I think from now on I'm going to include DVD cover images with these reviews where applicable. Make the blog a little more visually...something. "Dynamic" might be pushing it.
Supposedly, according to various articles on the internet that may or may not all stem from one claim that may or may not be in any way factual, this was the most popular opera of the seventeenth century. Quite a claim. This would be based on number of performances, but I have a hard time seeing how that can possibly be verified. Still! They say that, so it's probably worth seeing. I mean, it's Cavalli, so it's probably going to be worth seeing anyway. I don't need an excuse. But...I don't know how I was going to finish this sentence.
It's...well, based on the story of Jason and Medea. Sort of. Very, very sort of. It never ceases to amuse me how little respect people in baroque times had for classical mythology. Sure, it varied: Cavalli's La Didone, in spite of the grafted-on happy ending, basically takes the drama seriously; L'Orfeo is very, very solemn; and Charpentier's Medée is a grimmer, more mythologically-grounded take on the same material here --but people of the time were extremely willing to just travesty the shit out of this material. And I love them for it!
SO ANYWAY. It's very busy, with characters constantly dashing on and off-stage; it would take forever to provide more than a basic plot outline: Jason and Medea are in love, in theory. But Jason is already married and already has children with Hypsipyle, the queen of Lemnos, and she wants him back so she sends her servant Orestes to find him. There's also Aegeus (Theseus' father?), who apparently had a thing with Medea in the past and is still in love with her. And there's Aegeus' comedy servant, the stammering Demo. Ultimately, Hypsipyle finds Jason and demands that he return to her, but he's vacillating around like a big dope. Medea is pissed at this and demands that he kill Hypsipyle. He doesn't want to get his hands dirty, but it's cool if one of his men does it, so he orders her to go meet with his captain, Besso and say a specific thing to him, and he orders Besso to fling whoever says this to him in the ocean. However, instead Medea comes, says the specific thing, and gets thrown in the ocean, only to be saved by Aegeus. Now she's in love with him again (and sorry for trying to get her rival murdered). So Jason is ordered to return to Hypsipyle, which he does, and everyone's happy. And that's that. Also, did I mention that there's a horny old nursemaid? That's a character type that Cavalli is extremely fond of.
I know that SOUNDS goofy, but I don't think it quite gets at how goofy it really is in the small details: Demo insisting that he drowned in the ocean and now he's dead and also he's swallowed a whale; Besso declaring that he won't drown Hypsipyle because "I only kill one queen per day;" Jason's sitcom-level efforts to placate both Medea and Hypsipyle--it makes me feel closer to our seventeenth-century forebears to realize that they had whimsical senses of humor like this.
There are actually two productions of this available on disc; the other, being I guess older, seems to be much more watched--it has a bunch of amazon reviews while this has none--but I was extremely happy with it. Goofy, sure, in a way that people complain about sometimes, sure, but it seemed to fit the general tone of the piece very well. A confident mixture of anachronistic setting and especially costuming, with Hypsipyle (pictured on the DVD cover) and her attendants dressed in 1920s chic lugging steamer trunks around; the Argonauts looking like some kind of mixture of bikers and black-clad secret service people, with Ercole himself (of course Hercules is a character here; you know he's always hanging around) as a huge-muscled Hell's Angels type; and Cupid (another singing character) as a person in a somewhat terrifying giant, anatomically correct Cupid costume. It's pretty darned nutty, in all, but in a way that brings me delight in great measure.
Is it the best opera of the seventeenth century? Well...hard to say, really. Not necessarily, but it IS super-good, and if we have to choose one, hell, I guess we could go with this, while recognizing that it's necessarily at least a somewhat arbitrary distinction.
This is what I watched instead of the Presidential debate, by the way. This was self-evidently the correct choice. I don't know what you people were expecting.
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