Oh yeah! Oh yeah! Here we go! This is some ADVANCED OPERA-WATCHING SHIT, you betcha! Definitely one of the rarest I've ever seen. This is based on Molière's comedy, obviously. Quoth wikipedia: "As the work uses spoken dialogue and verse taken directly from Molière's play, the Comédie-Française tried unsuccessfully to block performance of the opera." Seriously, guys? You thought you should have exclusive rights to a play that was at the time one hundred ninety-two years old? Current copyright law is plenty draconian, but this is ridiculous. Even more ridiculous.
I have actually seen the play, albeit in English translation. The plot is that there's this drunken woodcutter, Sganarelle, who is made to pretend to be a doctor when his wife--to get revenge for his abusive behavior--tells the servants of Géronte, a rich guy looking for one, that he IS, but won't reveal it unless he gets the shit beaten out of him. As you do. The problem is that Géronte's daughter Lucinde has seemingly been struck mute, and thus can't marry the rich guy that he's arranged for her. But in fact, she's just faking it because she wants to marry her sweetheart, Léandre. Léandre gets Sganarelle to agree to distract Geronté so he can elope with Lucinde. As soon as she sees him, she magically regains her voice. Geronté, being hell of pissed off, is going to have Sganarelle executed (if you were a rich guy in seventeenth-century France you could just do that?), but then it turns out that Léandre has just inherited a bunch of money from his conveniently rich and conveniently late uncle, so...he doesn't. One of these things where a modern sensibility would prefer to see a change of heart rather than the circumstances changing to accommodate the regressive reality of the thing...but the story is from a pre-modern mindset that doesn't want to destabilized the status quo, so that's what we get. It's why there are all these stories about people from humble backgrounds actually secretly being nobility.
This opera is almost never performed, but it's hard to say why. It's my first Gounod comedy (and probably only, the way things are looking), but he proves himself perfectly adept at writing comic music. I do have the same problem that I've had with a number of comic operas: the story is just so silly and lightweight that it doesn't feel like it has as much heft as you'd like. That's part of the reason truly great comedies like Figaro, L'elisir, Falstaff, or Rosenkavalier stand out so much. Nonetheless, there's really no reason we shouldn't see this performed more often. Is it because the idea of a drunken wife-beater doesn't seem as winsome as perhaps it once did? But the original play is still regularly performed. As far as I know.
I was able to watch this thanks to this bootleg DVD. Given that the recording exists, it is an abiding mystery why there's no official release, but such things happen. It has French subtitles which I was more or less able to follow, but alas, the spoken parts (yes, as a comic opera, it has spoken bits--never my favorite thing, but eh, it's fine) are unsubtitled, which was a bit rough. I mean, I knew what was happening, basically, but I definitely missed some jokes, but that the audience was exactly roaring with laughter. The second and third acts take place in a kind of normal room with some sofas, but the first one features this extremely bizarre assemblage of metal bands seemingly set up to look like a whirlwind with various furniture and other household sundries caught up in it. I guess it's meant to suggest the chaos of the woodcutter's hut. Well, it was fine.
I've liked every Gounod opera I've seen, and if you give me more, I will watch them too. I realize I say something along those lines in regards to bugloads of operas I watch, but it is frequently true, dammit!
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