Francesco Cavalli, Erismena (1655)

I was looking through the various operas I'd downloaded, and came across this which I somehow didn't even remember. Imagine that! French subtitles, which, again, I could easily follow. Seriously, why isn't this on DVD? It's a professional recording of a high-quality production. Fun fact: it was translated to English some time after its composition, making it the first-ever English-language opera, though it's not clear if that version was ever performed.

So we're in Media, which is an ancient kingdom more or less where Iran is today. The king, Erimante, is freaked out because he's having dreams where this young Armenian warrior who's been wounded and captured is going to end up taking over his kingdom. But he's actually a woman, Erismena, in disguise; she's there in search of her lover who abandoned her. He's going by the name of Erineo, but he's actually Idraspe, an Iberian prince. There's also a slave, Aldimira, who has several suitors whom she throws over when she falls in love with Erismena in drag. Comic-relief skirt-role nurse who reveals critical information. Various tangly things happen; the king tries to have Erismena poisoned, but in the end--spoiler!--it turns out Erismena is actually secretly Erimante's daughter, in true, goofy baroque fashion. So that's why he was having visions of her inheriting his crown, you see. Anyway, everyone ends up happy.

I don't know about you, but this plot feels distinctly Handelian to me. All these politics and mistaken identities and the protagonist in drag...I dug it. I mean, I always dug Cavalli, but the music felt especially luscious here. Maybe I'm just getting more onto his wavelength. I feel that I need to start using the word "arioso" when talking about these early operas: that's something between recitative and aria: you know it when you hear it; it's these things where it seems like it's going to resolve itself into a full-fledged aria, but then it just kind of melts away. That sounds like it ought to be maddening, but it can actually be quite enchanting. Anyway, there's a lot of that here.

Very good production. Featuring handguns in place of swords, but more timeless than contemporary. Really impressive performance by Francesca Aspromonte in the title role--including, not jarringly but still surprisingly, brief toplessness at the end. Which is actually kind of specified in the libretto, though it would be easy enough to work around it one were so inclined. Right there on youtube! THINK OF THE CHILDREN! Okay, all right.

Anyway, point being, I'm a bigger fan of Cavalli than you are. Whether that fact is enough to keep me warm at night is...another question.

Peter von Winter, Das Labyrinth oder Der Kampf mit den Elementen (1798)

You know what they say: "The sequel is always worse than the original, except for The Godfather, Gremlins, and The Addams Family. And maybe Star Trek, though that's a special case for obvious reasons. Also, this rule really only applies to movies. It definitely doesn't apply to videogames, which is probably the medium that gets the second-most sequels. Does it apply to opera? Again, not really; Il barbieri may be a prequel, depending on how you count, but it was by a different composer in a different period, so it's a different kind of thing. Doesn't really apply to the Ring cycle either, which was all written together. ARE there any operatic sequels per se? Well, it might apply, depending on the circumstances. Hard to say."

That's right: they say that whole, long thing. Once they've started, you will never get them to stop. You might as well just walk away. Anyway: what's this all about, dammit? Well, I think this is the first operatic sequel I've seen, and certainly the only one made more or less for the same reasons that most film sequels are--ie, to capitalize on the original's success and make BIG BUX. Not to bury the lede--I mean, you could probably guess, but--this is the EXCITING SEQUEL to Die Zauberflöte. It retains the same librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, as the original, so it's doesn't feel like a TOTAL bootleg, but if anybody enjoyed the original because of the greatness of the libretto, I would look at them funny, SO.

This really, really does feel like a superfluous Hollywood sequel: more of the same with no real justification and to very little effect. So: guess what? Tamino and Pamina are all ready to get married, but GUESS WHAT? The Queen of the Night is BACK! You thought she was gone for good? MORE FOOL YOU. She wants to capture her daughter to get her to marry some dude in her army! Sarastro has to muster his troops to stop them! Tamino and Pamina need to be tested again, for no reason! The extent of Papageno's faithfulness to Papagena is tested (also, we meet his parents and siblings). And oh no, Pamina has been captured! Will she be saved? Will everything end pretty much like the first one? Yup.

Seriously this libretto is a hot mess. Stuff happens for no apparent reason with little drama and unclear character motivations. Also--it must be said--while the misogyny is more or less relegated to the background this time, it more than makes up for that with racism. Hurray! So Monostatos may be black in the original, but it's not a thing that's hammered very hard, and it's easy for any production to downplay it to the point where it's not visible at all. NOT SO HERE. The libretto very specifically calls attention to his blackness, and there's a subplot where he's trying to dress as a...Papageno-person (I'm pretty sure he was just meant to be a guy dressed as a bird in the original, but here they all seem to be actually human-bird hybrids) to get Papagena, but it's ludicrous because he's black and all the Papagenoids want to kill him for having given them trouble before, and this is already REALLY damn queasy-making, but then how about the part where he wriggles out of it by bribing Papageno by promising to get a black woman for him? Yup, no shit. Of course, in addition to everything else, this doesn't do much for Papageno's character. Nothing ultimately comes of this (we see the black woman in question very briefly--there's a thankless role--but she never speaks or does anything). Did I mention that Monostatos and the other slave are in blackface? As it probably would have been in the original, but STILL. I mean, if you're going to produce this opera at all, there's no good solution here. the only available production is from Salzburg; I expect one produced in the US would have just had him played by a regular white dude, brazening through the discordance with the libretto. But it would be problematic in any event. You might say "this shouldn't be produced at all, given the problems," but you can see why there would be interest in it. I think the way they do it here is the best of a bad lot of options: at least it emphasizes the artificiality of the whole thing.

(I'd like to note that around this same time, Salieri wrote a non-racist opera with a sympathetic interracial couple--go Sal!)

It's a shame, really, because the music here is actually terrific. It does not need the benefit of having low expectations due to Mozart comparisons! It stands on its own beautifully. As you would figure, there are references to Mozart aplenty (Papageno gets a lot of glockenspiel riffs; the Queen of the Night a lot of high notes in imitation of her famous aria), but it also stands very well on its own. Winter (the "von" appears to be an affectation à la Balzac) was a prolific composer and very popular in his time, but he sure has fallen out of the public consciousness. His wikipedia page is barely more than a stub and doesn't even include a complete list of his operas. Go figure. I'd love to see more of his work, but that seems highly unlikely at this time.

The performance that exists is very colorful. The only complaint I have with it is that Michael Schade is WILDLY miscast as Tamino--the character is underdeveloped, sure, and never more so than here, but while I feel like a jerk saying it, he is WAY too fat and old for the part. He looks like a substitute math teacher. Still, since it seems unlikely that this will be ever recorded again, ya gotta just roll with it.

Virgil Thomson, The Mother of Us All (1947)

Per Wikipedia, Thomson "was instrumental in the development of the 'American sound' in classical music." How did I even hear about him, though? I think it was probably just sifting through the horizontal list that appears at the top of the page after a google search for "American operas," but that was some time ago. How come there's virtually no pre-twentieth-century American opera, or at least any that's remembered enough to appear in searches? It is a mystery!

This is about Susan B. Anthony. More or less. It's kind of jumbled, and there's a bewildering assortment of other characters, real and fictional, the former category including John Adams, Anthony Comstock, Daniel Webster, and Ulysses S Grant. It's basically her struggle for women's suffrage. What else would it be?

You can see that I'm having trouble summarizing it, but the libretto really IS willfully obscure. It's by Gertrude Stein, whom he had met when they were both living in Paris in the twenties, and...you couldn't call it hermetic poetry, exactly, but it definitely feels like it's written by a person who also wrote hermetic poetry, if you get me. I did not find it dramatically satisfying.

And this is a shame, because Thomson's music is great; you can definitely recognize that "American sound," even if you struggle to define it. A strong country-folk aesthetic, with melodies bubbling to the surface that you'd swear are half-forgotten folk songs. I would like to hear a Thomson opera with a libretto by...someone else.

Still, it's good that this is available to see. There's a production from earlier this year--before everything went to Hell--from the Met, which confusingly is short for Metropolitan Museum of Art in this case--apparently, they put on shows on occasion. It's performed in the museum, with a small audience of presumably donors. It's pretty good!

You'll recall that Our Hero President, well-known as a bold feminist icon, recently pardoned Susan B. Anthony for having voted illegally. Pretty sure nobody ever thought about that even a tiny bit or considered it some kind of great, lingering, social injustice--it's not even featured as a plot point in this piece--but WHATEVER.

#OperaHarmony - Week Four

And so it comes to an end. This group isn't as strong as last week's, but there are definitely some highlights. Here's a question you weren't wondering about but that I'm going to answer anyway: are you going to include each of these in your personal list of operas? ("Good question!" Thanks, me!) I'm not averse to including micro-operas in my list, but somehow it feels sort of cheap to just flood it with twenty of them all at once, especially since that would unceremoniously blast me past four hundred (not that there's going to be a ceremony, but you know). STILL, I've watched these, three hours twenty-five minutes in total, and I do want to acknowledge that, so I'm just going to include them all collectively, under the title #OperaHarmony, and not JUST because that allows me to have one placed alphabetically before the numerals. Some would argue that it would be proper to just ignore the hashtag and put it under O, but I don't put any stock in such wild rumors. So now you know.

Caleb Glickman, My Neighbor Figaro

A piano-based piece in which a woman is living alone in her apartment; it's presented as a video diary. Her upstairs neighbors are opera singers, which seems like it could be a nightmare, but it's not so bad: they always go out to practice and perform, so they never disturb her. But now with Covid, that's changing: everything's canceled, they're stuck inside, and they're driving her crazy with their singing. Finally she has a freakout, and they (presented only as disembodied voices) respond with kindness and invite her up, emphasizing the value of human solidarity. Also, the three of them are a tenor, soprano, and baritone, whereas she's a mezzo, so Symbolism: the four most common voice types coming together. I liked this a whole lot; it's a simple story, both funny and ultimately moving. I would say it ends a little abruptly--it's only eight minutes, so it clearly could've gone on for a little longer--but in spite of that, it might be my favorite of the week.

Harry Sever, La Solitudine

Man, I just don't know what to say about this one. It's very short (less than five minutes) and impenetrably abstract. We see some people running in the woods. Then we see people in houses, working on art projects, or not. The voiceover singing may have something to do with apartness and/or togetherness. I found the whole thing one hundred percent dull and uncompelling.

Michael Betteridge, Walk Out of Yourself

The backbone of this consists of British people out for walks--as I understand it, you're allowed to go out once a day in the UK--narrating and filming their situations, featuring both urban and rural areas. We also see these people (or their stand-ins) at home, singing about the situation. There's also a lot of wordless humming. I thought this was...okay. Fine. Pretty good. I realize that makes it sound like I didn't really like it, but seriously, it's not bad, even if I admire the concept more than enjoy the final product.

Nils Holger Petersen, Grief

There's an old man, some kind of teacher, whose wife has just unexpectedly died--and there's his student, though he only appears in the first part (supposedly, this is based on some kind of medieval correspondence between master and pupil). It's about the man trying to come to grips with the situation. In the end, he fails to come to terms with it in any way. I will acknowledge that this is well-made, but I really do think it suffers for that reason: I'm not saying you need some kind of Hollywood ending, but the lack of any resolution, even an oblique one, make me think, well okay, but what are you really trying to SAY here?

Ken Steen, APART/MENTAL

I would say that this one will almost certainly win this week, and is an odds-on favorite to win the whole thing. Of course, it has an advantage in that it's the last entry in the last week, and thus presumably likely to be the freshest in voters' memory, but there's definitely more to it than that. I wouldn't say it's MY favorite, but it's very ambitious and visually distinctive--it's certainly no injustice if it wins. It's about a Polish-Jewish-American super in an apartment complex. Cleaning supplies are supposed to come on the first of the month, but the next day, the disinfectant wipes are missing, and she takes it upon herself to try to figure out who took them, going from apartment to apartment and talking to the different tenants. This whole thing is presented as a kind of animation: everything is paper cut-outs on which characters' features and whatnot have been drawn (it looks nothing like South Park, if that's what you're wondering) (during the end credits, we see the cut-outs compared with pictures of the actual singers, after whom they are indeed modeled). The whole thing is a big ol' animated collage; extremely impressive and cool to look at. The music varies according to whose apartment we're at. It's very good; it may not be notably "deep"--it doesn't say anything in particular about the Covid situation--but I won't hold that against it. It's definitely a strong way for the series to go out.

Even if the results are inconsistent, this whole project was a really cool idea. I don't think there needs to be a pandemic; it would be neat if they chose a general theme of wide concern and did something similar on it every year. Or so I think!

Rankings:

1. My Neighbor Figaro

2. APART/MENTAL

3. Grief

4. Walk Out of Yourself

5. La Solitudine

Gioachino Rossini, La gazza ladra (1817)

Better known, perhaps (at least to Anglophones) by its English title, The Thieving Magpie. The overture may not be as iconic as Guillaume Tell's, but it's pretty famous as these things go. And, you know, good.

So it's Napoleonic Wars time. Ninetta is a serving girl working for a rich couple, the Vingraditos. She and their son Giannetto are in love and they're going to get married when he comes home. So that's fun. But then Ninetta's father Fernando appears: he was a soldier, but now he's on the run, having deserted after a fight with his captain for which he was sentenced to death. He gives her some silverware to sell to cover his expenses. The mayor appears, intent on seducing her, but she rejects him and he gets mad. Ninetta sells the silverware to an itinerant merchant. Another thing that's been happening during this time is that pieces of the Vingraditos' silverware are disappearing. When everyone learns that Ninetta was selling silverware, suspicion falls on her. The merchant comes back and says that the stuff she'd sold him had the initials "F.V." on them, her master's initials--and also her dad's, but she doesn't want to say anything to give him away, so she lets herself be arrested. The mayor tries to get her to accept his advances in turn for letting her go free, but she rejects him, and thus is sentenced to death (!). Fortunately, a friend of Fernando's appears, revealing that the king has pardoned him, and it is discovered that all the silverware was taken by a naughty magpie, so everyone's happy, except the jerkass mayor.

Gotta say: I'm pretty sure there has never been a point in my life when I knew how much silverware I had or would have noticed if some of it went missing. But hey, different times. Even so, though...in theory, the reason you can be sentenced to death for stealing it is because we're under martial law, which seems a bit questionable, but hey, I can sort of believe it, maybe. What's harder to believe is that this tribunal would just go along with that, sure sentence her to death, without thinking "dude, what are we doing? This is FUCKED UP." And happy ending notwithstanding, it's hard to ignore the fact that the law that says you can be hanged for pilfering cutlery is still on the books.

I hope, however, that the above paragraph isn't taken as serious criticism. I mean, it's something you can't help but notice, sure, but the opera works dramatically in spite of that, and it goddamn well rules. Rossini's music is varied and awesome as ever. I chose the traditional production over the weird, Eurotrashy looking one; as you know, I like Eurotrash as much as anyone, but this seemed a bit much. Very traditional, probably not unlike what it would have looked like in 1817; the only thing to object to is the quality. It's from 1987, and I'm sorry to say, the audio is a bit lacking--you get used to it, but you really have to crank it up, and there's audible hissing in the background.

Well, I think you'll have fun here however you see it. Let me ask you: do you think Rossini was the greatest composer of the nineteenth century? I know there's a lot of formidable competition, but he's gotta be up there, doesn't he? To say what thousands of people have said before, it really is a shame that he gave up opera. It wouldn't be reasonable to expect him to have kept up the frenzied pace he had at his height, but just on occasion? Every few years, maybe? Oh well. There's still plenty out there to enjoy, of course.

Sergei Rachmaninoff, Aleko (1892) and Francesca da Rimini (1906)

Rachmaninoff only completed three operas, these and The Miserly Knight (he started another one, Monna Vanna, which he never completed for copyright-related reasons; meanwhile, his opera based on Flaubert's Salammbô never got past the idea phase). These two are similar in that they both feature the trope of woman, lover, and jealous husband who kills them both--not that that's anything unusual, but they're presented together here by the Opéra National de Lorraine--with French subtitles, which were pleasingly easy for me to understand.

Aleko is based on a poem by Pushkin. There's a shocker for you. There's a troupe of gypsies (I should probably at some point do a whole post on the word "gypsy"); an old guy tells a story about how he had a sweetheart with whom he had a daughter, Zemfira, but then she left him. Zemfira is now involved with an outsider, a Russian named Aleko. He's sad because she doesn't love him anymore; she has a new lover. When he sees them together, he impulsively murders them both. The gypsies let him live but cast him out of their troupe.

Francesca da Rimini is, well, based on the episode from Dante--this is the story that just everyone feels compelled to make into an opera. I've seen the Zandonai, and if you have, you basically know this: woman, Francesca, tricked into marrying man, Lanciotto, by making her think she was going to marry his hotter brother, Paolo. They have an affair. Lanciotto murders them. This differs from the Zandonai in that there's no third brother; also, this one actually features Dante and Virgil as characters at the beginning, observing these souls in Hell about whom Dante gets curious.

I liked these both. Why not? The music is great. Both of them seem somehow more melodic than The Miserly Knight, though I may be remembering that wrong. I did significantly prefer Francesca, though--and I thought it was dramatically better than the Zandonai version. It really works: I mean, for all that you can point out how nuts this story seems from a contemporary perspective, it really, really works on its own terms. It forces you to accept it. And what it does really well is to make you accept that they're going into this sinful relationship, knowing it for what it is, but willing to accept damnation: one kiss is worth eternity in Hell. It is dramatically compelling.

As I said, these are presented together, meaning that they feature the same singers in the lead roles (Alexander Vinogradov is especially good as the betrayed husbands--you shouldn't murder your wife and her lover, but he brings a pathos to the roles that make them sort of sympathetic nonetheless) and certain things carry over. Each of them works well individually, I think. Aleko takes place in a kinda-modern-day gypsy encampment with a strong circus motif. There's a long instrumental section where the circus performers just...perform. Including a guy in a bear suit, who is probably meant, more or less, to just be a trained bear. Okay, that's kind of weird. But it works. Again, though, the production of Francesca da Rimini blows it away: it's really great and really contributes to the opera. In the beginning, in the section with Dante and Virgil, the damned souls are represented as people in monk robes carrying skeletons--possibly they're mean to be the skeletons, but regardless, it is really eerie and effective. These skeletons remain onstage throughout the opera, emphasizing the doomed nature of the proceedings, and that this is really just a vision that Dante and Virgil are having.

I have to admit, though, the connections between the two don't really work that well, for me: the dancing bear for makes a cameo appearance for no reason in Francesca, and at the very end, the back of the stage opens and we see, A CAR! The same car where Zemfira and her lover had their assignation! OMG! And yet, I don't think that the car is really freighted with the kind of symbolic importance that the producer was apparently assuming. It does not add to the drama.

Regardless! I like these, especially the latter, a lot. It was watching it that prompted me to make this little dabble into theology. Still, I'll end by saying this: the idea that having an affair, of whatever kind, means that you have PERMANENTLY TURNED YOUR BACK ON GOD and therefore should SUFFER ETERNALLY strikes me as a bit drama-queen-ish. Come on.

Paul Abraham, Viktoria und ihr Husar (1930)

I'm using the German title because that's what's on the DVD case, but there's no good reason for it, given that this is sung and spoken in Hungarian. Paul Abraham is also the composer of Roxy und ihr Wunderteam, an operetta about soccer, and I can't believe I never wrote about it, because it is truly one of the most delightful things ever--definitely my favorite operetta.

This is an earlier work. Koltay and Jancsi are Hungarian prisoners of war of the Russians, who are going to be executed, but escape to Japan where they take refuge at the American embassy. The American ambassador, John Cunlight, has married Koltay's fiancée Viktoria, having thought him killed in the war. There's also another couple, Viktoria's brother Count Ferry and Lia San (a somewhat unfortunate Japanese caricature), and Jancsi becomes involved with a chambermaid, Riquette. The household is going to travel to Russia, and they invite the Hungarians to go with them; from there, they can return to their home country. Viktoria admits that she's still in love with Kotay, but he gets taken by the Russians, who still want to execute him. Later, we're a Hungarian village, where there's a tradition that three--no less than three--couples must get married for some sort of ceremony. So Jancsi and Riquette are to be married, and Count Ferry and Lia San re-married, and Cunlight shows up to (maybe?) remarry Viktoria, but then Kotay, her true love, having received some kind of vague amnesty, appears and Cunlight is I guess going off to Washington.

This is somewhat more serious than Roxy; it's still largely frivolous, but there is the pathos of Cunlight, a wholly sympathetic character, losing his wife. Also, in Roxy, the title character is a skirt role, which automatically adds a large element of goofiness. Roxy features a mixture of folk and jazz elements, but the latter are absent here; the music mostly consisting of Hungarian folk (though there's one number that I would swear is, let's say, heavily inspired by the American folk standard "Goodnight, Irene"). The music is a bit less immediate than Roxy's, and I won't say I like the operetta as a whole quite as much, but it's still a lot of fun. I'd had it in my sights for a while, but it's out-of-print, and in the past, the only available pre-owned copies were going for three figures, and I wasn't quite that determined to see it. But now it can be had for a lot cheaper (as of this writing.  No future guarantees). The video is not exactly DVD-quality, but it'll do.

Of course, now I just want to see Abraham's other operettas, dammit, but none of them seem to have been recorded anywhere. Alas! What a tragic destiny is mine! But who can say what the future holds?

#OperaHarmony - Week Three

I feel good about this week's #OperaHarmony batch, for two reasons: first, because this one actually consists of six pieces, including the one about football with the long comedy name from last week; and second, because the average level of quality here is startlingly higher than either of the previous weeks. I would've voted for any or almost any of these above any of the ones I actually voted for as winners in the first two weeks. Go figure.

Katie Jenkins, A Fish out of Water

This one consists of abstract images (many of them in sets of four boxes, suggesting separation) with ethereal, ambient music complete with ghostly voices wordlessly singing over it. Meanwhile, we have a series of people (like, really people)--an astronaut, a deep-sea diver, an experienced Buddhist (do you need "experience" to be a good Buddhist?), the vice captain of a rounders team, and a left-wing activist--who reflect (speaking, not singing, obviously) on aloneness and togetherness, as their respective fields involve one, the other, or both of these. I like the music a lot. I'm not sure whether the concept coheres into much, but it's a perfectly fine way to spend ten minutes.

James Schouten, Threshold

This opens with an electric guitar riff, and it quickly becomes clear that it's a rock opera. And I have to say, it rocks pretty darned hard. It's about a young man and woman, upstairs and downstairs neighbors in an apartment block. She's one of those plugged-in millennials always on her phone; he sits alone in his computer mucking about online and contemplating his suspended medical studies. And then they meet, sort of, though it's really more about the potential than the real. But it's kind of great, and when I said it rocks, I wasn't kidding--I was put strongly in mind of Queen, and you can easily imagine Freddy Mercury belting out the male role. This is...well, it's my favorite of all of these so far. I could watch it over and over, and I might just do that.

Heathcliff Blair, Behind the Lines

This one is about World War I, and a couple communicating through letters. Oh, and also, there's this sickness that people are getting...I think you can see the relevance of this. In the end, one or both of them may or may not be about to die of influenza. We just don't know, though to be optimistic, the odds are better than even of both of them surviving. Black-and-white images of both of them writing. It's pretty straightforward, but THAT IS FINE. I like the music, and I think it's well-written. Another winner.

Daisy Boulton, Edge of Time

This one is based on a book by a journalist investigating his young mother's suicide. Well, I say "based," but it's six minutes and fairly abstract (in a good way!), so probably "inspired by" would be more accurate. I feel that this is the sort of abstraction I'd like to see in these things; it really works well, and it has this really lushly-produced country sound that recalls perhaps Emmylou Harris or Lucinda Williams. Great stuff; I mean that.

Dimitri Scarlato, A Life Reset

This is about a woman living alone during the pandemic, messing around online and contemplating stuff. It reminds me more than any of the others of the less-memorable things pieces from the first two weeks; while I wouldn't exactly call it bad, I have to admit, it's not that interesting either. A little bit, dare I say it, boring. Definitely my least favorite this week. I have little to say about it.

Hugh Morris, Harold & Keith Attempt To Use Zoom To Discuss The Potential Takeover of Beloved Football Club Newcastle United – An Opera

Yes, okay, giant comedy name. Well, I suppose if you've read the title, there's probably not much else I have to tell you about the story itself. These two friends are chatting back and forth about the subject on facebook until the daughter of one of them suggests, hey, why don't you just take it to Zoom and stop annoying all the bystanders? So they do. I've gotta be honest: I don't really understand the sports politics very well. Also, once they get on Zoom, it's sort of confusing: both Harold and Keith are trouser roles, but sometimes for no apparent reason they switch from female to male singing voices. Still, it's fun: especially when they're Zooming and singing at each other in rhyming couplets, with lots of profanity--in the first half, you wonder about the content warning at the beginning, but in the second, it becomes clear. The music is the weirdly folk-inflected stuff which I liked a lot. This one may be inessential, but I'm definitely glad that it didn't just disappear into the void.

Here are the rankings, but these are a little arbitrary: aside from the first- and last-ranked pieces, the others could fairly appear in any order, and indeed I would say I either loved or liked a lot all of them except the sixth-ranked.

1. Threshold

2. Edge of Time

3. Behind the Lines

4. Harold & Keith

5. A Fish out of Water

6. A Life Reset

Francesco Cavalli, La virtù dei strali d'Amore (1642)

Here's another Cavalli opera. What more do you want me to say? Well, I'll say this: the more of Cavalli I see, the more I like him. I hope that more of his operas will be performed and recorded in the near future.

The plot of this one is, let us say, choppy. Not the most coherent. There are, in the recorded production of this that exists, eleven singers, and most of them play two or three characters. If I tried to summarize the plot in detail, I would fail. But basically: we're on some sort of island. Pallante, a Thracian prince, is there in pursuit of Cleria, with whom he is in love. Also after Cleria is Meonte, from whom she's fleeing. Meonte's servant Eumete is also there. Oh, there's also some king who's been trapped in a tree by a which, but as far as that goes, I can't EVEN. So those are the main mortal characters. There are also a bunch of divine characters, the most important of whom--as you might have guessed from the title--is Amore or Eros or Cupid or WHATEVER. He's kind of miffed that his mother Venus is messing around with Mars, so even though they ask him to make Cleria love Pallante back, he doesn't wanna. Instead, he runs off to the island (to his wife Psyche's distress), but before he can do anything else, he falls asleep. His arrows make various people fall in love with various other people, but eventually things work out: it is revealed that Eumete is actually Erabena, who was Meonte's lover until he left her in pursuit of Cleria. But ultimately, all the correct couples end up together and it's all good. There, I THINK I got that about right.

Confusing it may be, but it's a lot of fun. And if you like seventeenth-century opera, I think you will agree. A lot of good early arias or aria-like pieces. The eryopses of arias? Maybe! The production is a contemporary sort of thing, with characters waving around guns in lieu of swords, which is perhaps a little silly (hell, the libretto is a little silly; stop complaining), but it's fine. Ignore the amazon reviewer who doesn't like it because the libretto is not up to their standards. That person is a curmudgeon.

Luigi Cherubini, Koukourgi (1792)

Cherubini was Beethoven's favorite, supposedly. He had a long, fruitful career in which--in addition to lots of other music--thirty-some operas. But for whatever reason, the only one anyone seems to care about is Médée--or Medea, as the case may be. You can see that one in multiple productions, in either the French or Italian version...but that's all. Well, except for this one. Why is that? Well, for reasons that I can't find any information about but that I think had something to do with it being composed in revolutionary France, this was not performed in Cherubini's lifetime. Later on in his life, a few pieces were reused for a different opera, but this 2010 production is the first time the original has ever been performed. And it's captured on disc for all to enjoy!

Médée is...well, it's Medea. This one is completely tonally different, a comedy prefiguring the operettas of the nineteenth century. It takes place in ancient China, or at least someone's questionable idea of ancient China. The romantic hero is Amazan: he wants to marry his sweetheart, Zulma, only there's also a fight with Tartars going on at the same time. And there's also Koukourgi, the son of a general, who wants to marry Zulma, only he's cowardly and gluttonous but (in theory) loveable. Also, did somebody think these names sounded in any way Chinese? Because I think they may have been mistaken. Western perceptions of the Orient are an interesting subject, for sure. It would be rewarding to really get into this and figure out where name like these come from. ANYWAY. Naturally, Amazon Gets the Girl, but you know, everything's cool. Everyone's happy. It's fine! Stop complaining!

Yeah. What can I say? The plot is fairly loosey-goosey, but the opera on the whole is a lot of fun. It is, granted, true that Koukourgi's...moves on Zulma may look, to our sensibilities, more like low-level sexual harassment than the zany fun they would presumably have seemed to at the time, but let's face it: if you insist on your operas having worldviews that always match your own...we can probably safely say that opera isn't for you. I mean, not that I don't respect your convictions, but I think you are very severely limiting yourself if you're too much of a purist in that regard.

So yeah. Having seen both of Cherubini's operas that one can easily see, I can safely say that I like him a lot and I hope his other works receive more attention in the future. Thank you for reading.

Boris Blacher, Preußisches Märchen (1952)

Hmm. This seems to be the fist opera I've ever seen with an Eszett in the title--that little b-looking guy who's pronounced in an S-ish fashion. That's the technical term for it that us linguists like to throw around to sound smart.

This is based on (loosely based on) the story of a small-time German con artist who the Germans decided should be a sort of folk hero, for somewhat obscure reasons. Well, not TOO obscure--everyone hates authority--but really, it doesn't seem like that much of a thing, really.  Like, you guys are really easily impressed. There's this clerk, Wilhelm Fadenkreutz, who's normally kind of timid and hapless but wins a medal for uncovering an embezzlement case. This giving him a swell of confidence, he tries to kiss a woman who turns out to be the mayor's daughter and loses his job. At home his sister, Auguste, is being courted by an assessor, Birkhahn. He proposes marriage, but she's worried that he won't want her after he learns her brother's unemployed, so when he asks him what he does, she blurts out that he's an army captain, so he has to go along with that, and goes out and buys a captain's uniform from a costume shop. They all go to a party that Birkhahn has invited them to, where his terrible play is being performed. Puffed up by all the respect he's getting from people who think he's a captain, and also kind of drunk, Wilhelm instigates a coup against the allegedly corrupt mayor, whom he's going to have arrested. His deception is revealed, but the mayor, though relieved to not be arrested, is still upset that there's now going to be a big ol' scandal. But his wife convinces him that he can pass the whole thing off as a joke and everything will be fine. Wilhelm gets his job back; Birkhahn decides not to marry Auguste, but let's face it, she can do better. The end.

It's a very likable piece. The previous Blacher opera I saw, 200 000 Thaler, was also a comedy, but this one sort of seems to be going for it more, with a lot of fun comedic musical set pieces. The music I found made more of an impression than it did in the other. The highlight is when Wilhelm's buying the uniform; he looks at himself wearing it in the mirror, and we cut to a ballet scene (I don't know if this is how the libretto dictates it go, but it ought to) of soldiers and women in fancy dress dancing to increasingly frenzied music. I was impressed. And hey, here's a fun thing I've never seen before: the Fadenkreutz' parents are characters too: the father is a trouser role; the wife a skirt. So it's a gender-swap thing, for no particular reason that I can see except that it's fun. As I said. And as it is.

We are, I think, pretty darned lucky that there's a DVD of this at all: it's from 1974, and, appropriately, it is extremely seventies-looking. Somehow the whole look gave me a Monty Python impression, which is no bad thing.

Look: if you make more Blacher available, I will see it. It's just. That. Simple.

Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Médée (1693)

Charpentier is known as a sort of successor to Lully, but really, he was only twelve years younger. They'd be considered contemporaries if Lully hadn't done such a number on himself with his conductor's battle axe. He, Charpentier, wrote an opera called Les arts florissants, from which the baroque music collective gets its name. Good choice, that.

I feel like Médée is his most famous work, though it's not really very readily available: there's a concert performance on DVD that's very out-of-print; the only other choice that I know of is this youtube video with French subtitles. I'd been putting off watching it for a while because, honestly, trying to come to grips with said subtitles for two and a half hours just seemed like it would be exhausting. And it is, a little. I mean, I already knew the story, but I was struggling, and at a certain point I decided not to stress the meaning too much. I could probably more or less understand about half of it, but it wasn't too easy.

I think you know the basic story: Jason and Medea are fugitives with their two kids; they take refuge in Corinth. But Jason is sick of Medea; he wants instead to marry King Creon's daughter Créuse (whose name seems to vary in different versions of the story). She's already engaged to the prince of Argos, Oronte, but Creon's cool with her marrying Jason instead. Medea is to be banished and her children taken from her, so she uses her magic to drive Creon insane and kill him, gives Créuse a poisoned robe to kill her, and murders the kids into the bargain. She is nothing if not thorough. Jason's sad, but he's a huge douchebag, so that's really the least of our concerns.

This is really good. And that is your penetrating insight! But really, I mean, if you know the milieu, you know basically what Charpentier's music sounds like, but my impression is that it's more sophisticated than Lully. Whatever that means. There's one part with an Italian singer, singing in Italian in an Italian style, that you definitely wouldn't have seen from Lully. Less dancing here, but what there is is pretty nice. This particular production youtube is modern-dress, but with some cool and slightly disturbing effects, such as smoke rising from Créuse's body as she's dying and Medea making her climactic appearance holding the blood-soaked, lifeless corpses of her children. And there's an appropriately apocalyptic fire effect at the end.  My only real objection to the production is that it shears off the prologue.  NOW how am I supposed to know whether Louis XIV is great or not?!?  Tell me THAT, huh?!?

Have I already seen an opera called Médée? Well, sort of. I've seen Luigi Cherubini's opera of that name from a hundred years later, but I saw it in the commonly-used Italian translation, so it's just called plain ol' Medea. Bummer. Which one is better? Well...I liked the Cherubini, but I can't say I remember it THAT well. I seem to recall that Creon's daughter had a much smaller role. I probably liked the production of Cherubini that I saw more than this production, but, I mean, it's no secret that baroque opera is my favorite opera, so I'd probably put this ahead of that for that reason. I really want to see more Charpentier, but he's much less-performed than either Lully or Rameau.

#OperaHarmony - Week Two

I'm feeling miffed at this one. You know why? Because there were supposed to be five mini-operas, but in fact, there are only four. That's the case for next week, too, but this is the one that bothers me, because as far as I know, they'd never claimed there were going to be five next week, but this one, they did: it was a piece with a super-long comedy name about British football fans having a Zoom meeting because they've heard that someone's going to be moving their favorite team. But it was dropped from the schedule with no fanfare or explanation. So now there are only four, and I am disappointed. I mean, I know it's free stuff that they're giving us, but still...

Rose Miranda Hall, Wisdom of Stone

This one is about a woman in a house--somewhere in Europe, it seems; it looks very old and crumbling when we see the exterior--singing about the situation, and comparing it to the past: supposedly, plague victims lived in this house. We hear a ghost singing. This very explicitly tries to grapple with the pandemic, for which I give it credit. The videography is appealing; I sort of feel like the libretto is more heat than light, but hell, it's fine. I like the music.

Judith Lynn Stillman, Essential Business

This one depicts a pastor having a Zoom conversation with God--but God's video and audio are both off. That's kind of clever. He's grappling with the situation and how you can social distance while still, you know, doing what he's called on to do. Also, his daughter has died, apparently of the pandemic, which must be kind of an unusual situation. I dunno. Again, I like the concept, but the libretto seems clunky. And there's only piano accompaniment, which will never be my favorite thing.

Byrony Purdue, Sleeping & Waking Are Their Names

This is about two sisters: one has been sleeping for four hundred years; the other never sleeps. And, as the Operavision description says, "their mother worries." As indeed who wouldn't? It keeps being the case that I find these concepts more interesting than the actuality. This is the shortest piece this week, at just five minutes, and it honestly didn't make much of an impression on me.

Ergo Phizmiz, No Room. No Room. No Room.

Apparently each week is going to include one piece that, even by the loosest standards, probably can't be classified as an opera. Here we have a series of pictures of rooms with little visual effects accompanied by a glitchy electronic soundtrack, with voices having conversations about the situation: what the letters in "Rooms" stand for, the dimensions of the rooms, how they're supposedly growing, specific pandemic reactions--did I love this? Well, that would be an overstatement, but given how generally unimpressed I am with the rest of the lot, this is my favorite of the week.  It's kind of fun. It's also the longest, at seventeen minutes.

I hate to say it, but this whole project is thusfar not exactly blowing me away. It's possible to write good short operas! Barber's Hand of Bridge is great! But...not everyone can do it, I think it's safe to say. You want rankings? Fine. Have your damned rankings!

1. No Room. No Room. No Room.

2. Wisdom of Stone

3. Essential Business

4. Sleeping & Waking Are Their Names

Marvin David Levy, Mourning Becomes Electra (1967)

YEAH BOY-EE! Look what I saw!!! Thanks, once again, to Florida Grand Opera. It's still online (with the same weird disclaimer that Florencia en el Amazonas had, that you are forbidden to evaluate any of the performers based on their work here), but probably not for much longer, so gather yer roses while ye may.

I've never actually seen or read the Eugene O'Neill plays. I've only read two O'Neill plays, in fact (way back when I was reading for comprehensive exams), The Hairy Ape and Desire Under the Elms. I remember liking them, especially the latter, which was, I recall, devastating, but hey, I was busy! I didn't have TIME for any more nonsense!

So why was I so fixated on seeing this? you might well ask. Well, partially it's just the thing where you want the one you can't have, for sure. Also, seeing it on the Met on Demand page, available only in audio form, was very tantalizing. Also, even though I'm not a patriot in most senses that people would use the word, but I do appreciate American art and I want to support it, so there's that. And finally: that title. It is SO COOL. Super-evocative. GIMME!

I didn't know it, but apparently this has a sort of fraught story. There was--I am told--a lot of controversy in the sixties about just how tonal operas should be. Honestly, that sounds like the world's dumbest controversy to me. Just write what you want to write and if aesthetic preferences seem to be going in a certain direction, the entire form probably will too, but you can't talk about these things in theoretical terms, as if there's some objective "reason" that opera of a given era should be one way or another. Be that as it may: for this reason, Levy apparently felt the need to include more atonal elements than he otherwise would have. The opera flopped--whether these things are causally related or not, I don't know--and the embittered Levy never wrote another opera. However, he DID revise this one twice, once in the nineties and once in the early oughts, changing the tonality among other things, and the work achieved a belated success.

What's it about? Well, even if you don't know the play cycle, you probably know at least the basic premise: Greek tragedy in the time of the American Civil War, with characters and situations loosely mirroring the ill-fated House of Atreus. Here, it's the Mannon family: the patriarch Ezra has been off fighting in the war, but now he's returning. But his wife Christine has been having an affair with Adam Brant, a bastard son of Ezra's brother and a maid. Her daughter Lavinia loves her father (of course--Electra is nothing if not complex) and is none too pleased with this, but Christine, not happy with her marriage, plots with Brant to murder her husband, which she ends up doing. Natch. Lavinia's brother Orin appears on the scene. Unlike Lavinia, he loves his mother (two complexes in one story!), but Lavinia convinces him of her treachery and gets him to murder Brant. Distraught, Christine commits suicide. A year passes, and Lavinia's and Orin's respective mental healths are both deteriorating fast. He ends up also committing suicide, and we'd better hope that mourning does indeed become Electra, because she shuts herself up in the house and prepares for a long and lonely life of it. The end.

Whether the music was what it was from the start or was altered later on (if you wanted, you could listen to the recording of the Met debut and compare), this is some really great, dramatic music, coupled with a plot to match. The story was a natural fit for an opera. A lot of the music reminds me of Samuel Barber, and not just because it has more or less the same ending as Vanessa, albeit with a much higher body count. There's always a worry: if you spend so much time anticipating something, what if it turns out to actually be kind of mediocre at best? WOULDN'T YOU FEEL THE FOOL? That's not the case here, however. It may not be the world's greatest opera, but it's pretty darned good, and this FGO production is really swell, mixing gothic Americana with Greek themes. Rayanne Dupuis is very striking in the title role.

It's kind of bizarre that a work of art like this should just sink back into oblivion after the video is taken down, but such is the dumb world of opera. I'm just glad to have finally had the opportunity to add it to my list.

Ildebrando Pizzetti, Assassinio nella cattedrale (1958)

Pizzeti wrote a bunch of operas, but this seems to be the only one that had any degree of staying power. Certainly, he didn't do his reputation any favors by cozying up to the government in fascist Italy, and there's also the fact that, as we'll see, he was a very old-school composer. But let's take a look at this, shall we?

It's based on T.S. Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral. Thomas Beckett is murdered, you see. But where? To learn that...you will have to see the play. Or the opera. Either'll do. There's not much to say about the plot beyond that: a number of people warn Beckett that he should soften his hardline stance in places that contradict the king (Henry II); he won't do it. Some guys come in and warn him to cut it out; he won't. They come back and kill him. The end.

Let's talk about the music here: it absolutely RULES. Seriously. Pizzetti was--it certainly sounds like--gunning for the spot of "next big romantic Italian composer," following Verdi and Puccini. A spot that ultimately went unfilled, but with this as evidence, I can't say that Pizzetti was unqualified. Really great stuff, even if it struck people at the time as Old Hat. Very dramatic, with some great choruses and some effective chanting in Latin--excellent. Also, there's a short, spoken-word epilogue where an emissary of the king justifies the killing; in this version, that emissary is played by none other than José Carreras, the Three Tenor that everyone forgets. A pointless cameo, but hey, if you can get Carreras...get him! Why not?

However, for all I like the music here, I must say, I find the story very unsatisfactory--I haven't read or seen Eliot's play, but I suspect that's down to deficiencies in the source material. I get the very strong impression of dialogue written to be Poetic, with little or no concern with character or drama. The only person who's characterized at all here is Beckett himself, and...not much, either. And, like, why is any of this happening? Okay, we have a general idea that he's defying the king, but what does this defiance consist of? Why is it so important to him? What is he fighting for? I suppose if you studied the historical record, you could answer that question, but this isn't a historical record. It's a self-contained tragedy. It needs to stand on its own.

That said...well, I'll probably never see any other Pizzetti operas, since they never seem to be performed, but if I ever get the chance, you can bet I will jump at it. There's a lot to like here.

Jean-Philippe Rameau, Dardanus (1739)

Rameau! We all love him! Although he was supposedly kind of weird and difficult to deal with in person. I suppose we'd probably put him somewhere on the autism spectrum today. But he sure could compose! I mean, if I like Handel more, it's because I'm such a big fan of the Italian-style baroque aria, but that's just personal preference. Rameau rulez.

Here's the story: Iphise, King Teucer's daughter; and Dardanus, son of Jupiter, are in love. Hurray! Unfortunately, Dardanus is Teucer's enemy, and he wants Iphise to marry his general, Anténor, instead. Iphise and Dardanus reveal that they're in love with each other (each not having known how the other felt, apparently), but oh no! Dardanus is captured! And then, double oh no! Neptune sends a HORRIBLE BEAST to ravage the countryside! Dardanus slays the beast, saving Anténor in the process, but doesn't reveal his identity. Everyone thinks Anténor slew the beast, but when Dardanus reveals himself, Anténor is forced to admit defeat, and asks Teucer to let his daughter marry Dardanus, which he does. Hurray! That's the version that I saw, which--I glean from the wikipedia page--is the original 1739 version; it was revised in 1744. They're pretty darn different: there's no HORRIBLE BEAST in the later version (why would you get rid of the HORRIBLE BEAST?! Everyone loves those guys!), and Anténor dies. I suppose his sacrifice might be more dramatically compelling, but I liked the one I saw.

Yeah, this pretty much rules. As usual with Rameau, the plot is...not given primary importance; there are long ballet sequences that interrupt proceedings for very little apparent reason. At the end in particular: quite a number of times you think, okay, it must be over now, oops, nope, more dancing. I mean, I'm not complaining, but it doesn't have what we would consider these days a strongly developed since of pacing.

Just look at this blu-ray cover:

Pretty! That candy-colored theme definitely gives you a good idea of what the whole thing is like. It strikes me as one hundred percent appropriate. I will cavil about one tiny thing, though: see that wig she's wearing? A lot of people in the opera are wearing similar, and when you see them close up, they appear to be made of plastic, which I didn't love.

Rameau wrote twenty-eight extant operas, of which I've now seen twelve, which unfortunately is all that are available in video form, at least per what I think has been a fairly comprehensive search. Give me more, dammit!

Ernst Krenek, Karl V (1938)

This is famous (I mean, to the extent that it's famous, so I probably should have said "not famous") as the first full-length twelve-tone opera (it was preceded by this one-act Schoenberg work). So: whoo.

Karl V is Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor from 1519 to 1558. Most of this takes place at the end of his life, as he's remembering incidents from the past via flashback. He's broadly concerned with that ever-popular activity, Uniting Christendom. However--naturally--there are conflicts within that make that difficult. We meet his mother, his wife, Martin Luther, Francis I of France, and really just a whole shit-ton of generals and things who are definitely real people, but not anyone you'd probably know if you're not an expert in this area. Also, this is fun: remember how, in my review of Benvenuto Cellini (of course you remember every detail of every review I've ever written!), I idly wondered whether there were any other operas to features Popes as singing characters? Well, here's one, and even more surprisingly, they both feature the same Pope, Clement VII. How about that?

The present-day world of this 2008 production is framed as being at a school, with Karl himself playing the role of teacher. Seems kind of weird, but it actually works pretty darned well, I thought. Dietrich Henschel is impressive in the title role, which must be a demanding one. I wasn't sure about this at first, but ultimately, I kind of got into it. It repeatedly made me think of Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra, which takes place mostly in more or less the same milieu. You know, that novel may be defiantly impenetrable, and I doubt I'll ever summon the wherewithal to reread it, but I must say, I do have basically positive memories of it, more so as time passes. That's neither here nor there, except that I enjoyed the association.

So, the music: I did like it. Kind of. But I remains a twelve-tone skeptic. There's a quote from Schoenberg which I can't find now to the effect that this is a hugely important development in German music that's going to change its course for the next hundred years. But...did it? Its influence may be felt in other composers; I'm probably not sophisticated enough to tell. But it sure hasn't taken over, and it always strikes me as really...limited. Like, okay, this is certainly not unlistenable, and as a novelty it's sort of cool, but where can you go with it? Can you do anything other than the same dern thing over and over? Maybe you can, and maybe I'm just a philistine, but such is my feeling.

Krzysztof Penderecki, Die Teufel von Loudun (1969)

This is based on a book by Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun. Penderecki revised the score in the years following its first performance, but the only filmed version, this teleplay, is based on the original. So there you are.

It takes place in the seventeenth century, amidst the Spanish Inquisition. There's a womanizing priest, Father Grandier, involved with several parishioners (and man, a priest having sex with consenting adults? Given what we now know about the Catholic Church, that seems extremely benign). Several nuns believe that they're being possessed by demons, and in the course of their exorcisms, they point to Grandier as the agent of the Devil. He's arrested and tortured (rather graphically, at least in this version), but he refuses to confess. Then he's burned at the stake.

Welp. It is what it is, and it annoys me that I can't say that anymore without conjuring images of President Shithead dismissing Covid deaths. The drama does become...sort of gruesomely compelling in the end, but in general, I didn't find this overly gripping. And so my mind wandered, as it does, to thinking about how human history is largely made up of people inflicting the most unspeakably vicious cruelties on one another, and then I felt dispirited. I mean, it's meant to be dispiriting. Obviously. But do I need to be more dispirited at this time? Opinions vary!

The music is...well, it's very clattery and atonal, but more than that, a lot of the time it's barely there: just this kind of humming in the background. Predictably, nothing like arias here. Did I like it? Hmm...not overly so, no! As you might have guessed. But what do I know? What, indeed, do I know? His most famous work, I guess, is his "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima," and while I can't deny his talent, I can't say I find that especially compelling or listenable either. So: it's definitely just me. Go ahead! Watch this! You will one hundred percent definitely love it! That is my ironclad guarantee.

Francesco Cavalli, Ercole amante (1662)

Cavalli was commissioned to write this to celebrate the marriage of Louis XIV and Maria Theresa, the infanta of Spain, which is why we have the unusual phenomenon of a prologue with people singing in Italian about how great the French king is. It wasn't actually performed at the wedding due to the stage machinery being out of order (I'd be very curious about what exactly it was felt that that was essential for); they replaced it with another Cavalli opera. This one was debuted a few years later, still featuring references to the wedding in the prologue. Our ol' pal Lully insisted on inserting ballet numbers into it, and when they proved more popular than Cavalli's own music, he helpfully took full credit for the opera's success (it was also probably a bad idea to include castrato roles, given the French aversion to those). Cavalli was so miffed by the experience that he declared himself through writing operas, although he quickly reversed course on that.

The story comes from Sophocles and Ovid. Ercole is in love with his son Hyllus' wife Iole (in spite of still being married to Deianira). He pursues her, and he's going to kill his son so he can have her, but she agrees to go with him in exchange for Hyllus' life. Deianira hatches a plan to bring Ercole down by giving him the skin of Nessus the centaur to wear, not realizing that it's going to be fatal. But it is, and he dies. But never fear! He's been reborn in Heaven! Hurray! There are also a whole bunch of gods running around and interfering with stuff, most notably Juno. Ercole's page and his herald Licco also have large comic-relief roles.

The first thing that has to be said is that Ercole is quite a huge douchebag here. Maybe that was obvious from the description, but really now. And of course cultural sensibilities change, but it's hard for me to see how we could ever not have been seen as such: was threatening to murder your son to steal his girlfriend ever considered a cool thing to do? Still, the libretto does explicitly compare him to Louis XIV, so what do I know?

A modern production is, naturally, going to emphasize his oafishness--how could it not? Actually, this whole thing is go-for-broke zany (though it does try to be somewhat serious for Ercole's death). Most visibly and memorably, Ercole (as depicted by Luca Pisaroni, who seems to be enjoying himself) is wearing a plasticine shell to make himself look like an action figure, complete with notches where the joint articulation would be (and at one point he complements this with leather pants, a leopardskin shirt, and a gold chain). I think it's a good choice; you wouldn't want to be po-faced when telling a story that, no two ways about it, is going to seem goofy to us, even if it didn't to them. But it probably did to them. Really now. Still, I feel that that does perhaps undermine what should be dramatic moments a bit: when we first see Hyllus and Iole together, in what's supposed to be a romantic scene, he's depicted as this totally oblivious manchild, more or less ignoring her (at one point we see him playing a Gameboy Color). The sort of eulogy that everyone sings after Ercole's death (and before Juno shows up to say, hey, cheer up! everything's fine!) is actually really effecting, but...how to take any of this even a tiny bit seriously?

Still, I liked it a lot. You can easily just get lost in the music, written in a French style (to the extent that I can identify that), with rudimentary yet recognizable arias. And the production IS amusing, for sure. My favorite performance was Anna Bonitatibus (there's a name for you) as a glamorous Juno.

It's interesting: the Cavalli operas I've seen thusfar have all been very tonally different: La Didone is pretty much a pure drama in spite of the added happy ending, whereas all the others are various degrees of comedy. At any rate, I look forward to seeing more of his work. Oh, and I have to say it: my first 1660s opera! Now I've seen at least one from every decade of the seventeenth century! Whooooooo!

#OperaHarmony - Week One

This is an interesting thing. Every Tuesday in August, Operavision is putting out one of these: a set of five (or possibly only four in some cases--there are conflicting reports) short, digital operas inspired, im- or explicitly, by Covid 19. I say "digital operas," but these are really closer to short films--that happen to include music and operatic singing--than they are traditional operas, per se. Mostly with filmed operas, you know you're watching a stage performance, even if there are close-ups and things, and even if you're watching a filmic version of an opera, you know in the back of your mind what it originally was and still fundamentally is, but these are designed as digital experiences from the ground up, to the point where I wonder if I should credit them by composer or by director. I'm going with the former because I'm very set in my ways, but you can do what you like. I don't know why I got weirdly passive-aggressive there for a moment. Anyway, let us have a brief rundown of the first set.

Joel Rust, A Man Drags the Carcass of a Deer

This is what the title says it is: hypersaturated images of a forest scene with a man dragging a deer carcass through them. Well, we never actually see the deer carcass. But what ELSE would he be dragging? A voiceover sings disconnected words, mostly nature-related, and the man talks about how he needs this deer for his family, and what does the future hold? This may or may not be a post-apocalyptic setting. It's all very abstruse. In its favor: this is rather visually arresting, and I'd say it has the best music of the lot--very haunting and ghostly. In its disfavor: this is the shortest of the lot at just five minutes, and even acknowledging the constraints here, this feels to me just a little <i>too</i> short to really effectively get much across. The Operavision blurb calls it "a meditation on the tension between isolation and community, and between the burden of involvement and the urge toward release," but that seems to me to be investing it with more meaning than it really has to offer.

Filip Holacky, Auschwitz Lovers

A bunch of mostly black-and-white video, as an old man is going to see his former lover from when they were in Auschwitz: there were both inmates, I think, but there's also the suggestion that she played some administrative role through which she saved his life. Maybe. It's very unclear. "Fate has one more trick up its sleeve," the Operavision blurb says, but having watched this twice, I'm going to say...no it doesn't. What the hell are you talking about? Did you save me? he asks. Yes, she says, and I'd do it again. All of this accompanied by some tinkly piano. I was extremely underwhelmed by this. It's also the one you'd have to strain the hardest to connect in any way to the pandemic.

Ian Mikyska, Divas Furloughed

Here's a cute little meta-opera: operahouses shut down during the pandemic, so characters are out of work: here, we see the heroines of La Traviata, Madama Butterfly, Lucia di Lammermoor, and Salome stuck at home, unable to die tragically or kill anyone or anything. It's an amusing conceit, but in practice, I wasn't overly impressed. It doesn't do much to actually connect the characters to their contexts, and ultimately, it just kind of plods along. Good singing, in multiple languages, but beyond that, eh...

There's a an OperaHarmony title card after each piece, and each one also proclaims that said piece was "made during lockdown 2020 following social-distancing guidelines"--except, very conspicuously, this one. So be it noted: this was definitely made during lockdown, given the subject, but we can only assume that social-distancing guidelines were NOT followed in its production.

Felipe Alram, How Does a Building Sing?

Here we have "a study into the ways in which the spaces we inhabit become 'characters' in our lives especially in times like this." Or so Operavision claims. Do we take their word for it? I dunno. There are no characters here; we just have animations of buildings, both 3-D CG-looking things and wireframe ink drawings. This accompanied by sometimes environmental effects, sometimes sort of rhythmic percussion, occasional wordless singing, and disconnected subtitles (ie, burned-in subtitles, clearly meant to be an intrinsic part of the piece) not of anything that's being sung about...capitalism? consumerism? Sometimes switching between English and Portuguese because...why not. I guess.

Out of the five, this one definitely looks like the most work went into the visuals. That's impressive in its way. And I'll even admit that I kind of got into some of the music, as unoperatic as it is. And yet, on the whole, this struck me as so much empty pretension. And I hesitate to say that because so often I like pretension, and do I just not Get It? Who cares; I'm not a fan.

Christopher Schlechte-Bond, The Den

Finally, there's this. It's the most straightforward thing here, and possibly for that reason, my favorite. It's an endearing little slice-of-life thing with fun, cartoonish music. It's about, well, a brother and sister in their little fort, trying to come to grips with being bored under quarantine and having a neurotic mother. They have a little tent-fort where they try to invent a cure for Covid and play at superheroes. I think it's an accurate look at how these things have worked: when we first had stay-at-home orders, it was sort of like a weird little holiday, but then as the reality sank in, we sort of deflated. Not that this is a downbeat thing at all. It's just silly. And, it must be said, with a libretto that, if it's trying to actually sound like children as opposed to an adult imagining how children probably sound, it fails utterly. That's okay, though. I still liked it, not in any transcendent way or anything, but well enough.

Here's how I rank the five of them:

1. The Den

2. A Man Drags the Carcass of a Deer

3. Divas Furloughed

4. Auschwitz Lovers

5. How Does a Building Sing?

Honestly, though the only two I positively liked on any level were the first two. A somewhat underwhelming start to this little experiment, but I remain extremely eager to see what's coming up.

Kevin Puts, Silent Night (2011)

This is about that incident on Christmas Eve of 1914 when soldiers in World War I declared a truce and fraternized with each other--or at least, it's based on a movie, Joyeux Noël, that's about that. It's told from the perspective of Scottish, French, and German soldiers, and it's sung in a mixture of English, French, and German--plus, it opens with characters singing Italian opera and there are several hymns sung in Latin; this is definitely the most languages I've ever heard in a single opera.

There are a lot of characters, but these are the main ones. On the German side: Sprink, an operatic tenor, who's sent to go fight in the war; he's called back to sing at a party for the top brass when his lover, Anna, a soprano, pulls some strings, but he feels a sense of duty to go back, and she insists on going with him. There are actually few strongly delineated characters on the Scottish side, but the main one is a soldier named Jonathan, embittered because his brother, who was in the same unit, was killed. And the main French character is a young lieutenant named Audebert, missing his wife and infant son whom he's never seen. The opera treats of the events leading up to the truce and the fallout therefrom--obviously, the general are extremely unhappy about their soldiers displaying excessive amounts of fellow-feeling towards their enemies. In the end, there are actually surprisingly few casualties, but we are left with the grim knowledge that the war has just begun, and it's anyone's guess who's going to get out of this alive, let alone whole.

I find it an extremely dispiriting story. The truce was a real thing, of course, nor was it an isolated thing. People are not, by nature killbots, and their humanity can't be entirely extinguished even in the most extreme circumstances. On the other hand...this appears to have made zero difference in this war, if it ever does in any war. They may not have wanted to on some level, but they still slew half the seed of Europe one by one. One does sometimes feel extremely pessimistic about our chances as a species.

Well, I don't know if it's exactly a consolation, but at least I can wholeheartedly say that this is a really terrific, moving opera. Puts' music is defiantly old-school--more than anything else, it makes me think of the later Strauss' hypermelodicism. The story does a deft job of jumping around between the three encampments; there are probably a few too many characters for some of them not to get short shrift, but in all: very solid storytelling.

Do you want to see this? Well, you can't. I mean, you can, but only in a very legally grey way. An excellent performance from Minnesota Opera was broadcast on PBS, but since then it has disappeared: it's not available via streaming or official DVD or anything. The idea that Art should just disappear like that...I find it unacceptable. I mean, not as unacceptable as World War I was, but nonetheless.

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Lo frate 'nnamorato (1732)

Pergolesi's second opera is a comedy. La serva padrona gets the credit for showing you could make operas about "normal" people, but this one came first. I guess it's just happenstance what gets the most attention. This does have the same librettist as serva, at any rate (Gennaro Antonio Federico).

It's a pretty typical opera-buffa-type plot, anyway: there are two sisters, Nina and Nena. Also, they have a long-lost brother, a detail that will definitely not prove relevant in any way. There are two guys who want to marry them, Don Pietro and Marcaniello, but they're both in love with Ascanio, who is also in love with them. How's that gonna work? There are various machinations, and also two maids, Vannella and Cardella, who comment on the goings on. In the end, it's revealed--get ready for your monocle to pop out in amazement--Ascanio is actually the long-lost brother of Nina and Nena! He has a birthmark that reveals this, you see. Do people in real life ever have birthmarks distinctive enough to facilitate these sorts of revelations? I have my doubts. The fact that I was actually their brother is why I was in love with them! Ascanio exclaims. I...don't think that's how anything works. In any case, he is now free to marry his adopted sister Luggrezia. Surprisingly for the type of opera it is, there are no other couples at the end, but everyone's happy, so it's all good.

It's a lot of fun, for sure. The libretto is a bit clumsy, I feel, but plenty good enough to support some great music. Definitely, the show is stolen by Vannella and Cardella, the soubrette maids, here played effectively by Laura Cherici and Rosa Bove respectively. The production is nineteen fifties or sixties themed, and it works well. I liked this better than La Salustia, though not I think particularly because I think opera buffa is "better" than opera seria. Pergolesi was getting better, is what I think it is.

Worth noting--or maybe not, but too bad; I'm noting it anyway: a character named Ascanio being revealed via birthmark as a long-lost son? That is exactly what happens in Leonardo Leo's L'Alidoro. The two plots aren't otherwise very similar, but that...is what it is. Though I suppose you could say that, given the commonness of the birthmark thing, the only real coincidence is the names. Still seems kinda weird, though. Coincidence? Probably!

Here and here are two arias that I uploaded, one from each of the maids. You can see from them how enjoyable the opera as a whole is.

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, La Salustia (1732)

Pergolesi died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-six, making him the shortest-lived composer of whom I'm aware. But he did use the time he had pretty well, writing eight operas in his last three years, along with sundry other musical works. He wrote four operas seria, two operas buffa, and two short, comic intermezzos for two of said operas seria. Of course, the only one that's widely-known is one of those intermezzos, La Serva Padrona, a highly influential piece. But that's not enough for me! Fuck that noise! I want to see every opera that he wrote! And, surprisingly, I can; they're all available on disc, in one handy box (or individually, but that would be significantly more expensive). Well, I say "all;" in point of fact, this one isn't. It's because it's considered a "sacred drama" rather than an opera, but it's still an opera, fercrissake, as is Mozart's debut.  You're the Pergolesi Festival--if we can't get all of Pergolesi from you, where can we get it?

Anyway, aside from that one, this is Pergolesi's first. Might as well watch 'em in order. It's about a Roman emperor, Alessandro--a very weak and ineffectual emperor, if this opera is to be believed (and maybe historically, but in fairness to the real guy, he was a young teenager while all this stuff was going on.  Give him a break). At any rate, he was assassinated at the age of twenty-seven and replaced by the terrifyingly-named Maximinus Thrax, so that's a thing. Anyway, he's married to Salustia, so that's fine. But unfortunately, his mother Giulia, who had arranged the marriage, is now jealous because her dumb ol' daughter-in-law gets to be empress and not her. What did she THINK would happen after he marriage? She browbeats her son into signing a document making HER empress again, and Salustina...well, it's not clear. But Salustina's father Marizano is not happy about this and plots to assassinate Giulia, with the help of another soldier, Claudio. There's also a little subplot where Claudio had abandoned his lover Albina but she's still in love with him and wants to get him back. Salustina--being all virtuous and stuff--foils their plot to poison Giulia, while refusing to reveal the guilty party. Things continue in this vein until we get the inevitable--but hella unconvincing, even by baroque standards--happy ending.

We can cut the real-live Alexander a break, probably, in that he was thirteen or fourteen while this was happening and totally helpless to the political machinations going 'round. But here, my goodness he's a schmuck. And Giulia, sheesh. I'm not sure I've ever seen such a cartoonishly over-the-top antagonist in an opera: total Disney-villain stuff. Not that that's necessarily a complaint. Laura Polverelli certainly seems to be having fun with the role, taking it for all the camp value it's worth. My other favorites were Vittorio Prato, very convincing as the powerful general; and Serena Malfi as Salustia herself, probably implausibly self-sacrificing, but with a few good defiant moments.

It's a lot of fun. For whatever reason, I found the recitative/aria/recitative/aria structure more obvious than usual, but hell, even if it's a bit overly talky, there are a lot of good arias, even if not quite Handel/Vivaldi level. Also, for unclear reasons, Alessandro sings an aria while holding a live hen. Probably most hens never in their lives get to have experiences that interesting. I look forward to watching the rest of Pergolesi's sadly abbreviated corpus.