So here's how I came to see this: someone posted a link with a description on the Met Live in HD facebook group; I sort of scrolled past without really reading it but the sole comment caught my eye: "The music's [sic] better be over-the-top GREAT! Because this sounds appalling!" So of course I looked back at the post: what's so appalling? And it was quickly apparent that, holy crud, this is an opera based on Angela Carter's novel The Passion of New Eve. Well...okay. Fair enough. I can see how certain people--probably the people in an opera group more than the general population, if I'm stereotyping--would find that "appalling." But not me! I'm not sure about the utility of changing the title--the original seems more distinctive--but still, no way I'm not watching THAT shit!
You know what The Passion of New Eve is about, right? No? You should read it. It's a great novel, and the opera is pretty faithful to it: streamlined in places, of course, but basically hitting all the main points. There's an Englishman, Evelyn, living in a dystopian New York who's obsessed with a silent movie star named Tristessa (Tristessa de St Ange in the book, but only her first name is given here). He has a dubious, exploitive relationship with a young prostitute before he goes west where he's captured and brought to the all-female city of Beulah and its leader "Mother;" there, he is forcibly given a sex change operation. The idea is to impregnate her with his own sperm to bring forth a new messiah, but she escapes only to be captured by an insane patriarchal cult leader "poet" named Zero who lives in a compound with a group of slave-wives. He's obsessed with Tristessa because he thinks she's somehow rendered him infertile.
Eventually...well, do I really need to go through the whole thing blow by blow? It seems unnecessary. Suffice to say, the novel is basically about gender relations being out of balance. And the opera does a great job of capturing the spirit of the original; even when there are small plot changes, the ideas are very faithful, which is the most important thing.
Do you get the impression that I liked this? Well, I loved it. You might expect some sort of jagged, atonal music for a story like this, but it's all tonal, neo-romantic stuff. Great! The production work is vivid and memorable. One thing I really appreciated was the way it uses the new medium to do things with characters that the original couldn't that advance the novel's themes: Mother and Zero are played by the same singer, as are female-Tristessa/Eve and male-Tristessa/Evelyn. Kind of genius. In the interest of full disclosure, one should probably put trigger warnings on it; it's definitely somewhat R-rated, though not as much as it could be. You can probably tell from that plot summary whether or not it would be distressing for you. I recommend it, however.
It's still available for like four days. The only problem I have is that, while sung in English, there are Swedish subtitles only. Burnt-in Swedish subtitles (seriously, why wouldn't you at least make them optional?) so whatever else you can say, I DID learn a few Swedish words, such as I ("jag"), beauty ("vacker") and bitch ("häxa"). There's probably some irony to the fact that if you watch an opera in your native languages with subtitles in another, native speakers of the other language are almost certainly going to be able to follow it better, and that's certainly the case here. Some parts are clear; some...not. It certainly helped that I was already basically familiar with the story.
You know, I'd never even heard of this 'til yesterday and then I saw it today and it was great. Opera!
No comments:
Post a Comment