A lot of full operas are being put online for free these days. Probably other things too, but let's get our priorities straight. This is one such, from Livermore Valley Opera in California. I really fear what's going to happen to these small companies as the pandemic rages on, but here we are for now. This is the only available video of this one-act opera.
It's based on an Oscar Wilde play. In sixteenth-century Florence, a woman Bianca is having an affair with Prince Guido. Her husband Simone, a textile salesman, comes back home and effects not to realize what's going on with the idea that he can use this as leverage to get the prince to buy stuff. So we have one of these situations where everyone knows what's going on and everyone knows everyone else knows, but nobody's saying anything. Obviously you'll know what happens if you know the play, but I had never even heard of the play, so I was kept guessing. I figured it was pretty inevitable that at least one of these people wasn't getting out of this alive, and I wasn't wrong, but I did not even come close to guessing the actual denouement. It's an interesting, very opera-worthy story.
And that's not all: it's accompanied by some very lush, Puccini-esque music (no arias per se, but in a compact story like this, I feel like they wouldn't have fit in very comfortably), which makes you wonder why Zemlinsky's eight operas aren't performed more often.
See, this is why I don't think I'm going to run out of operas to see: I keep finding new ones, and while some of these are not very impressive, some of them...are. So there you go. What a great insight that was.
No comments:
Post a Comment