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.
Perhaps the auto-translator's algorytm asumed that breast + taking them + wife = something more casual/sexual = boobs.
ReplyDeleteMaybe. I'm sure there's some sort of justification in the algorithm; it would be interesting to know exactly how it decided on this.
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