#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.