasts," a line straight from Shakespeare. However, this is rendered as:

...please.

"Femme" can mean both "woman" and "wife" in French so that's just one of the probably unavoidable limits of machine translation, but how the algorithm came up with "boobs" is...beyond my understanding.

Gaetano Donizetti, Anna Bolena (1830) and Maria Stuarda (1835)

These two operas along with Roberto Devereux are referred to as Donizetti's "three queens"--the queen in Roberto being Elizabeth, and in the other two...well, you can probably figure it out if you can translate the super-tricky Italian (though Elizabeth also features prominently in Maria Stuarda). It sort of feels like you're in an alternate universe watching these operas about English history where the characters all have Italian versions of their names. Anyway, I'd seen Roberto Devereux (Live in HD back in 2016, when I was an extremely casual opera fan at most), but I thought it would be good to complete the trilogy.

I saw the latter opera first. This was going to be the Met's final Live in HD production this season, until...stuff happened. I'm not too broken up about the cancellation, given that there's already a video of that same production with Joyce DiDonato in the title role. What else do you want?

Simple plot: Maria is being kept prisoner indefinitely by Elizabeth, who feels her reign is threatened by her. Two lords, Leicester and Talbot, try their best to get her freed, but without success. The second act is ten years later, and Mary is executed. That is all.

What's most striking to me in all of this is that while in Donizetti's Roberto Devereux Elizabeth was an effectively tragic figure, here she's just an irredeemable asshole. There may be geopolitical reasons for the execution, but here it appears her main motivations are jealousy at Mary being hotter than she is and how come Leicester likes her more than me? I must say, I think it's extremely unreasonable to coat your face in clown make-up and then turn around and complain that other people are considered more attractive than you are. Maybe if fashion had been less horrible at the time, she would've been a little more chill. Of course, I am not a historian, and I am not commenting on how historical this all is--but I kind of have to agree with the chorus which asserts that "this barbarous deed will forever stain England's honor." I definitely thought about the indefensibility of capital punishment while watching it.

Well, but even without a complicated antagonist, I still liked it perfectly well. Was Donizetti capable of writing bad music? DiDonato and Elza van den Heever as Elizabeth are both more than up to it, but honestly, neither of them really come across as strongly-drawn characters. I hope it's not in some way sexist of me to say it, but I think the male characters work better here: Matthew Rose is very commanding as the paternal Talbot; Matthew Polenzani reliable as ever as Leicester.

Anna Bolena. Right. This 2011 production was apparently its Met debut, which is surprising to me. The king, Enrico, is married to Anna, but he's simultaneously having an affair with her friend Giovanna Seymour (GOD I love using these Italian names). He wants to catch her committing adultery herself, which is why he pardons her former intended Riccardo who's still carrying a flame for her and lets him hang around. But as it turns out, his opportunity actually comes from Smeaton, a minstrel who has a secret crush on her and definitely deserved to get caught up in all this even less than anyone else did. But now Anna, her brother Giorgio because why not, Smeaton, and Riccardo are all going to be executed. I didn't know that the historical situation was quite such a bloodbath, but it was, although the historical Riccardo apparently wasn't involved in any of this and also his named definitely wasn't Riccardo.

I mean, musically, it checks out. No problems. Anna Netrebko was clearly chosen to create a sensation in the title role, and yeah, pretty much. It's all well-cast. But man, it really kinda got me down, how grim it is. So is Maria Stuarda, but this more so. In this production, especially, when Smeaton (a trouser role, Tamara Mumford, very good) appears in the second act, having been "interrogated," he's absolutely drenched in blood, and it just really brings home how absolutely fucking savage British history--and human history more broadly--really is. I know that sometimes conflict is unavoidable, I'm not (that) naive, but GOOD GOD, can't we let our kindness and empathy and compassion be our central governing principles? It'd be a good start, anyway.

Henry Purcell, The Fairy-Queen (1692)

MY GOD! I've seen almost three hundred operas; I feel I have a fairly good grasp of what the form entails. And yet this came as a total surprise. This was apparently super normal in early English opera, and yet I'd never seen its like before. It's what's known as a semi-opera, and it consists of long stretches of non-musical drama (occasionally with incidental music over it), interspersed with song-and-dance masque sequences that have little or no apparent relation to the main plot. Most of Purcell's stage works are like this: along with The Fairy-Queen, King Arthur, Timon of Athens, and the unfinished Indian Queen. It's no wonder that his most well-known work is Dido and Aeneas; not that the music or drama is necessarily better, but it's definitely much closer to our modern conception of opera.

The semi-opera form has presented problems for producers: they want to do Purcell's music, but they have little interest in the plays that go with it. A lot of them just dramatically cut the non-music bits, or even replace them with entirely different segments that they deem more interesting. I'm of two minds about this (like a tree in which there are two blackbirds): I agree that Restoration drama is a bit of a heavy lift for most people today, and I can see why you'd want to deëmphasize that aspect. On the other hand...I mean, this is what semi-opera was. And even though there's a clear demarcation between the musical and non-musical parts, I'm not all that sure they're as entirely discrete as you'd have to think they are if you want to mess with them in that way. Also, there's value in seeing these entire works as originally staged (okay, obviously not actually how they were originally staged, it's a fallacy to imagine that's even possible, but you know what I mean).

Well, we don't have to worry about this in the present case, because this production just goes for it: I don't know if any of the text is cut, but it certainly doesn't feel that way. It's three and a half hours long, and probably only half of that consists of music. There are definitely elements here that would outrage the purists in the audience, but to my mind it's about as faithful as you could want or expect.

The play in question is an anonymous revision of A Midsummer Night's Dream. If you were hoping for a Spencer opera, you will be sorely disappointed. I say "revision," but, while it doesn't include the entirety of Shakespeare's text, just about everything that it does include is verbatim or near-verbatim from the original. I didn't realize it would be like this until I started watching, and yup, after the overture, we go right into the first scene of AMND, and I was feeling a little disappointed: do I really want to see another version of this? However, as the show progressed, I realized: actually, yes, I definitely do, when it's as well-done as this is and interspersed with such glorious musical interludes. I really think I never realized just how funny the play really is when done well, and not just Pyramus and Thisby. Susannah Wise as Hermia in particular is just hilarious, and somehow until now I never really appreciated the jokes about how short she is. A hoot and a half.

The production here does a good job of making sure that, more or less, most of the musical parts seem at least tenuously related to the main action, and oh my god they are so much fun. Most of it is sort of pastoral stuff about love and whatnot, and it's great, especially when married to a clever and creative production. There's one particularly memorable section where a nymph is singing about love to entertain Titania and Bottom, accompanied by a scene of giant rabbits having an orgy. Has to be seen to be believed, and definitely deserves to be seen.

I loved this unreservedly. Purcell died at the age of thirty-five, but imagine that he had lived and composed for another forty-odd years. Of course, that's an unanswerable hypothetical that you can ask about any artist who died young, but in Purcell's case, I think it might be more pivotal than most. He was writing at a time when opera as a form was still kind of protean; still figuring out what it wanted to be. It's easy for me to imagine that, given this fact combined with his prodigious talent, if he had lived he truly could have had a seismic impact on the long-term development of opera. I can easily imagine that English opera would have been a much more significant factor, for one. Who knows? Not us, alas! If I die and am reborn someday, I hope it's in an alternate world where he lived to a ripe old age so I can find out.

Jules Massenet, Werther (1892)

Okay, I thought, so having seen Luisa Miller, what's the next-most-well-known opera I haven't seen? And this seemed like a plausible candidate. The Sorrows of Young Werther is also probably one of the most famous novels I haven't read, so they dovetail nicely.

The plot is about as elemental as it gets: guy likes girl, she likes guy too but marries someone else, guy commits suicide, girl is sad. There's very little more to say about it. Goethe's novel of course was a sensation, and Werther is seen as one of the first Romantic Heroes, but that can be a little hard to understand from a contemporary perspective. You can just mope around and then kill yourself and you're a "hero?" What is this? Jonas Kauffman, in his backstage interview remarks that "you have always this feeling of 'come on, get over it,'" and you...kind of do. Nevertheless, just dismissing the whole thing like that doesn't seem very helpful. Sure we can do it if we want to, but in that case, what have we learned? Nothing. If you don't even try to understand these things, how are you ever going to expand your understanding?

Right, so Werther is--apparently--too pure and sensitive for this vulgar world. We may sort of roll our eyes at that if we think about it in a purely realistic sense, but there IS a certain appeal--and not necessarily just an adolescent appeal--in that idea. The world DOES sometimes feel a bit much, you know? Especially now, for obvious reasons. I mean, it's still silly on one level, but I found myself mostly able to appreciate it. Certainly, I'd say I enjoyed it more than the other Massenet operas I've seen. It doesn't hurt that the casting (here) is so good: Kauffman has the perfect voice and looks for the title role, and everyone else brings their characters to life as well. Special props to Lisette Oropesa as Charlotte's little sister Sophie; she doesn't remotely look like a fifteen-year-old, but she's very charming, and I wish her part were bigger. The production's also nice to look at in general, making prominent use of video to emphasize the changing of the seasons.

So yeah. The opera's not an all-time favorite of mine or anything, but I have certainly seen worse! What do you think the next-most-famous opera I haven't seen is? Death in Venice? I've been putting it off just because I'm looking forward to it so much. But we will no doubt get there sooner rather than later.

Giuseppe Verdi, Luisa Miller (1849)

Speaking of old-school Italian opera, here's...this. I sort of had the feeling that this was the most well-known opera that I had never seen. I could be wrong. It's hard to judge these things. But there you go. Certainly the most well-known Verdi opera--by my count, I've seen sixteen of them, and none of the rest are at all prominent. Though I still want to see them, of course. This seems to be a transitional work; the next one was Stiffelio (which, okay, no one's favorite), but then straight to Rigoletto, Il trovatore, and La traviata.

From that name, you'd kind of think this would be set in an Anglophone country, but apparently it's just Italy, as usual. So Luisa and this dude named Carlo are in love, only, surprise, it turns out Carlo is actually Rodrigo, Count Walter's son. They're still in love, but the Count wants his son to marry a rich noblewoman instead. Also, there's a guy called Wurm (name a bit on-the-nose?) who also wants to marry Luisa. Count Walter tries to have Luisa arrested, but Rodrigo threatens to reveal his Terrible Secret is he does. The secret is that he became count when he and Wurm colluded to have the previous count killed. Now they collude again to solve their new problems: Luisa's father is arrested because mumble mumble, and Wurm extorts her into writing a letter declaring her love for him so he'll be released and not executed. That way, Rodrigo won't want Luisa, Wurm can have her, everyone wins. Well, that's the theory. The fact is that, although Luisa's father is released, which is good, in a fit of jealous rage Rodrigo drinks poison and tricks Luisa into drinking it too. When she knows she's going to die, she tells him the truth, so they'll be happy in Heaven, allegedly. In an admirable display of efficiency, Wurm comes on stage at the last second so Rodrigo can stab him real quick before dying. I don't know. Maybe Luisa's and Rodrigo's fathers can bond over having both lost their children in this zany mix-up.

So I was more or less enjoying this most of the way through, in a generic sort of way. Some perfectly acceptable arias and love duets and whatnot--the usual stuff. Which I like. But the big problem here--which you may have guessed--is, man, FUCK Rodrigo. Seriously, FUCK that guy.  Wurm looks sympathetic in comparison.  We're supposed to I guess just think of him as being hotheaded in a way that leads to tragedy, but I've gotta say, no, fuck that shit. Fellas: I know it sucks when you're into a woman and she rejects you.  No fun at all.  But that is EXTREMELY FAR AWAY from giving you license to involve her in your stupid murder-suicide pact. Fucking hell, man.  You talk about libretti screwing up operas--that is definitely the case here.  She should say to him, "no, we won't meet in Heaven, because you won't BE there, and if by some bureaucratic screw-up you are, I am walking briskly in the opposite direction as soon as I see you.  You prick."  Even beyond that, the whole thing is a bit thin--who is Luisa, anyway? What's the deal here? It is quite unclear.

This production is notable mostly for featuring Domingo as Luisa's pa, as part of his campaign to take on baritone roles. He's fine; whatever. In his introduction, presenter Anthony Roth Costanzo (who went on to play the title role in Akhnaten) declare that Domingo has "what appears to be a career that will go on forever." Hmm, yes. I'm from the future, and funny story about that...

Riccardo Zandonai, Francesca da Rimini (1914)

Zandonai wrote a bunch of operas, but for whatever reason, this is the only one that's entered the repertoire. It's about a medieval noblewoman, well-known from Dante, who had an affair and was killed by her husband (and doesn't that sound like the Platonic ideal of opera plots). Apparently it really, really struck a chord with composers, as wikipedia lists no fewer than eleven operas and two symphonic poems about her, all called Francesca da Rimini except one French one (by Ambroise Thomas) called Françoise de Rimini. Damn, dudes. That is truly excessive. By comparison, wikipedia only lists seven operas based on Romeo and Juliet.

I sort of just described the plot above. In a little more detail: Francesca is supposed to marry a noble named Giovanni. But he's considered unattractive and it's feared that she won't do it. So they trick her by sending his hot brother Paolo instead, and letting her think it's Giovanni. I do not understand how this works at all: surely if she has enough agency that she would be able to reject Giovanni in any case, she's also going to be able to say "screw you, you tricked me, I'm not marrying you." Well, apparently not, because in the second act, they're married. But not before she and Paolo had fallen in love. Whoops! So they start having an affair, but unfortunately, Giovanni and Paolo's other brother Malatestino is also in lust with Francesca, and when she rejets him he tells Giovanni she's having an affair, and when he catches them in the act, he kills them both. And now, I'm guessing, relations between the two surviving brothers will be somewhat strained.

You can definitely see why this is popular: a classic operatic plot married to some truly impeccable late Romantic music. I liked it a lot, and I liked this handsomely traditional Met production, featuring Eva-Maria Westbroek in the title role. She's always great, but I also have to give a lot of credit to Mark Delavan as Giovanni: he's a savage character and not a good guy (though not as bad as Malatestino either), but Delavan also endows him with undeniable humanity and moments of human warmth.

If I have any criticism, it's that, while the score is indeed great, I just feel like in general, the actual vocal part of the score doesn't reach quite as high as I'd hope. Don't get me wrong; there are good moments, but...somehow I feel that keeps it just outside the top operatic echelons. Or! It's also possible that that's an implicit criticism of the cast, and I just don't know it. Or maybe I'm just being weird and idiosyncratic! Wouldn't be the first time. You'll definitely enjoy this, probably.

Anton Rubinstein, The Demon (1871)

Rubinstein was a Russian composer. What can I say? He composed. He wrote twenty operas, according to wikipedia (though typing "Rubinstein operas" into google gets you fewer than that), but this is the only one that's ever performed, I think, and it's still very obscure. Fortunately, there's this production on youtube from this guy known only as "Nervous Gentleman" who, before he abruptly stopped for reasons unknown, specialized in uploading performances of rare operas, generally from old TV broadcasts, often adding custom English subs. I saw Dantons Tod back in the day thanks to him. And now I've seen this one, from the Latvian National Opera.

Yeah, so there's this unnamed demon. He's still a demon, but he's getting kind of bored of doing demon things. He comes across this princess, Tamara, and is immediately fascinated for, promising her the kingdoms of the world and like that if she marries him (none of her attendants can see or hear him). She kind of freaks out and they all go home. Then we see her fiancé, Prince Sindol. He's heading for her court for the wedding but has been delayed by a landslide. The demon declares he'll never see his betrothed and then--presumably at his behest--his party is attacked and slaughtered by Tatars. When Tamara hears about this, she decides to join a convent. The demon goes there and begs her again to marry him. She tries to resist but she's also kind of into him. He kisses her and she dies. She goes to Heaven. The demon does not. And that is that.

This is all reasonably fun; as is typically the case, any opera with a demon in it is good. Especially when he's trying to seduce her in the last act: I was put in mind of some of the stronger passages in Melmoth the Wanderer. And yet, I must confess myself confused and bemused by all this. The demon goes on and on about how he's open to being good and Tamara will redeem him etc. Is he sincere? Well, you think, no, he's a demon, and anyway, he (apparently) killed her fiancé and also ultimately her. EXCEPT: how does he get into the convent? Because--it is specifically noted--"his spirit has been opened to goodness." This is why the angel protecting Tamara can't stop him. That seems significant, and yet the opera then goes on as if it hadn't just said that. Am I putting too much stock in that one line? Well, maybe. If you took it out, the whole thing would make more sense. And yet, the idea of a potentially repentant demon is a really interesting one that you don't see in operas, like, ever, so I kind of wish more was done with it even if it wasn't the intent. Hmph, say I. Hmph!

Aulis Sallinen, The Palace (1995)

This one is loosely based on Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and when I say "loosely" I mean "I'm not sure I would've even made the connection if the DVD notes hadn't." There are some similar names, it takes place in a palace, and...that's it. It's also based, I'm not sure how loosely, on a nonfiction book about the last days of the reign of Haile Selassie. Seems like an unusual combination.

Well, anyway. So we're at the court of this nameless king, of whom everyone is scared and who only communicates through his queen, Constance. All the courtiers and ministers are tiptoeing around. There's a newcomer, Valmonte, in the court, trying to get ahead. Constance and this lady-in-waiting, Kitty, are tired of this life and plot to leave. The king tries to stop them. He fails and is deposed. And now Valmonte is the new military dictator, and things seem like they're only going to get worse. As they so sadly typically do.

Let me be clear about one thing: the music here is as strong as in The Red Line. Sallinen is a very good composer. And yet, I really didn't like this, I'm sorry to say. It strongly feels like an operetta, is the thing, in spite of being kind of dark in the end. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with being an operetta, but to me, the big difference between comic opera and operetta isn't that the latter includes spoken dialogue, it's not that the latter is generally less difficult to sing: no, to me it's that operetta is very much the opposite of the Manic Street Preachers song: all surface and no feeling. It always feels very surface level to me, with no real emotion. There are exceptions to this, and sometimes the music is infectious enough that you just don't care, but my goodness: I like Die Fledermaus okay, but the other popular Viennese operetta, Franz Lehar's Merry Widow, is to me incredibly annoying, and I never want to see it again.

And yes, to me, this is like that. I found it impossible to care about any of the goings on, the libretto is...I mean, I guess it's somewhat witty in places, but this is one of those times where I found it more alientating than appealing. Sorry!

Giacomo Meyerbeer, Il crociato in Egitto (1824)

I wanted to see this one for two related reasons. First, it's ("probably," per wikipedia) the last opera ever written with a castrato role, which gives it some historical interest. And second, that castrato role is here played not by a countertenor but by Michael Maniaci, a male soprano.

Now, the question of exactly what "male soprano" means is a bit slippery, but for Maniaci, what it means is that he's a freakish mutant (um, in a good way) whose larynx didn't develop normally. Countertenors are unique among classical singing types in that their singing register doesn't correlate in any way with their speaking voices: they're doing a different thing than other singers do. But a male soprano can sing high notes without having to do that. If that makes sense. Is this what castrati actually sounded like? I have my doubts, at least in Maniaci's case. His body manufactures male hormones normally (I assume); it's just this one aspect of his physiology that's different. But in any event, I really wanted to hear what he was about.

So. The story is that it's Crusader Times in Egypt. The Sultan, Aladino, wants his daughter Palmide to marry his friend Elmireno, who saved his life in battle and whatnot. But! Elmireno is already secretly married to Palmide, and they have a son together (I know stranger things have happened, but keeping a whole pregnancy secret like that is still quite a trick). Also! Elmireno is actually Armando, a Christian crusader, in disguise! Palmide herself has secretly converted to Christianity. But! Now some Frankish crusaders have arrived in Egypt to negotiate with the Sultan, including Armando's uncle Adriano and his former fiancée Felicia. Adriano recognizes Armando (who had been thought dead) and demands that he come back to fight for Christianity, which he agrees to. The crusaders and Aldino decide that though they're foes, they respect each other, and in recognition of their frenemiship, Aldino agrees to free all his Frankish captives (like Mozart's Entführung aus dem Serail, this opera is a good illustration of the ambivalent European attitude towards the Muslim world). So that's good, but negotiations quickly break down when Armando reveals himself to have been deceiving the Sultan. He imprisons all the Christians, but when he meets his grandson, his heart softens. But then it hardens again when he learns his daughter has converted. He's going to have all the Christians executed, but when his vizier Osmino betrays him and tries to stage a coup, they protect him, and now it's Christians + Muslims Best Friends 4-Ever, apparently. Palmide and her son are going to go back to France with Armando, and Felicia is apparently resigned to the situation.

So the first question is, how is Maniaci as Armando? It's not that I'd never heard his singing before; I have a CD of him doing Mozart arias. But somehow that's not quite the same as actually seeing him, you know? And, well, I like him a whole lot. If I didn't know and you told me he was "just" a countertenor, I'd no doubt unquestioningly believe you, but there's definitely a difference. Countertenor voices are generally kind of "light;" his singing seems somehow more weighty. Like he can do things that they might struggle with. He sounds similar to a standard soprano, but not, somehow, identical. And his performance is all the more impressive given that he was a last-minute replacement and only had two weeks to learn a role in an opera he was totally unfamiliar with. He should definitely appear in a lot more operas--while he's young, you know.

But Maniaci aside, what did I think of the opera? Well...I absolutely loved it. Believe me, no one's more surprised about that than I am. This is the work that first brought Meyerbeer some degree of prominence, as I understand it, but inasmuch as he's remembered for anything these days, it's certainly not his Italian operas. Even the DVD notes only offer qualified praise, opining that "once the novelty of the first performances has passed, today it is difficult to fall in love with an opera that is so clearly a work in transition, no longer purely Italian and not yet French." I don't know. Maybe it depends what you're looking for. Certainly, of the three Meyerbeers I've seen, this is my favorite by a great margin.  It was the first one that made me understand why he would've been considered a Big Deal. I still badly need to see Les Huguenots, generally regarded as his masterpiece, but it might just be that I like a kind of opera that Meyerbeer, at the peak of his popularity, did not write. This feels very strongly like a throwback to the opera seria of yore; I'd think it would've felt extremely old-fashioned at its debut. But perhaps people didn't historicize in that way back in the day.

At any rate, it's just full of one great aria, duet, trio, quartet after another. Loved the music, loved the singing. Also, I was surprised by how engrossed I got in the story; it's easy to cavil about this or that aspect of it (I do wish Felicia got to have a better role), but I really was frequently thinking omg, what will happen next?!? And while it's certainly dated in its own way, I really did appreciate the interfaith accord that it ends with. I dunno; in this day and age, that kind of thing seems more important than ever.

Benjamin Britten, Owen Wingrave (1971)

Did you know that a full twenty percent of Britten's full-length operas are based on Henry James stories? That is a true fact that sounds sort of interesting for about three seconds until you think about it and think, huh. What am I supposed to do with this? Is there something relevant in James (probably) being a closeted gay man (Britten's own sexuality being a sort of open secret--British society would have had absolutely no problem destroying him if it had been more public--look at Alan Turing--so we're lucky he was able to walk that delicate line)? Actually...there might be something in that. Let's think about it.

So Owen comes from an aristocratic family which has as its central tenet the idea that all the men have to be soldiers. It's kind of their thing. But after some time at a military academy, Owen decides that war is not his thing on principle, and that he's not joining the army. This is to his family's consternation, and after his grandfather the general tries and fails to make him change his mind, he's disinhered. To back up for a moment, there's a legend about the family's ancestral home, where supposedly there was a Wingrave boy who declined to fight another boy; his father summoned him into his room and hit him for this affront, which ended up killing him. Later the father died to, of unclear circumstances. Anyway, their ghosts supposedly still haunt that room. So Owen's cousin Kate, with whom he'd formerly had a thing (that's JUST THE WAY IT WAS with cousins back in the day--get used to it!), and is now even more angry at him than anyone else for his non-war-like ways, accuses him of being a coward and challenges him to sleep in the haunted room to prove he's not (yes, childish, as the libretto acknowledges). He does this, but then he's found, inevitably, dead, from some mixture of the physical and metaphorical, traumas and ghosts.

This subject was clearly up Britten's alley: he and Pears were both pacifists who had been conscientious objectors during World War II, and with the Vietnam War raging--definitely something he would have felt able to address forcefully from conviction. I wasn't really sure about this opera at first; obviously, it's among Britten's lesser-known works.

And yet, I ultimately liked it a lot. I got caught up in the story, and especially in the second act. There's a memorable, ghostly ballad that really stands out. Now, you certainly could accuse it of having a certain lack of nuance. Owen's military school teacher and his wife, as well as his classmate Lechmere, are sort of uncomprehending but still respectful of his conviction, but his family is just horrible in a totally unnuanced way. Why are they this monomaniacal about it? There's just no way to get into their heads. They're cartoons. And...well, yes. Granted. I think that's the weakness, although you can also see it if you want to as an allegory for ghomophobia: blind, unreasoning hatred that can't be justified because it has no rational basis. Whether you think that makes it better or not...is up to you.

This opera was actually originally written for television. This production with Gerald Finley very good in the title role takes advantage of that well: a lot of military imagery where appropriate. I suppose you'd have to say that it's a comparatively minor work, but that just goes to show how good Britten is.

Feliks Nowowiejski, The Baltic Legend (1924)

My sixth Polish opera is a rarity: apparently it had never been performed since its debut until this Poznań Opera production, which was featured on Operavision. And now...I have seen it.

So there's a fisherman, Doman, who's in love with a woman, Bogna, but her father opposes the match; he wants her to marry an old mean rich guy, Lubor. But that's neither here nor there, since he won't let her marry period except in special circumstances: there's this legend--a Baltic legend, you might call it--that there was a town nearby, only the king's daughter rejected the love of the god Perun and threw a crown he'd given her into the sea. This made him unhappy, so he drowned the town beneath the waves. Apparently, the curse can only be lifted by retrieving the crown, though it was extremely unclear to me what the "curse" even is, or what lifting it would entail. The opera does not make this clear. Anyway, Bogda can only marry a guy who finds the crown. So Doman does that, and everything's cool. Also, there's a secondary couple, Svatava and Tomir, but as is often the case, their story is very much on the side. You could cut it out entirely without changing anything about the main narrative. Oh, and also--this amuses me--there's a statue of a goddess named "Dziedzilla." History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man, DZIEDZILLA!

Of this opera, operavision exhorts us to "discover a long-lost Polish gem, which shines like gold at the bottom of the Baltic Sea," which I can't help but feel may be overselling this a bit. The music occasionally recalls Wagner and Rimsky-Korsakov in pleasant ways, but mostly it's pleasant but somewhat generic romantic stuff. The story, also, isn't much. The characters, at least in this production, never really reveal themselves as much of anything. The most interesting part is the second act which, aside from a brief chorus, is entirely wordless, with Doman under the sea searching for the crown. Otherwise...eh.

I'd been looking forward to seeing this one for a long time, but while there's a temptation to want to think that anything that's obscure must therefore be a lost gem, I...wouldn't say that's exactly the case here. There's nothing particularly wrong with this, but it's definitely the least of the Polish operas I've seen, and I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for it to enter the standard repertoire.

Einstein on the Beach, again

A lot of places are putting free opera streams online lately to help people pass the time, including this new production of Glass's piece (which is available until Sunday). Hmm, I thought. Am I really up for this? Honestly, if it weren't time-sensitive, or if I had been able to download it, I probably would've just filed it away for possible future investigation and then forgotten about it. But since it was now or never, I decided, okay, now. Four more hours of avant-garde anti-opera. Why not?  I'm sure you could give me a long numbered list.  

I'm a little bit confused, because this is really so different it almost might as well not have the same name. Given the fact that there's no story or anything dictated by the music, there's no reason you can't put any ol' visuals up there, but I was under the impression that Robert Wilson's production was considered an integral part of the piece. But no, this is totally different, right from the beginning. In the other version I saw, you have two women reciting a series of numbers. Here, there's just one woman, who is later joined on stage by Einstein himself, who recites most of the disconnected phrases. In that other one, there's a woman dressed as Einstein playing the violin; here, the violin is played by a non-dressed-as-Einstein woman. So it seems that you can do what you want with this music; I suppose there'd be nothing stopping someone from making a completely non-Einstein version. If they wanted.

The whole thing is still totally inscrutable, don't get me wrong, but in a totally different way. There's an extensive use of video and silhouettes. There are a bunch of people dressed as toreadors. At one point Einstein is, literally, on the beach, with people playing badminton and a guy being attacked by a crab. That's kind of funny. Which one is better? Well...that's gonna be a very individual question. I feel I probably liked the first one I saw better; I thought, maybe, that it brings the inchoate themes through better. But you might completely disagree! That's fine. They're both well-made.

One thing about the new version is that it's a half hour shorter. That might be reason enough for some people to choose that one. I can't say why that's true for the most part, but one thing I did notice: when I watched the (in?)famous "prematurely air-conditioned supermarket" section, I thought, huh. That felt a lot shorter than it did before. So I went back and checked the DVD, and sure enough, while that one is a full thirteen minutes, this is only half of that. Not sure why. This isn't something that you would edit down for space concerns.

I do have to say, though: I know a lot of people, including myself, discovered Glass with the Met in HD production of Akhnaten, and even if you really love that one, this might be a heavy lift. It's interesting in its own right, but, as much as I hate to give into convention in anyway, I think having some sort of story to hang the opera on is extremely beneficial for the evocative music. There's probably a reason that--as far as I know--Glass has never tried to be quite this willfully experimental since.

Francis Poulenc, La voix humaine (1958) and Einojuhani Rautavaara, The Gift of the Magi (1994)

What do these two have in common? Well...they're both operas. They're both about forty-five minutes long. And I saw them both on the same day. Other than that, not much. But I'm sticking them together anyway.

Poulenc is best-known for his opera Dialogues des Carmélites, about a group of Carmelite nuns who are martyred during the Terror. I never wrote about it here, probably because I was having trouble wrapping my head around it. It's obviously a profound piece that I should revisit, but I didn't know if I had a lot to say about it at the time.

I may have the same problem with this one, honestly. It's based on a play by Jean Cocteau, and the only character is a soprano who is having a conversation over the phone with her former lover. She tries to act normal, but then reveals that she had tried to commit suicide over him. The ending is ambiguous; she may or may not die then and there. I say let her live: why does everything have to be a whole big thing, anyway?

It's certainly impressive for a single singer to carry an entire opera. There are a fair few versions on youtube, but I watched this one, I think mainly just because it includes English subs. It was fine, although the woman is not talking into an actual phone until the very end, which makes her look kind of insane. Of course, that could be a valid way to play it, but I'm not sure if it was intentional or not. The singer, Amy Burton, was fine.

Not sure what I think about this, honestly. I kind of liked the premise, but I also--I hate to admit it--got a little bit bored. See, that's my dark secret: I can act like I like highbrow art, and I do a lot of the time, but if it's not engaging me I can easily zone out and start to think about other unrelated things. There may have been a bit of that here. Still, it's short, so watching it again in another version and seeing how it strikes me might not be a bad idea.

RIGHT, now onto more Finnish stuff. This is the last Rautavaara opera that's currently available in video form, so don't expect to see any more by him for a while here! Apparently, I'm a Rautavaara completist. What a weird thing to be, especially given that I'm not a super-huge fan.

Well, certainly the plot here is calculated to appeal to an English-speaking audience more than the others I've seen. And you know that's what the producers of this DVD were going for, inasmuch as it has burnt-in English subtitles. Sheesh. I mean, not that I was planning to watch it without, but is there ever a good reason to have those on a disc, other than perhaps in certain documentaries. Whatever!

Anyway, you know what it's about: it's Christmastime and he sells his heirloom watch to buy her a set of tortoiseshell combs and she sells her hair to buy him a platinum chain for his watch. What a coupla buffoons!

It's...not bad. Not terrible, anyway. Some nice, Christmas-y music, and even though the story is admittedly slightly, I think it's fundamentally strong enough to make this work. There is a..."subplot" might be giving it too much credit...a few scenes about the couple's mean landlord who--the opera is surprisingly and somewhat jarringly graphic about this--is willing to accept sex in lieu of rent money, and there's this one slutty tenant who, we presume, has taken him up on that. I have no idea what this is doing here, and the landlord looks altogether too much like an anti-Semitic stereotypes...so yeah, someone in this process fucked things up pretty badly. Under the circumstances, I don't know if I'd recommend it or not.

This concludes my overview of the two short operas that I saw back-to-back. As you were.

Manuel da Falla, La vida breve (1904)

AT LONG LAST, A SPANISH OPERA! When you ask, hey, why isn't there more of a Spanish opera tradition, the answer you generally get is, oh, they have zarzuela instead, which is the Spanish music-drama that's existed since the seventeenth century. How is that different from opera? you ask. Because it consists of a mixture of spoken dialogue and music, say they. How is that different from singspiel, which is definitely opera? ask you. Then they get bored and wander off. Well, we'll see. Frankly, I'm not wholly convinced that they're not just using this "zarzuela" nomenclature so they can feel special, but at some point in the future I shall see a zarzuela, and then I shall pass final judgment. I know that'll be a big relief for everyone, to have that sorted out. But in the meantime, this is definitely an opera. There is no spoken dialogue to be seen.

It's a short (eighty-odd minute) work with a pretty basic operatic plot: Salud is a poor girl who desperately misses her lover, Paco, until he comes back. But then it comes to light that he's marrying a rich girl the next day; Salud sees the wedding dances taking place. Her uncle and grandmother intervene, the latter with the idea of killing Paco, but Salud dies, of some mixture of a broken heart and stabbing herself (I kinda wished Uncle Sarvaor had gone in for the kill on Paco, but no such luck). That is all.

I'll give it to you straight: this opera kicks all kinds of ass. It's super-passionate; whatever stereotypes you may be harboring about Spaniards being hot-blooded, this will do nothing to dispel them. Salud's suffering is the kind of heightened emotion that--for my money--nothing conveys better than opera (and Cristina Gallardo-Domâs really kills it in the role). The music is a mixture of sweeping romanticism and gypsy/folk and flamenco rhythms, and it's very thrilling. There's more dance here than you find in most operas outside the French baroque, and that is one hundred percent fine with me. I would gladly watch a whole lot more of it.

My first experience with Spanish opera could hardly have gone better. Well done, everyone! Whatever zarzuela is, if it produces works I like as much as this, I will be highly impressed.

Benjamin Britten, A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960)

Oh yeah baby! Here we go!

I think this is the first opera to include a role written specifically for a countertenor. Certainly the first well-known one. The wikipedia list of "notable countertenor roles" jumps straight from Handel to Britten (though if we're including castrato roles as "countertenor," you'd think Sesto in La Clemenzia di Tito would've gotten a mention). Very forward-thinking of him, I must say.

More than that, though, I think this probably has roles designated for more different voice types than any other opera I've seen: countertenor (Oberon), tenor (Lysander, Flute, Snout), baritone (Demetrius, Starveling), bass-baritone (Bottom), bass (Theseus, Quince, Snug), coloratura soprano (Tytania), soprano (Helena), mezzo-soprano (Hermia), contralto (Hippolyta), treble (Cobweb, Peaseblossom, Moth, Mustardseed), and "spoken role" (Puck). Yes, self-evidently, some of these are very fine distinctions that can easily slide into one another (and is a "coloratura soprano" really that different from a regular one?), but it's still pretty cool. I think.

Yeah, A Midsummer Night's Dream.  As a young thespian, I played both Oberon and Bottom in school plays (not to brag or nothin'!), so I know the play pretty well, and the opera follows it very closely. I thought it might be difficult or unwieldy to try to fit all three intersecting plotlines--faerie politics, love quadrangle, mechanicals--into one opera, but it actually is very adroitly done: I think the only scene from the play that's omitted is the opening in Theseus' court. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure one hundred percent of the dialogue is from Shakespeare, which is very impressive to me. One thing that did stand out to me that I never really paid much attention to is that boy, Tytania (not sure why it's spelled with a 'y') gets a raw deal: she's humiliated and Oberon takes her changeling child and that's it. If I were going to rewrite the story, I'd like to give her more agency. But that's just me.

The music is Britten, for sure: nothing really unexpected, perhaps a little more restrained than some of his previous work, but lots of very ethereal "faerieland" music with more earthy tones for the mechanicals. I have to admit, I was never quite as struck by any individual scene as I have been in some of his earlier operas--this may be in part just from excessive familiarity with the story--but the whole viewing experience was extremely pleasant. Some good farcical energy built up by the lovers' quarrels in addition to the surefire "Pyramus and Thisbe" climax.

I watched this version, mainly because I wanted to see the now-disgraced David Daniels (just fired from his tenured university position--I guess that's the last vestige of his career gone) as Oberon--the man may be morally beyond the pale, but he sure could sing. It's a very elegant production by Robert Carsen. The conceit is that the forest where the whole opera except the final palace scene is set is a giant bed, with pillows and sheets and blankets, everything dominated by blue and green. Beyond this, it's very minimalistic, but it succeed in creating the desired uncanny tone. I was unfamiliar with the cast beyond Daniels, but I liked them all, notably Peter Rose as a very funny Bottom; and Henry Waddington, very endearing as Quince.

Anyway, good stuff. Now I want to see Purcell's Fairy Queen (based on Shakespeare, not Spencer), for comparison's sake. Actually, I wanted to see it anyway. Oh well. All things in good time, if we're not all murdered by viruses.

Pietro Mascagni, Iris (1898)

Mascagni clearly breaks with verismo in this opera set in some hazy European vision of medieval Japan. The first thing you notice is: wow is this music ever gorgeous. Breathtaking. On a purely compositional level, there's no reason that Mascagni should be known as more than a one-hit wonder. This is easily Puccini-level. And there are plenty of opportunities for great singing too. Why is this not in the standard repertoire? And then, the second thing you notice explains this, which is: wow is this libretto ever dire. Seriously, I don't say this lightly, but it may be the worst such I've ever seen. The disparity between music and words is truly striking.

Iris is the naive young daughter of a blind man who lives with him and helps him. Osaka, a young noble, plans to kidnap her with the help of Kyoto, some sort of pimp (...it is extremely obvious that you named these guys after cities, dude. You really thought you should write a libretto for an opera set in Japan even though you couldn't think of a single Japanese name?). He does this by sort of dazing her with a puppet show and carrying her off (don't think about this too hard). In his private palace or whatever, he plans to seduce her, but gets annoyed by her naïveté and tells Kyoto to just send her back. Unfortunately, her dad--a real asshole--assumes she just went off of her own volition and disowns her. In her grief, she jumps down the sewer (as you do). There, she meets four wisecracking mutant reptiles who--sorry, wishful thinking on my part. She's discovered by some ragpickers, who run off when they see she's not dead. She has visions of Osaka, Kyoto, and her dad, and then she dies. And I guess she goes to Heaven, so it's triumphant. In some sense.

That might sound kind of dopey, but I don't think it adequately expresses just how utterly unbearable Iris really is. She's supposed to seem super-innocent, but she mainly seems like she's just suffered a severe head trauma. There's a longish scene after she's been captured before Osaka appears where she thinks she's dead, and it's very much unintentional comedy. And the part after that reads like it's meant to be a parody of an opera: I mean I guess it's not nice to laugh because she's the victim and all, but when Osaka plans on having his wicked way with her but then decides, nope, not worth it, take her back, it's hard not to. Her piteous wailing is meant to generate pathos, but...can't say it does. People criticize heroines in operas for being too passive and always dying for love, but GOOD LORD, anybody who has ever had anything bad to say about Cio-Cio-san has never seen this one. Her ultimate demise is very much a relief for everyone concerned.

This production is adequate as far as it goes, although the exaggerated childishness of Iris being portrayed by a singer who looks to be in her forties at least (Paoletta Marrocu) is a bit odd. Good singer, though. But mainly I just wanted to note that at various points, thematically appropriate images are projected onto the backdrop, and at one point while Iris is babbling about sea creatures (there's a lot of babbling here), we get that classic work of Japanese art, "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife." And I thought: is this production mocking the opera? If so, I certainly couldn't blame it.

You've gotta hear the glorious music here, but the rampant idiocy of the plot may be a bit of a turn-off.  Probably one of those works that's better listened to than seen.

Benjamin Britten, The Burning Fiery Furnace (1966) and The Prodigal Son (1968)

Britten's second and third "church parables," and unlike Curlew River, they're actually based on Bible stories. I guess that was obvious from the titles.

I think you know what these stories are about, but what the hell. The Burning Fiery Furnace, three Israeli men come to the court of King Nebuchadnezzar. They're three MCs and they're on the go: Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego. Actually, I didn't know that those weren't their original names, which are Hanania, Mishael, and Azaria--less catchy, certainly. In fairness to me, I mainly knew the story from the Johnny Cash version of the gospel song "Fourth Man in the Fire," which does not mention this either. I wonder how many people actually know their original names? I'm guessing not many. Anyway, they refuse to worship King Nebby's idol, so he orders them thrown in the furnace, but God saves them, and Nebby converts to Judaism. THAT'S NOT HOW IT HAPPENS IN NABUCCO. Now I don't know which opera to believe.

In The Prodigal Son, the younger son of the rich guy asks for his inheritance early and goes and spends it. The opera differs from the original story in that there's a satanic temper urging the kid on; this doesn't seem to be like a dramatically satisfying choice. I think it works better if he's just acting on his own, being dopey kid. Anyway, he spends all his money and returns home in shame only to be welcomed by his father. It's a lovely story, really. It works whether or not you buy into the religious aspect. Much more edifying than the furnace thing, which is clearly coming from a less developed religious perspective.

So regardless of the quality of the source material, I didn't really care for either of these operas. I should include a huge disclaimer, however: I was not able to see particularly good-quality recordings of either one. You know, I write these entries like I'm reviewing operas, but really, I'm reviewing particular performances of operas. Sure, the fundamental material of the opera itself comes into it, but that's far from the only thing. I try to look through the performance to the opera as written as much as I can, but my opinion will definitely vary enormously according to quality. So. It's slightly baffling to me that there's no high-quality DVD set of professional performances of all three church parables. It would be a real service. But...well, we work with what we can. This 1968 BBC recording of The Burning Fiery Furnace is kind of interesting for featuring most of the original cast, including Britten's long-time partner Peter Pears as Nebuchadnezzar. But eh. As I said, I really, really don't find the story interesting, and this kind of bored me. By contrast, we have this 2013 performance of The Prodigal Son, which definitely has a churchy feel to it. I like it more, but still not that much. Neither of these has subtitles, which certainly does not help; you really miss the majority of the dialogue.

Oh well! I've decided I'm a Britten completist, so I was glad to see these. But alas--seeing his first opera, Paul Bunyan (with libretto by WH Auden!) seems impossible--there's a German-language performance with German subs on youtube, but that's it. Well, maybe someday. Now, on to bigger and better things!!!

Aulis Sallinen, The Red Line (1978)

Not another Finnish opera! It's the significantly less popular sequel to Not Another Teen Movie! I wouldn't have known about Sallinen except that there was an "other DVDs available from Ooppera" insert in the Aleksis Kivi disc. But it has a certain amount of cachet: it's been performed internationally, including, in 1983, at the Metropolitan Opera. So what do we got here?

It's based on a novel by Ilmari Kianto, whose work has never been translated into English, so we must make do with the opera. For whatever it's worth, according to the DVD sleeve notes, the libretto here (by Sallinen himself) is better than the novel. It takes place in northern Finland in 1907, the year parliamentary elections were first held, and concerns a peasant couple, Topi and Riika, who live in grinding poverty with their three small children. Going to town, Topi happens upon a socialist meeting, along with the suggestion that their lives don't have to be what they are. The priests urge quietism, but clearly something is happening. The socialist organizers tell everyone to vote for them (which you do by writing--wait for it--a red line). The election happens, but after that, and before the results are tallied, Topi has to go to work at a logging camp (less fun than a summer camp), and while he's gone, all three children die from malnutrition. Jeez. He comes back, the socialists declare victory, but too late. Topi goes to fight a bear that's been seen in the area and dies. The end.

Now, you would be quite justified in thinking "...and then he was killed by a bear" is a bit of a bathetic ending. And sure, I can say "the bear is a metaphor!"--as bears killing people generally are--but a metaphor for what, exactly? It's very hard to place this opera ideologically. Yes, the priests urging everyone to just be happy eating shit aren't sympathetic, but is the opposition actually going to help? It's unclear. But it's hard to really blame anyone other than the system for what happens to the family. You would think that this conclusion would be some sort of comment about socialism, but it doesn't really seem to be, as no such thing has been instituted yet. Ultimately, I think it really boils down to the message of a lot of operatic tragedies: shit happens. Life's a bitch and then you're killed by a bear.

Anyway, be that as it may, this is actually a very powerful opera--definitely the best I've seen in Finnish, and not by a small margin. The jagged, neo-romantic music allows for a lot of good arias and dramatic moments, and regardless of the political implications, the story is effectively tragic. It doesn't hurt that Jorma Hynninen and Päivi Nisula are so great as, respectively, Topi and Riika (Hynninen also played the lead in Aleksis Kivi--I guess when you're a Finnish singer with an international reputation, you can probably more or less take your pick of roles in Finnish operas). They do a great job conveying the characters' desperation, leavened with moments of awkward tenderness. One of the most memorable parts of the opera, actually, is them after their children have died, just silently sitting on a bench, contemplating their sorrows. It's not a big sturm-und-drang-type opera, but it's highly effective as its own thing.

I leave you with this: there's one (1) lighter scene in the opera, which doesn't have much to do with anything but still is charming; apparently it's taken from an unrelated short story by Kianto. In the first act, Riika's alone with the kids when a peddler named Simana, who had been working in Sweden, comes by just, I guess, to visit. The kids pepper him with childish, unanswerable questions, and he responds with one of those question-and-answer folk songs, like "False Knight on the Road." I thought it was memorable enough that I uploaded it to youtube, and here it is. Just don't ask me what those dancers who look they're meant to be zombies are doing; they appear somewhat puzzlingly throughout the otherwise-realistic production.

Anyway, that's all I have to say about that. I had no expectations going in, but now I'm extremely interested in seeing more of Sallinen's work.

Tan Dun, The First Emperor (2006)

I've often thought it would be interesting to hear a Chinese opera, even though I know that it's a completely different form from the kind more familiar to Westerners. This is not that, but is a brave attempt to infuse Occidental opera with Chinese music and dramatic sensibilities. With mixed results.

It's about Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of a united China. He's annoyed because he doesn't like the traditional music he's hearing, so he wants to bring in his childhood friend, the composer Gao Jianli, to write him an anthem. So he has his troops subjugate the province where Jianli lives and bring him back as a prisoner (...you couldn't just have, I don't know, asked him?). Jianli is none too happy about this because his village was destroyed and his mother killed and says, screw you and your dumb anthem. The Emperor's daughter crippled Yueyang is impressed by this guy and gets her dad to let her try to convince him to write the anthem. They fall in love and she isn't crippled anymore. The problem is, the Emperor had promised his daughter to General Wang for conquering Jianli's province. Therefore, she commits suicide. Jianli rips out his tongue in grief so the Emperor mercy-kills him. Then he's sad. And that's about that.

I really like the music here. The effort to marry Western and Eastern is really apparent, and very intriguing: a lot of traditional Chinese instruments mixed with more traditional Romantic stuff--it's good. Tan is an interesting composer, for sure.

But...the music is really the only interesting thing here. I realize that's a pretty big "thing," but it's far from the only thing in an opera. The Met really, really wanted this opera they'd commissioned to be a big thing, so--among other things, which we'll get to--they got Placido Domingo to play the title role. Which is fine, I guess...but seriously, neither he nor anyone else gets anything memorable to actually sing. No show-stopping arias or anything of that sort. The story is supposed to be a big, epic thing showing the contradictions of this great emperor who could also be tremendously cruel--but as presented, it's actually very thin stuff. None of the characters are given any depth, and the English-language libretto is incredibly clunky. This really should have been seriously revised before being performed.

And, yes, they obviously wanted it to be big. One uncomfortable contradiction that I have to live with is that, while I love a large-scale Met production, the money for these things comes from really unsavory people. Michael Bloomberg is a horrible creature who I wish didn't exist--and yet, he donates millions of dollars to the Met. He has definitely contributed in a large way to be having transcendent artistic experiences. What am I supposed to do with that? If my fondest political dreams were realized, we just wouldn't have huge operatic projects like this. There would, I'd hope, still be opera, but not on this scale.

So that's something I have to think about. But I don't have to think about it with regards to The First Emperor. I don't think this is true, but if you thought that the Met was entering a period of decadence, you would definitely want to point to this as your most compelling piece of evidence. It's obvious that massive amounts of cash were pumped into this, but to what end? Did anyone have any actual artistic vision here? Because the very strong impression I get is that this is big and expensive for the sake of bigness and expensiveness. The sets and costumes are super-elaborate. You can see where the money went. But rarely have I seen so much spent to so little effect. It remains dramatically inert. On balance, this is a mediocre opera in any event, and the fact that it's been gussied up as much as it has doesn't obscure that fact; it accentuates it.

I will grant that there were some good intentions here: the production is nothing if not culturally respectful. And the idea of bringing Chinese sensibilities and aesthetics into Western opera is a good one. But I can't say that the actual product here is much to shout about.

John Corigliano, The Ghosts of Versailles (1991)

I'd been curious about this one for a long time. I sort of vaguely knew the premise: it's about Beaumarchais, author of the three "Figaro" plays, on two of which Mozart and Rossini based popular operas. And apparently, the Ghost of Beaumarchais is in love with the Ghost of Marie Antoinette and wants to try to change history so she's not executed, and also it features Figaro and related characters? What? This sounds absolutely nuts. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but I am having a LOT of trouble envisioning this.

And...yeah, that's basically what it is. It starts with a frame narrative about the Ghost Court of Louis XVI at Versailles. Everyone seems to be pretty reconciled to being dead except Antoinette, and Beaumarchais has the idea that he can make an opera that will change history and bring her back to life. And then when things start to go not-according-to-plan there, he enters the opera himself to fix stuff. Said opera is based on La Mère coupable, the third and far the least well-known Figaro play (the opera--ie, The Ghosts of Versailles--was commissioned for the Met's hundredth anniversary, and I strongly suspect that they originally just wanted a straight story based on the play). The story is that Rosina has an illegitimate son from a one-night stand with Cherubino (who is now dead). Almaviva has an illegitimate daughter of his own, and the two kids fall in love and overcome obstacles with the help of Figaro and Suzanne. In this version, this stuff gets all mixed up with the French Revolution (why is this taking place in France now? The world may never know): Almaviva has a plan to save the Queen by selling a valuable necklace at the Turkish embassy so she can have money to flee to England. There's a villain, Bégearss, but obviously, everything works out okay for the characters, and everything works out ambiguously for Beaumarchais and Antoinette.

So, yeah. It's all kinda nuts, in a way that you would think would be right up my alley. And yet...WOW. I have had very few operatic experiences that I liked less than this one. It makes me feel like I may be going crazy, since poking around online you find nothing but rapturously positive reviews, but damn, man: okay okay, I suppose I have to admit that there are a few musically okay moments, including Antoinette singing about being executed in the beginning and a flashback duet of Cherubino seducing Rosina)--but really, very little was musically compelling to me (yes, it quotes both the expected operas, but not in any interesting way), nothing was dramatically so, and every single attempt at comedy fell embarrassingly flat. Also, Bégearss is such a ludicrous cackling cartoon villain that it's impossible to take him seriously or find him interesting or indeed threatening in any way. I suspect that La Mère coupable just isn't as good as the other two plays, but I'm also sure that this doesn't do it justice in any event: the characters therefrom are totally undeveloped and uninteresting. And TO TOP IT OFF, there's a section at the end of the first act at the Turkish embassy that--I can't believe I'm saying this--I found legitimately offensive: there's a performer (Marilyn Horne vamping it up) singing in fake-Arabic gibberish (or is it meant to be fake-Turkish gibberish? It's all the same to Corigliano!), and it's just the most witless display of pure, unfiltered Orientalism I can imagine. You could forgive it in an older work, but 1991? Fuck. That. Shit.

So yeah! Not a fan! This was Corigliano's first opera, he hasn't written another since, and I personally am thankful for that. Seeing it satisfied my curiosity, but it didn't satisfy me in any other way.

Benjamin Britten, Curlew River (1964)

Boy, you can say this is "for church performance," but that would require an awfully large-scale church, I feel. Britten wrote it after visiting Japan and seeing noh drama; it's based on noh play, but converted to have Christian themes.

The story is simple: there's this river, see. And there's a "Madwoman" who (along with a "traveller") wants to cross it: she's looking for her son, who's been missing for a long time. The ferryman tells them a story about a mean guy who came by some time ago with a child he'd kidnapped. He was sick so the mean guy left him there, and in spite of the locals trying to help him, he died. This is the woman's son, obviously. So that's sad, but then she hears here son's voice assuring her that the dead will live again and that they'll be together in Heaven. So now she's redeemed and not mad anymore. Finis.

It certainly has a different feel to it than other Britten operas I've seen. The music is sparse, almost ambient in places, and there's obviously a strong liturgical feel. There's a very good performance here, with English subs and everything. One interesting thing is that the Madwoman is a skirt role--because noh performances traditionally have all-male casts. Apparently, in the original production of the opera, all the singers wore noh masks, but not here; I think performances nowadays are less stylized than Britten had envisioned. Which is fine, but you do have to wonder: the singer here has absolutely no signifiers of femininity added, which is obviously the right call: any such would inevitably be read as comical. But done this way, it's still borderline surreal. I don't know if there's a good solution.

But really, it's no biggie. I wouldn't say my breath was exactly taken away, but I still liked this a lot. It's cool that Britten was down with stretching himself artistically as he does here.

Arnold Schoenberg, Moses und Aron (1957)

Supposedly, the title spells it "Aron" because of Schoenberg's severe triskaidekaphobia--he didn't want his opera to have a thirteen-letter title. How about just using an ampersand? For the record, the subtitles in this performance use "Aaron."

(Actually, at least according to wikipedia, this superstition may have lead to his death.  It's a sad story: someone pointed out to him, at the age of seventy-six, that seven plus six was thirteen, and this realization led to some sort of breakdown. You'd think he could've taken comfort that he (and many others) had survived forty-nine, fifty-eight, and sixty-seven.  But are phobias ever rational?  Actually, maybe sometimes they are.  It's worth pondering.  But certainly not this one.)

So Schoenberg. Twelve-tone music. You know, I really just need to read a textbook or something on music theory, so maybe possibly I can really understand what terms like that MEAN. Is it different than atonal music? How? To me, this doesn't sound so different from Berg, but maybe an expert would scoff at that judgment. "Ha! They're nothing alike!" At any rate, I felt, let's say, a certain amount of foreboding going into this opera. Would it be an unlistenable cacophony that makes me think maybe I'm just not capable of appreciating music? That, while I thought music was good, it's actually...bad? Well, no. It's...okay? I don't know. I think it accompanies the action in a more or less appropriate way; I just don't know that I'd go out of my way to listen to it.

But it's not just the music that makes this a potentially difficult opera. The libretto is very abstract and cerebral. Obviously, it's about the Biblical characters and their flight from Egypt. It's an opera that's centered around semiotics, if you can believe: Aaron is trying to tell the people about God to make them understand, but Moses understands that there are no accurate signifiers: God can't be expressed in that way. The God that can be named is not the true God, it seems. So while Moses is up grabbing him some commandments, Aaron builds a golden calf so that there will be a god with characteristics that the people can understand. Moses comes back down, angry and despairing at this: that he can't convey God to the Israelites. "O word that I lack!" he laments, and that is the end of the second act and of the opera, which Schoenberg never completed. When Berg's Lulu is performed, it's always the version that was completed in 1979, but even though there is a "complete" version of this authorized by the Schoenberg estate, it's generally performed as he left it, and that seems like a good choice: it's a powerful non-ending, it must be admitted, and an obvious meta-commentary on Schoenberg's own writer's block.

This production is pretty odd. Difficult to wrap one's head around, as perhaps befits the opera. In the first act, the entire stage is shrouded in fog. It's impossible to get a clear look at the singers. There are things projected onto the wall, most notably a series of words (in French)--at first, they appear slowly and seem to have at least some relevance to the libretto, but at a certain point they go by so quickly it's impossible to catch most of them, and to the extent that you can, they seem completely random. This is obviously building on the idea of the inadequacy of the word. In the second act, the fog has lifted (though I'm not sure why, since the confusion certainly hasn't), but aside from that, it's still as strange as ever. One major element is people dousing one another with what looks like oil (ie, petroleum). Is this meant to convey verbal slippage between the kind of oil you would use for anointing and the other kind? Maybe I'm reading too much into this (but try and stop me!). Honestly, I was of two minds: on the one hand, the libretto is, as I noted above, vague enough that this kind of interpretation can work (and there are definitely striking moments). On the other hand, maybe it would be better to sort of let the text speak for itself by putting on a more restrained production? I don't know. I have to admit, the weirdness did get a bit wearing after a while.

I may not have loved this, quite, but the artistic commitment on on Schoenberg's part is undeniable. Definitely an opera that you must see if you are interested in the form.

Benjamin Britten, Let's Make an Opera!/The Little Sweep (1949) and Noye's Fludde (1958)

In addition to his "regular" operas, Britten also wrote some shorter, less-performed works: these and three on religious themes meant for performance in churches. I feel it would be better for me to watch them prior to the full-fledged operas of his I've yet to see--A Midsummer Night's Dream, Peter Wingrave, Death in Venice--lest they should be made to feel anti-climactic. I mean, I don't KNOW that they would. It just seems like a potential concern. I'm pairing these two together because they're both designed for primarily amateur casts.

Let's Make an Opera!/The Little Sweep was two-part production, as that title may make apparent. Let's Make an Opera! is a play of sorts where a bunch of amateur performers conceive of and rehearse an opera. It's meant to be an introduction to and demystification of the form that also gives the audience a chance to preview the songs they're meant to participate in during the second half of the evening. I watched this out of a sense of completeness, but honestly, I didn't find it very compelling. I don't need to see the form demystified, and if I did, I kind of doubt that this would really do it. There's no plot of drama to it, so what's the use? You certainly don't need to see it to appreciate The Little Sweep.

But speaking of: it's a short, simple opera for children, although Britten's music is definitely for everyone. It's sort of loosely inspired by Blake's two "Chimney Sweeper" poems in Songs of Innocence and Experience, but it lacks the savage irony of the former and the general grimness of the latter. There's an upper-class family with three children and their two cousins. There's an executive chimney-sweep (or something along those lines) named "Black Bob" coming by with his son Clem (very Dickensian characters the both of them) along with Sammy, a young boy who's been sold to them by his impoverished father and is being forced to do very unpleasant chimney-sweeping activites. The kids take it upon themselves to rescue him and let him free, although it's extremely unclear what's going to happen to him, ultimately. Well, in Let's Make an Opera!, the woman telling the story--presented as based on a true one--says that he grew up and became the head gardener, so that's all right for him, I guess. The whole thing is small but fun. It's charming, as intended, and although "opera designed to be sung mainly by amateur children" may set off all sorts of warning bells, it actually works fine, even if it doesn't have the resonance of Britten's best.

How to see this? Well, as far as I can tell, this video is the only one available of Let's Make an Opera! It's a bit cheesy, but that was probably the intent, and it'll satisfy whatever curiosity you have, which is about all you can ask for. And after it and before the opera starts, you can listen to a guy talking to the audience in Norwegian for fifteen minutes, which is exciting. I'm not a huge fan of the version of The Little Sweep attached to it, but you may not have much choice. I liked this televised version more, poor video quality notwithstanding, but unfortunately, it's not complete: there are two parts, but the last ten or fifteen minutes are missing. You'd think there would be a professional-quality DVD somewhere of these short Britten works, but nope. But in any event, I still enjoyed it.

Now, Noye's Fludde. It's about Noah's Ark. It's based on an old mystery play, which is why it's titled like that. I must say, they really sucked at spelling back in the day. They didn't have modern orthographic technology. There's not much to say about the plot, which basically follows the original story, give or take a subplot about Noye's wife ("Mrs Noye"), as she's called not wanting to get on the Ark. So not that dramatically exciting, but the music is gorgeous. If you want to watch a staged version, the only choice is this one, but you probably want to go with this concert version--the other one has very muddy sound such that almost the whole of the libretto is incomprehensible, and there's a huge amount of coughing and occasionally you can hear the people filming it whispering. You don't get a good idea of Britten's genius from it--although from my perspective, there was ONE interesting thing: none of the singers are well-known, but there's a credits role at the end, and singer playing Noye...

I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience when I saw that.

Anyway. Love me some Britten. More later.