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.
No comments:
Post a Comment