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.