Richard Stauss, Die schweigsame Frau (1935)

While many of Strauss' operas are comfortably part of the repertoire and performed regularly, there are a few that, for whatever reason, just aren't. To my knowledge, there is no complete video of Die ägyptische Helena or Friedenstag, and the only one of Intermezzo is sung in English, which...not ideal. The hell, people? This one falls into the same category, but fortunately, some awesome person uploaded a 1971 performance from the Bavaria State Opera. It has English titles, so clearly it was originally broadcast in some Anglophone country or other, but where? Hard to say. There's an unreadable little logo in the top left that I don't recognize.

This has a libretto by Stefan Zweig: gutsy to have a Jewish writer do your libretto at that time. Strauss refused to let Zweig's name be removed, which contributed to the initial run being cancelled after only a few performances. Right on. Fuck all nazis always, and in the exact opposite of a fun way.

It's based on a 1609 comedy by Ben Johnson (though this one apparently takes place in 1760--how am I possibly meant to be able to detect the difference?). There's a retired naval captain, Sir John Morosus who hates noises after having survived an explosion at sea. His barber recommends that he marry a quiet young woman to look after him in his old age. But when his long-lost nephew Henry appears, he decides, screw that; I'll just make him my heir (I'm not clear why this is an either/or situation). But then Henry reveals that he's a singer and brings in his opera troupe, complete with Aminta, his soprano wife. This does not sit well with Morosus, who determines to disinherit his nephew and get married after all. But the troupe decides to play a trick on him, by making him think he's married one of them, who will then act super-loud and obnoxious until he regrets his actions and re-inherits Henry. This plan works well: the woman who pretends to marry him is Aminta herself (shouldn't he recognize her from when Henry introduced them?), who feels remorse at having to act like a shrieking harridan but does it anyway. At one point she practices singing an aria from L’incoronazione di Poppea, which is amusing. Anyway, Morosus is extremely relieved when he learns it was just a trick, his nephew is back in his good graces, and he decides that actually music is okay, he can tolerate it, although silence is still better.

This may immediately remind you of Donizetti's Don Pasquale. Well, a rich guy marrying or trying to marry a woman who isn't what she seems was definitely a classic comedy trope. Less so nowadays, since it's hard for us to see such a man as just a semi-sympathetic buffoon rather than a monster of some stripe. Accordingly, this feels very old-fashioned compared to...well, every other Strauss opera I've seen. And yet, it's still a lot of fun! Strauss' music gets "zany" in places in a way you don't usually see, and the whole thing, if predictable, is still compelling, and sometimes funny (though not as funny as Don Pasquale).

This youtube version naturally doesn't quite have the video quality you might hope for, but on the whole the quality is better than you'd expect for something (presumably) recorded off a TV broadcast close to fifty years ago. It features big names of the time, notably Kurt Moll in the title role. Definitely stealing the show, I'd say, is Reri Grist as Aminta. Very charming, and one of the first African American opera singers with an international career (I mean, so says wikipedia. It's not like I just knew that off the top of my head).

I suppose, really, you can see why this isn't as widely-performed as some; it really does play it safe in terms of both form and content. But when you're dealing with a genius like Strauss, that still results in a solid operatic experience, and I definitely recommend it.

Willem Jeths, Ritratto (2020)

Hey look, it's my first 2020s opera. I know some people will go "the 2020s don't start until 2021, there was no year zero, I am extremely smart, blah blah," but I don't care about that. I don't know if you've noticed, but there really aren't many people around who were alive when the calendar ticked over from BCE to CE. It's just not connected to how how we perceive time and history. So. But actually, the point may be moot, because this opera has never actually debuted, in the technical sense: it was preempted from its planned March premiere by you-know-what. But the Dutch National Opera released a video of this dress rehearsal, so we can see it anyway. That also explains why there's no applause at any point and no curtain call.

The Italian word "ritratto" means "portrait," and this is in particular a portrait of Luisa Casati, a rich Italian heiress and patron of the arts in the early twentieth century, noted for her outrageous behavior (in spite of the title, the opera is mostly in English, albeit interspersed with substantial snatches of Italian and French). The opera doesn't have a plot, really: it's mainly the Marchesa talking about art with various of the prominent figures in her circle, most notably the painter Romaine Brooks and poet and father-of- fascism Gabriele D'Annunzio. It proceeds through the First World War and her eventual bankruptcy and death. She gouges her eyes out here at the climax, which I don't think is historical record. But obviously, that's not the point.

A lot of contemporary opera don't, let's be honest, have particularly memorable music. That doesn't mean I don't in some cases enjoy them, but the story is the main thing, with the music being more background. I'm happy to say that that's not the case here; this is very tuneful, with plenty of memorable arias. I really enjoyed it a lot. Being more about aesthetics than shit actually happening, it might remind you of Strauss' Capriccio. It's a fair comparison, even if this (unlike that) is in an ultimately tragic vein. This one's a winner, a promising start to the decade.

The other thing that's a winner is the production, and particularly the costume design: the "dress" part of "dress rehearsal" is taken extremely seriously, with all the characters decked out in outlandish costumes. Here's a screen capture that gives you the idea better than I could:

The Marchesa is the redhead holding up her hand just right of center. The color palate switches throughout the opera; it's not green the whole time. I must say, I'm glad that the Dutch Opera put this out for consumption, but I cringe when I think about them having to just eat the costs for this elaborate costuming. I hope everything is able to get back to "normal" soon, though it's hard to imagine how.

Christoph Willibald Gluck, Iphigénie en Aulide (1774)

Yes! Gluck wrote two separate operas about this extremely minor character from Greek mythology! They're both based on Euripides plays. Quick refresher in case you've forgotten: Iphigenia is Agamemnon's daughter whom Diana makes him sacrifice or else she won't let him go off to murder Trojans. So he does. Very edifying.

In Iphigénie en Tauride, the idea is that the goddess actually spirited her off to be her priestess rather than letting her be killed. Here...well, it's not that complicated: her dad doesn't want to sacrifice her but blah blah blah, Clytemnestra opposes this, and also in this version she and Achilles are in love (Deidamia apparently not existing in this continuity), and is he faithful to her, blah blah and also et cetera. In the end Diana appears and is all "kidding lol" (reminding me of the end of Idomeneo) so now everyone can be happy, except that Achilles is going to be killed in the war and Clytemnestra is ultimately going to murder Agamemnon. That stuff isn't specified by the text. I wonder how having another sister around would affect the plot of Elektra, or any of however many other plays and operas.

Not gonna lie: I found this a little on the boring side. The music is fine--and I think I can definitely see more clearly than I did in the past the intersection between the baroque and classical periods--but the drama I thought was extremely non-compelling, and--I noticed this in Iphigénie en Tauride also--it's just sooooo slooooow. I don't know; I suppose that's characteristic of baroque opera in general, but for whatever reason, it kind of got to me here.

The production may partly be to blame, too. I saw this one, which I think is the only available video. It's by Pierre Audi, who was also behind that stage version of Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder, and I think maybe I just don't like him. There's nothing terribly special here; it's just a vaguely modernized version with metal scaffolding and staircases on the sides of the stage. I feel it doesn't bring home the stakes of the drama very well, and--this will never not irritate me--in the latter part Iphigenia is wearing a suicide belt, and COME ON. You can't just stick such a charged signifier in there without a very damn good reason, which I don't think this remotely had. FAIL.

I'll definitely see Gluck's Alceste one of these days (his other oft-performed opera that I haven't seen), but I'm sort of on the fence right now about whether or not I really like him or not (or, perhaps more accurately, whether I like his librettists' sense of drama).

Nkeiru Okoye, Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed that Line to Freedom (2014)

Yeah! Let's watch an opera about one of the best Americans ever! A natural subject, or so it would seem.  Apparently there are several contemporary operas with her as a subject, but...this is one of them. I don't know how I planned to end that sentence.

Hey, remember when there were plans for Tubman to replace the odious Jackson on the twenty? Yeah...in retrospect, it should have been obvious that that would never happen once T**** got elected. I think at first we (okay, maybe just me) didn't quite realize what hardcore white supremacists he and his cohort are. Still, I suppose you could make the case that doing it would just be empty symbolism allowing us to feel good about ourselves while not addressing our country's festering problems. Or, indeed, that getting her all mixed up with American capitalism is more insult than honor.

Anyway. The question is, how do you shape her life into a compelling narrative arc, exactly? Obviously you have to decide where to start and where to end and what to emphasize. Well, we start with her as a young girl named Araminta, or Minty for short. One of her owners bashes her on the head with a piece of metal, which gave her visions and sleeping spells that lasted her whole life and probably made her become an abolitionist. She gets married, argues with and leaves her husband, escapes, comes back for her family and others, and that's about what she's doing as the opera concludes.

It is, I have to admit, a little bit jumbled, and there are a few eyebrow-raising moments, like when Harriet's come back south and her father comes in wearing a blindfold, and everyone asks, hey dad, why the blindfold? and he sings a comic aria about how he's wearing it so if anyone asks if he's seen her, he can truthfully say no, and...lol? What kind of tone are we trying to strike here, exactly?

Still, it's more compelling than not. The music is really great, mixing folk, gospel, blues, and soul together. Most operas that take place in a historical time and place make, it must be admitted, zero effort to evoke the given era musically, so it's nice to see this one do that, and get it so right.

You can see this on The American Opera Project, along with some others.  It's an unlisted youtube video that I could just link to, but I think it's only fair that you register, as they ask you to. It's a very good performance; notably, Janinah Burnett is revelatory in the title role, with a steely-eyed determination and, in softer moments, a smile that lights up the stage. I want to see a lot more of her. Briana Elyse Hunter is also excellent as her sister Rachel. Unfortunately, there are technical aspects of the video that make it not-ideal. First, the sound isn't perfect; in places, especially the second act, it has a distinct echo-y and tinny feel, and a lot of the singing is simply impossible to understand--this problem compounded by the fact that this has what must be the worst subtitle track I've ever seen, in the sense that it just cuts out after the first few minutes and never comes back. The piece deserves better.

Still, I liked it a lot, and I hope it doesn't just sound like tokenism when I note that it's my first opera by a black woman. But it is, and I'm happy about that. I mean, happy to have seen it. Not happy that it's thusfar the only one. Shut up.

I was looking through the wikipedia page for Harriett Tubman, and it's pretty darned dispiriting reading about her postwar life, and the mighty struggles she had to undergo to get even the most modest pension from the government. She was well-known and celebrated in many circles, but the overwhelming level of white supremacy that pervaded the country was not an easy force to overcome, as demonstrated by the fact that we still haven't.

I was, however, amused by the following passage, which describes how she met her second husband:

Tubman spent her remaining years in Auburn, tending to her family and other people in need. She worked various jobs to support her elderly parents, and took in boarders to help pay the bills. One of the people Tubman took in was a 5-foot, 11-inch tall farmer named Nelson Charles Davis.

You would think, reading this, that his height would be in some way relevant to something later on in the article, but nope! It's just a completely random fact about him shoved in for no clear reason. Good times.

Hans Werner Henze, Pollicino (1980)

Here's a short children's opera that Henze wrote. According to the booklet, he wanted to write an opera that children could participate in (hence the largish boys' chorus here). Britten would definitely have approved. The DVD booklet is written in very simplified language, and if it weren't already apparent that this was for children, in the back it clearly defines esoteric terms like "score" "conductor" and "rehearsal." Are a lot of kids really buying DVDs these days? Well, it's a nice thought.

The story is sort of an amalgam of various popular faerie-tale tropes: the parents are poor, so they abandon their seven sons in the woods: it's actually sort of funny; they do this twice. After they get home the first time, there's some business about how "we'll never be separated again"--then hard jump-cut to the kids again abandoned in the woods. The sort of thing you'd associate with movies. But helpful animals help them, and they're taken captive by a giant who's going to eat them, only then they escape with the help of his seven daughters, and everything's gonna be great! I guess. Oh, the main kid is named Pollicino, so that's what that is. Not sure about the ending though: okay, they're free from the giant, and they sing about how great everything is and it's springtime etc, only...what about their parents? Okay, maybe they're just bad parents, throwing their kids out repeatedly, but in the beginning they're singing about social injustice, about how they need to pay money for rent that totally destroys them even though it would be NOTHING for a rich person, and you expect this to be solved in some way, but no, we're just left hanging.

Aside from that, though, what's not to like? The music is very melodic and appealing. I can easily imagine this being a gateway for a kid into opera fandom--though given that the brothers here are obviously all played by professional choir members, the idea that "any kid can do it!" doesn't quite come across here. There's an interview with the director who clarifies that adults are also "allowed" to watch it, so that's a relief.

Gioachino Rossini, Semiramide (1823)

Hey! None of this semi-ramide business! For me, it's the whole ramide or NOTHING! I'm very uncompromising in this regard.

Yeah, so this is based on a play by Voltaire, which is in turn based on the story of a legendary Assyrian queen, Semiramis. There are several other operas with the same title, including a mostly-lost one (alas) by Vivaldi, but this I believe is the only one actually based on Voltaire.

Semiramide is the queen, her husband Ninus having died. Is this the same Ninus at whose tomb Pyramus and Thisbe were to meet? Maybe! Significant parts of this do indeed take place at his tomb, so, I mean, I didn't think that story took place in Mesopotamia, but who knows? Anyway, there's a somewhat tangled love...shape: everyone thinks Semiramide is going to pick a successor, and the main candidates are Assur, a prince and a villain; and Arsace, a general and a hero. They both want to marry Azema, and she wants to marry Arsace (as does Idreno, an Indian prince who has a lot of stage time in spite of being very superfluous to the overall story). But! Semiramide doesn't want to step down at all; she wants to marry Arsace and rule with him. Only, whoa, the ghost of Ninus appears and demands a sacrifice to appease his spirit, helpfully not specifying exactly who should be sacrificed. But it turns out that Semiramide had conspired with Assur to murder her husband, he having convinced her that he was planning on abandoning her. So she feels guilty about that. In other news, it is revealed that Arsace is actually Ninia, her son. He goes off to kill Assur, but whoops, in the dark of the tomb, he accidentally stabs his mom instead. Assur is arrested. When he realizes what he's done he's sad, but then there's a triumphant chorus welcoming him as king, so it's all good...I guess.  I think the message we can take from this is that six or eight thousand years ago, they laid down the law...in Mesopotamia.

Not gonna lie: the plot is a bit of a mess. There are all these twists that just come from nowhere and wait? What now? Huh? Also, I don't feel as though Semiramide gets enough attention to be the sort of tragic heroine she's meant to, and Azema seems like it's a more tiny, insignificant role than it should be. None of that really matters much, though, 'cause you're listening to some really damn great Rossini, and who cares why these people are singing? They're doing it beautifully. Great vocal acrobatics.

I do have one thing to say, though: I watched this handsomely traditional Met production.  The presenter is Christopher Maltman (yay!), who explains that the reason this opera hadn't previously been staged for twenty-five years was because it's so dern hard to find singers who are up to its vocal demands. Now, presumably this was what he was told to say, but really now: why do they keep telling lies like this? It's almost as though they're inexplicably defensive about not having performed the opera in question for so many years, and they're trying to make excuses. But come ON: are you really telling me that the role of Semiramide is so difficult that there's literally only one soprano in a generation who can handle it? That's obviously untrue. Sure, you can believe that a smaller opera house might have trouble finding the talent to mount your more difficult operas, but it's not remotely believable that there was ever a time in the Met's history--at least since they became an established institution--when they wouldn't have been able to do any opera they wanted. Come on.

Well, here the title character is sung by Angela Meade. I first saw her as Alice Ford in Falstaff--my third-ever opera, if memory serves.  She made a strong impression on me there, and she's really great here. Quite a stage presence. My other favorite is Ildar Abdrazakov (who previously played the title role in Prince Igor) as Assur; very sinister, and he has a good freak-out scene when he thinks Ninus' ghost is trying to get him.

I enjoyed this a lot. I've never not enjoyed a Rossini opera.  I shall see more soon.

Leoš Janáček, Kátja Kabanová (1921)

Well, now the only Janáček operas I haven't seen are the ones that are rarely performed and not to my knowledge anywhere available in video form. This sort of has the same tenor as Jenůfa, only without the happy ending.

The story is extremely simple: Kátja is recently married, but she's in love with another man, who also is in love with her. She freaks out when her husband goes off on a business trip, because she thinks it means she won't have the willpower to avoid cheating on him. She doesn't and and she does. As a result, she is eaten alive by remorse and jumps in the river and drowns, though I have to note that as presented, there is absolutely no way that, realistically, she was there long enough to drown before being fished out. There's also some other fairly superfluous detail involving her nightmare mother-in-law (who at one point complains that now her son is married and he seems to love his wife more than her--Freudian!) and her lover having an uncle whom he has to obey if he wants any inheritance, but that's basically it.

Now, I know there's no point in viewing the story in modern terms; no point in saying "Kátja, you are overreacting here to a really excessive degree." I mean, she even is for the time, but by our standards, definitely. The drama is what it is, and obviously people took these things more to heart than we would now (not that people can't still feel guilt and shame about cheating like this, but I doubt it drives too many of them to suicide). Still, I'm forced to admit that I had trouble really getting into this on a visceral level. Jenůfa may be similarly of its time, but the emotion there I found a lot more palpable.

As for the music, well, I know by now what Janáček sounds like. I like a lot of his music, but I find his lack of traditional arias or anything like that a bit wearing. The wikipedia page compares his late operas (and this one in particular) to Puccini, but boy do I ever not hear the Puccini here. Definitely of his time, for better or worse. If you hurry, you can probably still see this production for free! It transplants the action to some sort of Eastern Bloc city, which seems appropriate to me. Please enjoy! Or not. It's none of my business.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Mitridate, re di Ponto (1770)

Mozart's first opera seria, written at the age of fourteen. It's a fairly standard opera seria kind of story: It's antiquity, and Mitridate is, as you might have guessed, king of Pontus, which was an empire centered in what is now northern Turkey. But he's dead, or so it seems, and his sons are not on friendly terms: Sifare doesn't like Farnace because he thinks he's too buddy-buddy with the kingdom's enemy, the Romans. Also, both brothers are vying for the affections of their late father's fiancée (is that weird? I think that's weird. If you read old novels, you're used to first cousins getting married, but this is a new one on me, as far as I recall). Anyway, she's in love with Sifare also, but it turns out Mitridate isn't dead after all! What a twist! The brothers decide to hide their feelings and have a truce, but Farnace is still plotting with those dern Romans. Their dad has brought a Parthian woman, Isemene, whom he wants Farnace to marry; apparently they have a history together. Anyway, things continue along these lines. Mitridate wants to execute his sons, but then the Romans attack and he leaves to fight them. Farance repents. Mitridate commits suicide before forgiving everyone (this may be the first Mozart opera I've seen where a character dies, depending on what happens to the villains in Zauberflöte, which is ambiguous. Both couples become couples and they pledge to fight off Rome, which seems a sort of futile conclusion, since this was the exact point where Rome took over Pontus. But there ye be.

So this music is recognizably Mozart, and I liked it. I think it's the first Mozart performance I've seen featuring a countertenor (the castrato roles in the performances I've seen of Idomeneo and La Clemenza di Tito were all sung by women, alas (not that I'm trying to devalue female singing, but I like countertenors, dammit!)) I guess it's not as sophisticated as his later, better-known work, but I have to admit, I have no idea how to quantify the relative quality of different music. All I can say is that some I like more than others. What can I say? This wasn't an all-time favorite opera, but I liked it, and there are some memorable arias, including some from Aspasia that I would swear anticipate the Queen of the Night, years later. In fairness, I should say that after the first act, the subtitles in the version I saw were horribly out-of-synch, which certainly did not help with the drama.

But aside from that, I liked the production a lot! There are, like, three or four performances of this available on disc, so you can take your pick, but I saw this one (which used to be online, but now, I think, isn't), which drags the action into the present as a sort of light satire of European politics (though not dogmatically so--Eurotrash, sure; Regietheater, no. The whole thing takes place in an airport conference room, and there are big screens which sometimes broadcast mock news reports about the political situation, complete with chryons going into specific details. Rome is referred to as the "Roman Union," and at one point there's mention of a possible "Pontexit." I found it funny and clever and appropriate to the somewhat tangled plot of the opera. However, some day I will watch a more traditional production, just for comparison's sake.

Berthold Goldschmidt, Beatrice Cenci (1951)

So here's a somewhat happier happier story about a Jewish-German composer in the first half of the twentieth century: naturally, his career in Germany was obliterated on the nazi takeover, but he emigrated to England in 1935, according to wikipedia "on the advice of an SS officer"--I'd love to hear about that in more detail. He kept writing music, but he met with general indifference, and even though his opera Beatrice Cenci won a prize in a competition, it somehow was never produced: I'm not clear if this was just for lack of funding or political reasons. Anyway, he stopped composing for twenty-some years until he returned to the field in his and the eighties. This coincided with a resurgence of interesting in his work, and he lived to see Beatrice Cenci's first staging in 1994. So that at least is heartening.

It's based on a play by Shelley which is in turn based on a real-life incident of a Renaissance noblewoman who killed her abusive father and was in turn executed after a lurid trial. Well...that about describes that. To be slightly more specific, her father is a terrifying, sadistic murder fetishist making life hell for her, her mother-in-law, and her brother, so they all plan to kill him (there's a scene at a party where he's feeling cheerful and someone asks why and he says it's because his other two worthless sons who were off studying have DIED recently, so that's great, and everyone's sort of freaked but still refuse to help his family because of his political power--so there are definitely structural problems here)...well, actually, this priest that Beatrice had been carrying a flame for suggests contracting some helpful men to do the killing for them, but then one of the bumbling idiots gets caught and it's LIGHTS OUT for this family. Except the son; he's too young to be executed, I guess. But.

It has very old-fashioned music, out-of-step, I suppose, with the times; he Goldschmidt characterized this as "bel canto," and you can definitely see the influence. Or at least, I think you can. Maybe I'm just saying that because he said it. BUT FOR REAL. It's some nice music, for sure.

The best thing by far about this production is Christoph Pohl as Francesco, the dad. He really has that decadent Renaissance cruelty thing down pat; he's mesmerizing whenever he's on stage.

And yet, somehow, I didn't quite like this as much as I wanted to. I think a big part of the problem is that the libretto--being, I assume, an Italian translation of Shelley's text--is so stylized and mannered. The tragedy doesn't come across so well, I thought (and also, the thing with the priest Beatrice has or had the hots for is a narrative cul de sac that contributes nothing to anything). Also, the production: it's a Eurotrashy thing that sometimes works: Francesco delivers his last aria holding a microphone and dressed in a shiny jacket like a Vegas lounge singer; that's chilling. But the fact that Beatrice is wearing an enormous red fright wig throughout? Less so. And the way people keep waving handguns around--I don't mind the anachronism itself, obviously, but I feel that this is very odd and distracting in the context of the chosen atmosphere.

Oh well; you can't win 'em all. Anyway, it certainly wasn't an unpleasant way to spend a few hours.

Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Die Soldaten (1965)

Here's this, which is meant to be one of the most significant German operas of the latter half of the twentieth century. There's a highly specific category. It's written more or less using Schoenberg's twelve-tone system, so we'll see how that works for me.

It's based on an eighteenth-century play about a woman driven to prostitution and madness and death. You know, that good ol' stuff. Marie is engaged to Stolzius, from her own, low, social class, but her head is turned by Desportes, a young soldier and noble. He loves her and leaves her, and she's purused by another man, Desportes' friend Major Mary, but that seemingly goes nowhere; Stolzius enters Mary's service in disguise to he can get revenge on Desportes, but not before Desportes sends his gameskeeper to rape Marie (he's a huge misogynist, obviously). Stolzius kills Desportes by poisoning his soup and then dies himself for no particular reason, and Marie goes mad and dies also. And there you have it.

Actually, I have to say, I liked the music here. I don't know whether I'm getting used to it, or whether I just liked how it was used more, but there are some very powerful moments and a cool jazzy dance number. I wasn't sure whether I'd actually like this; I was watching partly out of a sense of obligation (now seriously, what possible "obligation" could you have...?), but in the end, I was swept up in it. Something, one can't help noting, in between Wozzeck and Lulu, but I liked it better than either. This was Zimmermann's only completed opera, which is too bad.

There are two videos of this you can watch, this one from the Salzburg Festival and this one from the Stuttgart Opera. They both got good reviews, but I chose the former just because it was easier and cheaper to come by. And it's a very impressive production: it has this widescreen look to it, where the stage appears to be double the normal length. There are a series of windows in the background, basically, through which various people can be seen doing various things, and onto which are frequently projected old-timey black-and-white pornographic images, which seems highly appropriate for this particular opera. The whole thing is appropriately scuzzy: there's one bit where Marie's lying in bed and we see a bunch of soldiers in the background watching her with their hands in their pants.

And yet, I felt like I also might have been missing something here. Per Zimmermann's plan, there are supposed to be various films projected onto the stage at certain points in the production, and those aren't present here. Also, the conclusion, while shattering enough in its own way, is extremely unlike the description on wikipedia, which sounds super-apocalyptic in a way that this isn't quite. It might genuinely be worth seeing the other version for another take on this.

Arnold Schoenberg, Gurre-Lieder (1913)

Here's an interesting thing: years before Schoenberg started messing around with serialism and his twelve-tone system, he was writing straightforwardly Wagnerian romantic music, including this extended cantata, which dramatizes poems by the Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen. This performance is the first time it's ever been done up in operatic fashion.

The music is beautiful; I don't know what else to say. The above description probably tells you about everything. The first part only involves solo singers, but the second half has some very dramatic choral music. The story...well, is pretty abstract, but it involves this kind, Waldemar, and his mistress Tove, who dies. Um. And then Waldemar summons some undead warriors, as you do. And then, uh, it ends.

Well, we have to consider what kind of thing this is: so what exactly is a cantata? As far as I'm able to determine, it's like an oratorio, the difference being, it has a different name. Seriously, these terms seem pretty close to interchangeable. If you google "cantata vs oratorio," you are told that an oratorio is generally longer (but this is two hours, not massive but definitely as long as many oratorios), and that a cantata is more likely to be used in religious settings (but this is secular and plenty of oratorios are religious). So...yeah. But THE POINT IS, as generally happens when you dramatize oratorios or cantatas or whatever, you can kind of tell that it was not originally an opera. Not that that's a bad thing, but you generally get something much more abstract: like, here we have people singing third-person narration that you can't attribute to any given character, and the action is as much seen as told.

That's fine; I don't mind. But I do find it a little bit perplexing that, for something that was always going to be a little bit abstruse, the director decided that its first-ever operatic production should be so inscrutable, even beyond what would be like in any event. Seriously, just try to say what's actually happening in most of this. Why is there a guy painted white carrying an illuminated balloon that keeps popping in? Why is there a giant fish-car near the end? What is HAPPENING here?!?

Well, okay, I still enjoyed it. It's not reasonable to expect a piece like this to seamlessly transform into an opera, and it's very interesting to hear this other side of Schoenberg: I don't think I've heard to pieces by a single composer more different than this and Moses und Aron. If you want to see it, that youtube video will be up for the next week, after which you'll have to buy the DVD.

Hans Werner Henze, Der junge Lord (1965)

If you're going to watch this very strange, perhaps not wholly satisfying opera, you might want to do it without having read a summary beforehand. So if you read on, you have only yourself to blame!

So we're in this German town, and everyone's excited because a rich Englishman, Sir Edgar, is moving in (while this is happening, there's also a romance between two townspeople, Luise and Wilhelm, but that's not really relevant until the end). But the townspeople get annoyed because Sir Edgar is standoffish and won't go to their soirées or otherwise participate in the town's life. He only goes to a circus that's passing through, and invites some of the circus performers (including an ape, or at least a guy in an ape suit) to dine at his house. Some amount of time passes, and weird noises are heard coming from Sir Edgar's house. But his secretary explains that these noises come from Lord Barrat (the title character), who is still learning German and being punished for his mistakes. But soon, he'll be better at it, and then all the people are invited to a party in the house! Whoo! This mollifies them. At the party, Lord Barrat is acting very weird, but the townspeople find this charming and begin to imitate him. Luise is attracted to him, to Wilhelm's dismay. A while later, at another party, there's an understanding that she and Barrat are going to be engaged. Everyone's dancing, which dancing becomes progressively wilder and wilder, until finally Lord Barrat's human disguise falls off and he is revealed to be an ape. The same ape from the circus? Maybe. That is wholly unclear.

So yeah, something about conformity, small-mindedness, a bit of emperor's-new-clothes, like that? Or maybe just, English people are weird? But to be honest, it feels to me like a joke with no punchline. I continue to like Henze's music, and his versatility is impressive here, vacillating between romantic and stately dance music to wilder and wilder stuff as the situation warrants.

And yet...well, I wouldn't rank it among my favorite of Henze's operas. It's not long, only a few hours, but it somehow seemed to drag a bit, for me, and as noted above, I don't know that the scenario pays off in any way. The relationship between Luise and Wilhelm is really a big ol' nothing, which on the one hand is clearly essential, but on the other, eh...and how about Lord Edgar's black servant Begonia (okay, given the time period of the opera, clearly slave, but let's just whitewash that for the moment), who keeps pronouncing--in English--what "Jamaica girls" do, and what Napoleon did (I know that sounds like gibberish, but watch it and you'll see). Is this in some way racist? And even if not, what's the purpose of it? The plotting seems...a bit iffy to me.

We have this DVD, I think of the debut, which is fine. Loren Driscoll particularly is a hoot as Lord Barrat, twitching around in a very animalistic way (he's wearing an ape suit under his clothes; the transformation works well in its low-tech way).

So yeah, even if I didn't love it, it was still okay; I will never pass up the opportunity to see a Henze opera.

Oh yeah, I also want to note that this is my fiftieth German-language opera.  German is still fourth, behind Italian, English, and French in that order, but it's moving on up.

Boris Blacher, 200 000 Taler (1970)

Yeah! Another opera to be alphabetized before 'A!' But can anything take the place of 1984 in the number one slot? Well, I suppose if there was an opera called The 10 Commandments? Though in that case, it would probably spell out 'ten,' alas. What I REALLY need is an opera whose title somehow starts with punctuation. The most likely would be an ellipses, like if it were called ...and justice for all or something. No doubt some would argue that you should just ignore the punctuation and alphabetize it according to the first letter, but I can't get behind these new-fangled ideas.

You might ask: how the hell do you even find obscure operas like this, anyway? Well, the general answer is, I'm always poking around. But the specific answer in this case is, I was contemplating how pre-war Germany had an amazing musical cultural that was badly crippled when the nazis, in the name of "purifying" the country, either murdered or drove into exile so many of their most important musicians, like the enormous dumbasses they were and are. So then I thought, what post-war German composers even are there aside from Hans Werner Henze and Gottfried von Einem? So I did a google search and entered all the ones I found into amazon to see if they had any operas on disc, and Bob's yer uncle. Job's a good'un.

It's based on a play by Shalom Aleichem, best known for the short story collection Tevye the Dairyman that was adapted into Fiddler on the Roof, and I must warn you that the original stories are way darker than the musical. No worries, though; this one's pretty cheerful. It's about Jews living in a Ukrainian shtetl round about the beginning of the twentieth century. Soroker is a tailor with two assistants, Motel and Kopel, both of whom are vying for his daughter Bailke's favors. They're a little bit in debt, a little late with the bills, but more or less doing okay. Soroker habitually plays the lottery, and guess what? Today, he has the winning ticket! He's won a sum of...well, the title gives it away. So he moves into a bigger house and is now hobnobbing with rich people, in a kind of awkward way; he also has a plan to start an apartment complex for poor people where they won't be evicted (excellent plan). The rich people are maneuvering to get his money, and now his daughter--obviously--can't marry Motel or Kopel, so Soroker tries to arrange a marriage with a rich guy, which she isn't happy about. She ends up running away with them, but then it turns out that Soroker's ticket didn't win after all, so everyone goes back to their old digs, relieved to be away from all that idiocy. Bailke is going to marry Motel; Kopel is disappointed but accepts it. And that's our story. The characters are very likable; Motel and Kopel are especially so as friendly rivals who remain friendly even when one of them loses; none of the violence you'd get in many operas.

Blacher himself wasn't Jewish, but the story--obviously, given the source--is extremely so, which is interesting: I've never seen such an opera before (somehow, La Juive, although written by a Jewish composer, isn't quite in the same category); the fact that it's German only makes that more compelling. The attitudes and philosophies of the characters definitely feel Jewish: with that kind of rueful, ironic acceptance of fortune and resignation to its vicissitudes. The music here is...well, it's a little bit modernist, a little dissonant in places, but not, I wouldn't say, the kind of thing likely to alienate anyone; it's melodic in its way, but mainly its unobtrusive--it propels the story, but the story feels more central than the music instead of the other way round. The singing is very conversational; there are no arias, but it's really just a fun story. The Mad Magazine "satire" (not sure they really knew what satire is) would call him "Bore-us Blecher," but I would not do that, for I enjoyed his work. This video is of the 1970 premiere; naturally, the video quality isn't quite up to contemporary standards, but basically everything's fine. Günter Reich is particularly notable as Soroker, having a sort of disheveled, hangdog quality that suits the character.

I don't think anyone thinks too much about Blacher nowadays, but I should like to see more of his work. A lot of it is supposed to be very weird and experimental (in contrast to this); either way, I think he's due a renewed wave of interest.

Alexander von Zemlinsky, Der Zwerg (1922); and Viktor Ullmann, Der zerbrochne Krug (1941)

The category is: composers murdered by scumsucking nazis. Actually, Zemlinsky was "only" murdered by proxy; he made it to New York but died soon after of, you know, nazi-related stress. Whereas Ullmann was straight-up murdered at Auschwitz. There's no way to sugar-coat it.  This production is a double-feature of a one-act opera by each of them, to show us, I suppose what we lost.

It's tempting to just call nazis shitheads and be done with it, and I'm certainly not going to stop that, but I think it might be more rhetorically effective to just point out what enormous dumbasses they were and are. They've more or less accepted that they're evil, or at least that people will call them that, but nobody wants to be thought of as a slackjawed dimwit. And yet: German culture, including music, was really vibrant at the start of the twentieth century. German was eclipsing Italian as the primary language of opera. And then, in the name of "purifying" their culture, these moronic cavemen destroyed all that. Great job, fellows! You are truly, deeply stupid people.

Well, enough said on that topic for now. How about the operas themselves? Der zerbrochne Krug is a comedy based on play by Heinrich von Kleist. The story is that a woman is going to court to try to find out who broke her water jug, but then it turns out that the judge himself broke it! I'm sorry; I find it just a little implausible that somebody charged with upholding the law would, on the contrary, break said law. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to take a long drink of water while I check twitter.

Supposedly, the jug represents her virginity, but I found that somewhat obscure. If this seems like a pretty thin plot, well, the whole opera's less than forty minutes long. This is understandable, given that Ullmann was interned at the Theresienstadt concentration camp when he wrote it. I mean, not that the story demands anything longer. But whatever the case, the whole thing can't help feeling a bit slight. I think the best part is the overture, here elegantly staged with silhouettes behind the image of a jug enacting the crime. That's fun, but the music doesn't really capture me aside from that.

Der Zwerg is an entirely different story. It's based on "The Birthday of the Infanta," a story by Oscar Wilde, and, per Wikipedia:

Yes...it's "semi-autobiographical." Good god, wikipedia: it's true that neither Zemlinsky's nor Wilde's lives ended happily, but what the hell do you imagine they were LIKE? Crikey. The story is that some sultan has sent a dwarf as a present for the infanta on her eighteenth birthday. He doesn't know that he's deformed because he's never seen his reflection; he thinks he's a dashing knight. She plays with him a little, gives him a rose, and leaves. He ends up seeing his reflection, being casually rejected by the infanta, and dying of a broken heart, the one compassionate lady-in-waiting notwithstanding.

Zemlinsky's music is just great: really delicate romantic stuff that becomes dramatic when need be. Based on the evidence of just these two operas, I'd say he was the better composer. And MY GOODNESS, the emotional cruelty of the plot: it is not surprising that this comes from the writer of The Picture of Dorian Gray. And Mary Dunleavy really brings it across as the infanta:

"Oh well, time to go dancing!" It's strong stuff, for sure. The title character is played by Rodrick Dixon, an African American singer, and he's very good, but this also causes me to feel complicated emotions. Because, yes, it's easy to imagine the characters in the play feel significant casual racism to go with the rest of their callousness. His ethnicity marks him as different as much as his hump does (or more, really; the hump isn't particularly visible much of the time). So that's fine in theory, but you sort of think, I mean, I'm sure no one involved in the production was intentionally thinking "hey, look at this freak, on top of everything else, he's black!" But...I don't know. The thought that that may have been a calculation in his casting remained in the back of my mind. Maybe I'm overthinking this, obviously we have reasons to be thinking hard about race issues lately, but it did make me a little uncomfortable. OH WELL. Good opera regardless, and another thing I especially liked about it was that it comes dead last on my alphabetical list. It may in fact actually be the furthest-back opera title in the world. Unless there's a Zygotes: The Opera out there. And now I'm picturing an opera based on  "Diary of an Unborn Child." What fun.

Richard Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919)

This was going to be part of the Met's Live in HD series this coming year, but I'm pretty sure it, along with many others, has been cancelled, as the first half of the Met's season isn't happening--and, let's be real, not the last half either, even if they haven't made it official. I was waiting to see this for that reason, but now, might as well. I'd been curious about it; I had zero idea what it was about, and that title ("the woman without a shadow") didn't tell me anything. It is, however, probably one of the better-known operas that I still hadn't seen, so hey. A few people on the Met facebook group were saying that it was kind of inaccessible and a bit of an acquired taste, but was that going to stop me? Are you STUPID er sumpthin'?

Well...people said that with reason, I'll say that much. This is a very strange opera; not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, but it's still kind of difficult to see what Strauss and Hofmannsthal were trying to accomplish. I don't know how well I can summarize it: there are definitely things that happen in it in a certain order, but it's often very unclear why these things are happening, or how one leads to another. So: there's this legendary, mystical realm of some sort. The Empress doesn't have a shadow, which in some way signifies her inability to conceive children. The Empress' father, Keikobad, sends a message to her that if she doesn't find herself a shadow, her husband the Emperor will be turned to stone (see? I can tell you that these things happen, but if you respond "what? why?" I have no answer). The Empress and her Nurse go down to the human world where they meet Barak the dyer and his wife (who is only known as "Barak's Wife"). He wants to have children, but she doesn't. They offer to buy Barak's wife's shadow, and she agrees to sell it to them, but for unknown reasons, they first have to stay there for three days. Some other weird stuff happens that I don't understand, and Barak's wife tells him that she's sold her shadow. He gets mad at this and is going to kill her, but then they get sucked into the mystical realm. They're separated, but they both sing about how they love each other. The Empress is encouraged to go ahead and take the wife's shadow, but she refuses, and as a reward, Everybody Gets a Shadow, and the women can have kids, apparently.

Um...yeah. At one point, Barak accurately sums up how I felt about what was going on:

You and me both, brother.  Apparently Hofmannsthal compared this to Die Zauberflöte, which is appropriate in that both that and this have weird, alienating plots, but Mozart's opera at least makes sense on its own terms, and I'm not sure this does (though in fairness, this also lacks the explicit misogyny, Barak's Wife's lack of a name notwithstanding). It's certainly not inconceivable that I could warm to it in time, but, well, that hasn't happened yet. The music is, you know, fine; it's Strauss. Quite varied. And yet, I feel like if the characters are all singing sheer madness, it takes away from the overall effect.

This production is pretty good, though some complain in comments about the Russian singers mangling the German libretto; I couldn't really speak to that. It's from the Mariinsky Theatre, though, and the production is predictably spectacular: the "mystical realm" parts take place in a glittery fairyland, and the "real world" parts (as you can maybe tell from that screenshot) in Barak's ratty-looking, working-class residence. There's some predictable whining about this in the comments, but good god, people. Opera would be so boring if it were preserved in amber like you want. This isn't even Eurotrash, and it seems to me to be perfectly faithful to the spirit of the thing. The standout among the singers is definitely Olga Sergeyeva as Barak's Wife.

I dunno. As I say, I could warm to this, but I really cannot adequately emphasize how fucking nuts the whole thing is. It's my seventh Strauss opera, and nothing in any of those first six would have led me to anticipate something like this.

Douglas J. Cuomo, Doubt (2013)

This is based on the play by John Patrick Shanley about a Catholic school in 1964 where the principle starts to suspect that the pastor is a pedophile. But! She might be wrong. I was actually somewhat familiar with the story already: I saw an actual production of the play back in the day, as well as the movie version starring the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman. Which one was better? I...cannot even begin to remember. So that was helpful!

I saw this now--from the Minnesota Opera, where it originally debuted--because it's on PBS just until the twelfth, so didn't want to miss it. Then, I saw that there was actually no time pressure because someone had uploaded a copy to youtube. So I watched a really good opera for NOTHING! What a waste!

I'm actually not sure whether the central drama here one hundred percent works for me: because for most of the runtime, the principle, Sister Aloysius, thinks Father Flynn is molesting their first black student based on NOTHING. It's ridiculous. She seems to have the idea that because he has long fingernails and likes sugar in his tea and enjoyed secular Christmas songs, he's some sort of sybarite and therefore he must be a child molester. QED. The other piece of evidence is that the child in question, Donald Miller, was taken from his class one day and came back acting odd, his breath smelling of alcohol. But the given explanation, which everyone confirms, is that he was caught drinking communion wine and was upset over that, which is an obvious, natural explanation and what kind of lunatic would instead jump to "the priest must've been getting him hammered so he could molest him?" Seriously. Later, on Aloysius calls Flynn's previous precinct, and it seems like he's bounced around from district to district, which DOES seems suspicious, but it's just hard not to realize, okay, but she did this calling based on absolutely NOTHING. It doesn't validate anything that came before. You can't just spend the whole time presenting no evidence and then present evidence at the very end and say "see? The fact that there was evidence at the end proves that there was evidence the whole time." No it doesn't. I mean sure, at the end we learn that Sister Aloysius isn't actually as sure about his guilt as all that, but...I don't know if that's really enough.

That was a negative assessment, so it sounds kind of weird to say that I got involved in the drama regardless, but so I did, helped along by dramatic music that at times does indeed seem to demonstrate the concept of "doubt" in operatic form. And that's to say nothing of the excellent acting that we get. I especially want to highlight Denyce Graves as Donald's mother: she only gets one scene, but with all due respect to the rest of the cast, with that one scene she absolutely steals the show. While watching, I thought that she sounded for all the world like a contralto, but then I checked afterwards and saw that she identifies as a mezzo-soprano: well, maybe my ear is off, or maybe it makes you more marketable to be labeled a mezzo, but whatever she is, her voice is very distinct and very forceful.

Another good contemporary opera. Of course, it's impossible to know what will and won't endure over the years and centuries (I mean, even assuming society does), but it's definitely noticeable that even though opera obviously has a less prominent cultural role than it once did (in spite of which, it's interesting to note that I've seen significantly more operas from the 2010s than any other single decade), artistically speaking, as a genre it's still in pretty darn good shape.

Various, Intermedi della Pellegrina (1589)

Whoa, what's this? Well, it's a rather interesting thing. I don't know why, but I've never thought much about the prehistory of opera. Did I just assume that it just somehow appeared ex nihilo 1600-ish? Well...not exactly, but I didn't assume it didn't, either. For whatever reason, I never really thought much about it at all. But here's the real story, as I understand it: starting as far back as the late fifteenth century, plays would have little musical interludes between acts (and by the way, "intermedio" is the same thing as "intermezzo;" that was confusing me for a while). As the sixteenth century proceeded these became more and more elaborate and to have their own little narratives. At the same time, they became increasingly popular, until they started to overshadow the plays they were associated with (to the playwrights' annoyance). Given all this, it was only a matter of time until people started cutting out the non-musical plays altogether and just creating purely musical narratives. Also interesting to note that at a certain point operas started having their own intermezzi, whether it was elaborate ballets or whole other operas (eg, La Serva Padrona).

As for the present...thing: in 1589, Ferdinando de' Medici and Christina de Lorraine were to be wed. This marriage was meant to be an extremely Big Deal politically, as it was to cement the Medicis' status as a power player in Europe. So naturally, they needed to have the most insanely lavish wedding possible--involving two years of planning, according to the notes. The centerpiece of this celebration was to be a play by the poet Girolamo Bargagli called Pellegrina. And, naturally, Pellegrina was also to have musical accompaniment--the fanciest musical accompaniment that the greatest minds of late-Renaissance Italy could muster. Of these intermezzi, there are six, by many of the most influential composers of the era: Cristofano Malvezzi, Luca Marenzio, Giulio Caccini, Giovanni de' Bardi, Jacopo Peri, and Emilio de' Cavalieri. Not exactly household names today, unless you live in a household with an ancient music expert, but hugely influential on the development of Western music. You may recognize Peri as the composer of both the first known opera, Dafne, as well as the earliest surviving one, Euridice (how come no one ever seems to stage Euridice? I'd love to see it. I've listened to bits and pieces on youtube, and the music is extremely listenable).

So anyway. I don't think anyone thinks much about Pellegrina these days. It's extant; you can even read an English translation if you want, but the music accompanying it is surely of much more interest to many more people. What we have here is a staged version performed in Florence last year. It's a slightly weird thing: the audience moves around and sees different of the intermezzi at different locations. The conceit, such as it is, is that this is indeed the wedding of Ferdinando and Christina, only in a modern context. There's a voice through a loudspeaker between the pieces explaining what's happening, stuff along the lines of "here comes the bride in her Rolls Royce, see how graceful she is." It works okay. The actual singers are dressed in loud Sergeant-Pepper-esque costumes, and there's a lot of weird business with people with bows and arrows and golf clubs (???) and stuff. It's definitely colorful, at any rate.

As for the music itself: well, there are plot descriptions in the booklet: 1. Harmony descends to Earth to pay tribute to the couple; 2. A singing contest between mortals and muses; 3. Apollo vs. Python; 4. Announcement of a new Golden Age; 5. sea gods and demigods pay tribute to the couple; and 6. Jupiter comes down to help everyone party. Obviously, there is a common theme here, though they aren't directly related plotwise. But actually, I was sort of surprised by how little story there really is: you would be hard-pressed, I think to actually discern most of these plots just by watching them. It really is primarily showering praise on the couple.

The music is definitely pre-baroque: you can kind of see how this would evolve into the baroque, but we're not there yet. Very much of the Renaissance. A lot of elaborate madrigals. The singing's fine--nobody with any international presence, but that's fine--though even though it's less than an hour and a half total, that kind of thing does get a little monotonous to me sooner rather than later. Ultimately, it's super-interesting to me to better understand the development of opera, but this is mostly a more or less pleasant curiosity than anything else.

So...did this marriage make the Medicis into power players? And after all this glitz, was it in fact a happy marriage? A bit anticlimactic if not, but alas, I have absolutely no idea; the internet does not seem to say. But you don't see too many Medicis tromping around today, so draw your own conclusions.

Giacomo Meyerbeer, Les Huguenots (1836)

Finally getting around to this. Huguenots were French Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They suffered a lot of persecution from the Catholic majority, and this concerns events leading up to probably the biggest persecution of all, the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre in which--according to wikipedia--between five and thirty thousand of them were murdered. That's quite a range, but horrendous even at the low end--though in fairness, the way some of the characters in this opera talk, it sounds as though the Protestants would've been happy to do the same, given opposite power differentials.

I say "events leading up to" the massacre, but I should clarify that these are all, as far as I can tell, wholly fictional events. So basically the Catholics are just doing their thing when this Protestant, Raoul de Nangis, shows up with his servant. There's a certain amount of tension, but things are basically cordial. Raoul tells about this woman he'd rescued from some sort of attack on the street and how he's in love with her now. But oh no, it turns out this woman (a count's daughter, named Valentine) is going to be married to de Nevers, this Catholic playboy type. But the queen's told her to break it off with him, because she wants her to marry Raoul instead to improve interfaith relations. But he refuses, because he thinks she's still involved with de Nevers. So she ends up marrying Nevers after all. Later, the Catholics are planning this massacre, and Raoul and Valentine are all oh no what should we do, we're still in love? He obviously wants to save his coreligionists, but her family, oh no, and eventually she converts to be with him and they're all martyred. And then Valentine's dad, who helped arrange the massacre, is sad. OH WELL. There are obvious affinities with La Juive, another story about religious intolerance that had premiered just a year prior. I don't know if it was a conscious influence.

So I did like this a lot. I didn't like it as much as Il crociato in Egitto (which I know is a weird opinion), but nonetheless. The music was what I expected, basically, but generally fun, with a lot of strong dramatic moments, and the climax is pretty intense. Robert le Diable had its Undead Nuns Ballet; this one has a ballet where gypsies appear for no reason and dance and then leave, not affecting the plot in any way. But their music rules!

Still, it must be said, the plotting here is...not great. First there's just the macro-level issue: the opera really never shows tensions increasing between the two factions, so you really don't get any idea of why they go from being sort of friendly to murderous in just a few acts. That seems important, somehow. But then there are the characters themselves: first, just in passing, let's note that Raoul and Valentine have literally no onstage interaction before they decide they're in love; I know people fall in love in operas with very little provocation, but this still seems excessive. Still, no big deal.  More to the point, it's really not clear why Raoul refuses to marry Valentine; I know that in theory it's because she thinks he's still involved with de Nevers, but the text doesn't make this clear. Also, we just have to assume that she decided to marry de Nevers anyway, which just seems weird. And de Nevers himself: while all the other Catholics are planning the massacre, he objects that it would be dishonorable, so you think okay, the feckless playboy showing some spine, that's an interesting character thing, where is this going? Well, it's going nowhere, because the next and last we hear of de Nevers, we're told, with no further elaboration, that he's been murdered offstage. There's no world where that's good writing. I think the opera kills him off just because it's inconvenient to the plot for Valentine to still be married to him.

I mean, I still liked it, but SHEESH, you write great music, why don't you want to have a decent libretto to accompany it?

I saw this 1990 production from the Sydney Opera House, which was part of a farewell gala to commemorate Joan Sutherland's retirement (it used to be on youtube, but I think it's been taken down). She plays the queen, naturally. It's kind of weird that she choose this as her final role, as the queen actually has a rather small role, only appearing in the second act (out of five, as grand opera generally went), and doesn't really get to distinguish herself vocally very much. And if you don't want to have a negative opinion about Joan Sutherland, you should definitely not read the following from her wikipedia page:

After retirement, Sutherland made relatively few public appearances, preferring a quiet life at her home in Les Avants, Switzerland. One exception was her 1994 address at a lunch organised by Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, when Sutherland commented: "It also upsets me that it is such a damned job to get an Australian passport now – you have to go to be interviewed by a Chinese or an Indian. I'm not particularly racist, but I find it ludicrous."

So Joan "not particularly racist" Sutherland nonetheless quivers in rage at the possibility of having to interact with an Asian person. Cool. You know, if I were ever inclined to be tolerant of this kind of thing from out-of-touch old people (which I wasn't), I now am less than ever. Racist garbage like this fucking sucks, so I am hereby officially declaring Joan Sutherland cancelled. There will be no appeal.

Still! Everyone else is fine. Amanda Thane is a striking Valentine, Anson Austin a passionate Raoul. Also, Suzanne Johnston in a smallish trouser role as the queen's page makes a strong impression. 

Meyerbeer definitely isn't performed as much as he should be (how about the Met doing one of his operas Live in HD, when and if opera can ever be performed again?) but there is one other production of this available on disc:

Er...you all know that I like me some Eurotrash, but I think this might be a bridge too far. Is that the Catholics at some sort of pool party? What? And why is the title written in a "wacky" font as if this were some kind of comedy? Incredibly strange, and while I should keep an open mind, I just have very grave doubts about whether this supports the drama.

Federico Chueca, Agua, azucarillos y aguardiente (1897)

Not gonna lie: I made a bit of a miscalculation with this one. I wasn't sure whether I should write anything about it at all, but what the hell. My experience might be of interest. Or not! But it's my blog! None can stop me!

So this is a zarzuela, which would be a good scrabble word, although you'd have to use a blank for one of the z's. I came upon this production, which doesn't have English subtitles BUT does include Spanish closed captioning. So I thought, okay, fine, I've done this many times before in situations like this: I'll just auto-translate them, and sure, they'll be a bit mangled in places, but still perfectly followable. This turned out...not to be the case. I think it's because the closed captioning is "auto-generated" (not sure how that works in practice), meaning it's probably already in pretty bad Spanish, but when it was further rendered into English, most of it was just utter gibberish. Plus, most of the music wasn't closed captioned at all. So...not ideal.

The title means "water, sugar, and brandy," which was apparently a popular cry of nineteenth-century Spanish street vendors.  I know that the story involves a young woman, Asia, with literary ambitions. She has a boyfriend but no money, and her mother wants her to marry a rich guy. And...other stuff happens. Honestly, there's a detailed plot summary here, but I just read it and think, huh. That...happened? Did it? If you say so. So let's concede that I did not watch this under ideal conditions.

But what about the MUSIC? That's the important thing, no? Well...that's open to debate. Because the thing is, there ain't much of it. This is a seventy-ish-minute thing, and the actual music part is...maybe twenty minutes? And also, the finale takes up a good ten minutes of that, so it feels very unbalanced, and music is not common. And what music there was didn't do much for me. There were parts where I thought, okay, this could get good, but then it would just be over, and I'd think, huh. That amounted to...very little.

I mean, the production is bright and pretty, for sure. But I didn't like it, and I think that's only partially because I didn't understand it. Is this opera? Well...I guess it has to be operetta, at any rate. There's no rule about how much music it has to contain to "count." But I don't know if I should even include it on my big ol' list of Watched Operas. There's no DVD or anywhere, as far as I know, to watch it with proper English subs, but I will, in scrupulous fairness, find another zarzuela to see that I CAN see properly before I cast my Terrible Judgment on the whole genre.

Leonard Bernstein, Trouble in Tahiti (1952)

I mean, I knew Bernstein was a conductor, but as a composer, I always just associate him with West Side Story. Musicals are a perfectly valid art form, but not the one I'm passionate about. But he wrote a few operas also? Well, at any rate, this came up on Operavision, so I watched it. And, yup, it's undeniably an opera, although you can also see how Bernstein's talent could easily be turned to musical theater.

It's a short one-act affair, about a fifties suburban white-picket-fence-style couple, Sam and Dinah, who love each other on some level, or at least remember feeling that way and wish they did again, but have lost the ability to communicate with each other. Those are the only two solo roles, but there's also a trio who does commercial-jingle-style numbers evoking the greatness of suburbia. There's not much of a plot; their son is in a school play, but Sam has a handball thing he has to instead, which creates conflict, although then Dinah doesn't end up going either (they should bond over how much they hate their son). Instead, she goes to see a cheesy Hollywood musical Trouble in Tahiti. In the end, will they work things out? Unclear. Bernstein did write a sequel to this thirty years later, A Quiet Place (the title coming from the libretto here), but it doesn't seem to be very popular or well-known.

Well...yeah. I thought this was rather subtle and good. Sometimes the music feels a bit thin, but at less than an hour, it doesn't overstay its welcome. The number where Dinah is describing Trouble in Tahiti is a definite highlight. The Opera North production on Operavision really nails the sort of hyperreal fifties atmosphere that we're going for here. I was sufficiently invested that I would not mind seeing the sequel, but that may be easier said than done. Still. Cool. Bernstein could write operas. I'm sure he's relieved to have my seal of approval. Here it is:

Richard Strauss, Arabella (1933)

So there's an aristocratic family in hard financial times. They have two daughters, Arabella and Zdenka. However, they've decided that marrying off two daughters would be too expensive, so the parents have raised Zdenka as a boy. As you do. They're desperately trying to get Arabella married off to a rich guy to achieve financial stability, but she can't settle on anyone. She has three Three-Stooges-ish suitors whom she keeps more or less at arm's length, and another suitor, Matteo, in whom she has no interest. Zdenka is secretly in love with Matteo (who thinks she's a man), and she's writing him notes purporting to be from her sister to keep him from committing suicide in despair (seems like a healthy dynamic). Their dad has contacted a rich old friend, sending him a portrait of Arabella; it turns out he's died, but his nephew, Mandryka, got the letter and portrait and from it fell madly in love with her. They meet and fall in love and they're going to be married.

So far so good, but when the actual conflict of the opera starts...it gets a little bit iffy. Zdenka gives Matteo a key allegedly to Arabella's room, and tells him that she wants to see him (I have zero idea how this scenario was meant to work out). Mandryka overhears this and immediately turns into a hysterical douchebag; you know it's a comedy so things are going to work out, but it's really a hacky-sitcom-level conflict, and I found watching it play out to be a bit tedious. I suppose there's not even any point to mentioning Matteo's immediately transferring his affections to Zdenka when he learns the truth, since that's just how these things go, but still. I mean, in the end, the story still sort of worked for me, but--even with Mandryka repenting of his douchebaggery in the most emphatic way possible--it's hard not to have a certain skepticism of how this whole thing's gonna work out in the long term.

Still! The music! My goodness! So, I mean, I haven't seen all of Strauss' operas (though I'd like to!), but am I correct in believing that after Elektra, he just abandoned the whole modernist thing in favor of more traditional sweeping romanticism? Well, I can't say he wasn't good at it. In particular, the duet where Arabella and Mandryka first pledge their troth to one another is one of the most meltingly gorgeous things I've seen in any opera anywhere. We sometimes cavil about how people in operas fall desperately in love implausibly instantaneously, but really, with music this good, who wouldn't?

This was Hugo von Hofmannsthal's last libretto for Strauss (he also wrote Elektra, Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, and others). It's a sad story; he died of a stroke at the age of fifty-five two days after his son committed suicide. But the point is, he died soon after completing Arabella's libretto, he didn't have a chance to revise it, and Strauss wouldn't let anyone else touch it, which may explain why it's a bit rough around the edges, but it's still extremely worth seeing. The production I saw...well, I can't exactly find it now.  Vienna's State Opera is replaying an opera every day, and this doesn't seem to be online anymore. It updates the action from the 1860s to the 1930s, which creates a few anachronisms that I barely noticed. It was perfectly fine.

Modest Mussorgsky, Sorochintsy Fair (1880)

A pleasant surprise from Operavision; a less-performed unfinished Mussorgsky opera than Khovanshchina, though if I understand aright, it's probably finished to a comparable degree. It has, unsurprisingly, been completed by various people over the years, but the Komische Oper Berlin version is the one completed by Vissarion Shebalin (hardly a household name), which is the most common version. And it's a comedy, no less! Boris and Khovanschina are more or less of a kind, but this is very different.

Good god, where to start? So the supernatural backstory is that a devil was thrown out of Hell and pawned his overcoat at the local pub. He's going to redeem it a year later, but in the meantime, it was sold, and now he haunts the village, looking for his dang ol' overcoat. That's actually not very relevant as a plot point, but it hangs over the whole show. The plot is that Parasya wants to marry Gritsko, which her father is okay with, but her stepmother is against. So that's bad. The stepmother, Khivrya, has a lover, a local priest. He's there when her husband comes home with his drinking buddies, and there's some comical business where she tries to hide him. Gritsko has a dream about a witches' sabbath. The two lovers are going to get married in spite of stepma. And...that's it.

If that doesn't sound like much of a plot, well, it's not. That might be because it's incomplete--a lot of plot threads just trail off--but I get the strong impression that the incompleteness is basically in the music, and this is how it was always going to be. It strongly reminded me of Rimsky-Korsakov's May Night: a strongly folk-inflected, plot-light opera about drunken peasants futzing around, with some supernatural elements. And there's a good reason for this similarity: both that and this are based on stories from Gogol's Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, which I now kind of want to read.

So you really just have to take the story for the shambolic sort of thing it is, but the music is very good. As why wouldn't it be? As I said, very folk-y. This version interpolates "Night on Bald Mountain" into the dream sequence, which is appropriate and awesome. The production I found highly effective, being a kind of minimalistic thing with more or less period costumes and a lot of green lighting. As for the case, my vote for VIP is Agnes Zwierko as Khivrya. She's very good and very funny.

I mean, okay, nobody would probably call this a major piece of work, but especially given how few Mussorgsky operas there are, we should be glad to have a third one. This was recorded in 2017 but isn't available on disc, which raises the disturbing question: you had this recording all the time, but you were just...sitting on it? What the heck? I suppose it must've streamed somewhere at the time, but man. Why hide your light under a bushel? Free the operas!