Manuel Penella, El gato montés (1916)

Various places online call this a zarzuela, but in that case, the term has absolutely no meaning beyond simply "Spanish opera."  There's nothing unusual about this except the language: it's a standard tragic opera with no spoken dialogue.  Golly!

So there's a woman named Soléa, and she's in love with a toreador named Rafael.  Well, kind of.  She's giving it her best shot, but she's still REALLY in love with a bandit named Juanillo--el gato montés!  The wildcat!  He went to jail for killing a guy who was hitting on Soléa, but now he's escaped!  And he's back!  A gypsy fortune-teller warns Rafael not to fight or he'll die, but Juanillo goads him into a big fight where he tries to defeat six bulls.  But instead, he dies.  That was...not unpredictable.  Anyway, Soléa dies of sorrow, and Juanillo comes back to her, because now life has no meaning for him.  He refuses to leave when the law is coming for him and instead has his underling shoot and kill him.  The end.

I must say, I found this dramatically lacking.  It's a favorite of Plácido Domingo who--as you can see--plays Rafael, but I dunno.  The music is generally good, you can see the Spanish flavor, although it's a very open question whether I would if I didn't know it was Spanish.  But the story, eh.  The characters are very sketchily drawn, and in particular you really never get what Soléa's deal is.  I mean, maybe you do but her deal isn't very interesting.  I do not know!

During the bullfighting sequence, this production plays stock footage of bullfights.  I mean, okay.  The opera is about what it's about and there's no avoiding it.  Complaining about it is about as useful as complaining about the fox hunting scenes in Trollope novels.  But good lord, people, you REALLY do not need to rub it in like that.  You could easily underplay it, and you ought to, because you shouldn't give me time to really contemplate how FUCKING FUCKED UP it is for people to be torturing innocent animals for no goddamn reason.  Fuuuuck people suck.  And yet, even the ones who suck sometimes produce transcendental art.  What a contradiction!  And yet, I'm not sure that this particular opera is an example of that.  WHATEVZ.  I really just wanted to bump up my Spanish-language opera count, so mission accomplished.

Emmerich Kálmán, Die Csárdásfürstin (1915)

So they were going to have another operetta by Paul Abraham, The Flower of Hawaii, on Operavision, which I was very excited about it, but then--as I feared--it disappeared from the schedule after only a few days.  Damn you, COVID!  But I still wanted to see an operetta, so I chose this one, by another Hungarian composer, Abraham's very close contemporary.

The plot could really hardly be more fluffy.  Edwin, an Austrian prince, is hanging around cafes in Budapest.  He's in love with one of the singers, Silvia Varescu, the title gipsy (sic) princess, though she doesn't seem to be a Gypsy in any meaningful sense.  They're going to get married, but there's a problem: he's already engaged, to a countess Anastasia.  And a secondary problem: his parents are not going to approve this match.  But fortunately, his friend Count Boni falls in love with Anastasia, so the two of them get together, and the problem with Edwin's parents is solved when it turns out that his mother was also a cabaret singer back in the day.  So everyone (except dad) goes to America for a tour of some sort.  All this takes place with the specter of the Great War looming, but if you think that adds any gravitas to the proceedings, you are gravely mistaken.

Here's one thing--it's not a big plot point; it's just something that made me think: huh.  That's sort of interesting.  Which is that Silvia and Boni are briefly pretending to be married for reasons unexplained, and Edwin's like, awesome!  My parents will be WAY more willing to accept a divorced countess as a daughter-in-law than a showgirl!  And I thought...huh.  Again.  Do things work like that?  I don't know.  I have nothing to say about it except that it stuck with me.

Anyway.  It's a bit of fun.  Certainly nothing mind-blowing or for the ages.  Some musical numbers that are rather rousing and infectious; some that are a bit forgettable.  The subtitles very noticeably diverge from the actually singing text so as to rhyme, but I think that's fine in a weightless piece like this.  The production is done outside, interestingly enough, with a bay in the background.  Reasonably fun/colorful.  Sometimes something like this is all you need.  I'm not bowled over or anything, but I may seek out more Kálmán in the future, just for laffs.

Giacomo Meyerbeer, L'étoile du nord (1854)

For the fact that we can see this, we must thank some awesome Japanese person who took it upon themselves to add subtitles to this performance and upload it.  Thanks, Japanese person!  You rule!

So this starts off in Sweden, where--for reasons that are never even hinted at--Tsar Peter of Russia is in disguise working as a carpenter.  He has fallen in love with a local woman, Catherine, who doesn't know his identity.  Some other stuff happens, Catherine's brother Georges is in love with a different woman, Prascovia. Cossacks attack.  Georges is drafted.  Catherine goes off disguised as a man to save him.  She thinks Peter is unfaithful, but then it turns out he's not.  There's a plot against the Tsar which is crushed when he announces who he is (I don't get it--wouldn't that just result in him being immediately murdered?).  Um.  Everything turns out well.  The title comes from Catherine's late mother having prophesied that her life would be guided in a brilliant direction by the North Star, and now she's the Tsar's wife so...I guess so.

Dang, man.  If that summary seemed kind of vague, it's because this was VERY hard to follow.  I look at the wikipedia entry and think, that happened.  Huh.  I guess.  If you say so.  It may well in part be because of the performance: the Finnish cast is all fine, but the staging...I don't know.  It's staged in the sense that everyone's costumed and no one's reading from scores, but there are no backgrounds or sets and very minimal props, and I feel that this may make it harder than necessary to understand.  Then again, it could well just be the libretto: I prophesied that having Eugene Scribe writing would help, but...maybe it didn't.  I was sort of into the story, but I think I would've been more so if I could've grasped it better.

Which is a shame, because the music is just great; possibly Meyerbeer's most consistent score.  That I've heard, anyway.  It also contains comic elements that aren't really present in his other work, which sorta makes me wish he'd done more comedy.  This would definitely be a good opera to just listen to.  I approve.

And...now I've seen all of Meyerbeer's French operas--the ones that made him famous.  Considering that he had a fifty-plus-year career, he really wasn't very prolific.  It's a shame, because he was goldang good.  Possibly it would've been better if he hadn't been independently wealthy and had had to actually work for a living.  Do you think Carl Barks would've written so many duck stories if they'd paid him a fair wage?  Hmm.  Then again, maybe being in favor of capitalist exploitation, even in a jokey way, is a bad look.  Suffice it to say, I like Meyerbeer, and fuck Wagner for ruining his reputation.

Giacomo Meyerbeer, Dinorah; ou, Le pardon de Ploërmel (1859)

So after composing three megahit grand operas, you might think Meyerbeer would've continued in this vein, but not so.  Even before Le prophète, he had started the opera that would become L'Africaine, which he tinkered around with for the rest of his life, and which was only performed posthumously.  But in the meantime, he wrote some less ambitious operas: the Singspiel Ein Feldlager in Schlesien, this, and L'étoile du nord (which reused some of the music and story from Feldlager).  He was already rich, so he didn't have to work any harder than he wanted to.

This is a folklore-based piece.  Dinorah, alas, has gone insane because her bridegroom Hoël disappeared on their wedding day, one year ago.  But now, he has returned, having discovered a treasure that he wants to retrieve (was he looking for that for the whole year?  It is never explained).  He enlists the help of a cowardly bagpiper named Corentin to help him retrieve it.  There's a dark twist: legend says that the first person to touch the treasure will die within the year.  So they argue about that for a bit.  Dinorah falls in the river but Hoël rescues her and she stops being insane.  They give up on the treasure and are happy.  The end.

Yes, well.  This is Meyerbeer's only French opera with a libretto not by Eugene Scribe, and it certainly feels different.  Meyerbeer's music is good as always (even if it lacks the highlights of his best work) but the plot is a bit of a mess, feeling very vague and unexplained: why WAS Hoël away for so long?  What even IS this treasure?  And what kind of person is he supposed to be?  I'm sorry to say that as played here by Armand Arapian, he looks like a deranged prospector, which...actually might sort of match the libretto.  But that's not really a good thing either way.  There are also a bunch of superfluous pastoral scenes of farmers, hunters, and herders; not that you necessarily need justification for superfluity in an opera, but it all doesn't really work for me.  And what IS this "Pardon," anyway?  It's clearly some sort of religious ceremony, but who's being pardoned?  For what?  It is never made clear.  There ARE some dancing sheep and goats in this production that are pretty fun, though.

I dunno; I wouldn't place this in the forefront of Meyerbeer's oeuvre.  But I have high hopes that, especially with Scribe's participation, L'étoile du nord will be more to my taste.

Pyotr Tchaikovsky, The Slippers (1887)

Here is some more Tchaikovsky, with whom you can never go wrong.  As for the title...well, I am committed to using the English-language titles of operas which, from my Anglocentric perspective, come from obscurer languages, and I will readily grant you that The Tsarina's Slippers sounds way better--but, well, it's an embellishment.  Stand true to your dumb, nonsensical principles!

It concerns small village in Ukraine, 'round about Christmas-time.  See, a devil has dropped by because the village blacksmith, Vakula, drew a picture making fun of him, and now he's the laughingstock of Hell.  So he wants revenge.  But Vakula has his own problems--or problem, that is: he's in love with Oxana, but she keeps putting him off.  She doesn't quite know her own mind, apparently; at one point she laments that she can't accept him even though she loves him.  She says, in jest, that she'll marry him if he can get her some beautiful slippers like the Tsarina presumably has.  He takes her up on this; he catches the devil by the tail and orders him to take him to the royal court, where we get a song in praise of Russian military might (a composer's gotta know what side his bread is buttered on, I guess), as well as some totally awesome dances, and in the end the devil apparently just takes a pair of slippers and they go on home.  Oxana and Vakula are united (she making it clear that she didn't need the slippers to marry him), and everyone--including the devil, apparently--is happy.

This is the third opera I've seen based on a story from Gogol's Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, after Rimsky-Korsakov's May Night and Mussorgsky's Sorochintsy Fair.  Rimsky-Korsakov's Christmas Eve, which I haven't yet had the chance to see, is from the same story.  This definitely has the same feel as those, with a baggy plot that digresses all over the place (there's a funny scene I didn't even mention where Vakula's mother Solokha, a witch, successively hides four separate men in sacks in her house).  And although I liked them all, it is definitely the best of the three. 

See, here's the thing you have to understand: this opera rules so fucking hard.  I absolutely loved everything about it--and it's a great Christmas show into the bargain.  I can easily see myself starting a new tradition of watching it every year at about this time.  This might be blasphemous to some, but it's easily the best Tchaikovsky I've seen so far.  And this ROH production is absolutely great--really colorful and fun.  Very expensive-looking, but that money went to all the right places.   It's not as singer-centric as some operas, natch, but still very good.  The clear VIP is Larissa Diadkova as Solokha: really funny and charming and I think I'm a little in love with her.  It's interesting that there's this character explicitly in league with devils, and yet she's sympathetic and nothing bad happens to her.  I like.

I have this tendency to get self-flagellatory about things like this: "all this money for operas when so many people suffer?!?" but I'm going to try not to: the amount of cash pumped into shitty blockbuster movies that no one likes and are forgotten next year absolutely dwarfs what's spent on opera.  When that stops happening, maybe we can talk.  Until now, I'll keep enjoying my spectacles.

Giacomo Meyerbeer, Le prophète (1849)

After Les Huguenots was a smash hit in 1836, Meyerbeer wanted to write another opera about a religious conflict that would be totally opaque to twenty-first-century Americans. It's what the people wanted! But Le prophète wasn't completed until 1849. It seems the word "long-awaited" was relevant back then too.

It's based--extremely loosely, natch--on the life of John of Leiden, an Anabaptist who decided he was a prophet and briefly took over the city of Münster before being deposed and killed horribly (really horribly--you can read all about it on the wikipedia page. As I've probably said before, it just sickens me how sadistic people can be). Anyway: here, at the beginning, Jean runs an inn with his mother, Fidès. He wants to marry his sweetheart Berthe, but for that he needs permission from the local feudal lord, Oberthal, who arrests the two women. Meanwhile, some sinister Anabaptists are trying to convince Jean to be their prophet, be he is resistant. It becomes obvious that they're doing this for totally cynical reasons, so it's not clear why they're so deadset on ol' Jean. Berthe comes in, having escaped, but Oberthal makes her return on pain of Fidès' death. Now Jean is pissed off, so he agrees to go along with the Anabaptists' plans. They start sorta running amuck, murdering nobles and preaching egalitarianism, you know how it goes. Eventually they take over Münster, and Jean is going to be crowned king. But his mother--who didn't know that he was this nefarious prophet everyone had been talking about--recognizes him. And because apparently it's forbidden for a prophet to have a mother (this plot detail is extremely unclear), he denies her and says "if I'm tricking you and she's my mom, take revenge and kill me!" so that she'll recant to save his life. Clever, if dickish. Later, they meet in private, she begs him to step down, he doesn't want to, but ultimately he agrees. Berthe appears, intent on murder; when she sees him everyone's happy and they're all going to leave together, but then she learns that he's the prophet and gets pissed off and stabs herself. As you do. With nothing to live for, he determines to take everyone down with him. It's a big ol' Anabaptist banquet; Oberthal shows up to arrest him, but the doors have been locked so no one can escape and he sets off a big explosion and absolutely everyone dies. The end!

I've gotta say, that ending really left me grinning. Maybe that's perverse, but it's so perfectly, operatically over-the-top. I was having a little trouble with the story at first: Jean's character arc is not particularly clear; he's corrupted by power and all, but there's really no process by which that happens. He just IS, suddenly. Still, especially in the latter half I really got into it: there's a great ballet sequence, predictably, and there are a few really great duets with Fidès and Berthe. Lots of showstopping moments, and the climax is truly climactic.

The best way to watch it is here, with French subs. I have given up trying to understand why these things are recorded but not commercially released. It's a really good performance, with John Osborn in the title role. But I must REALLY give a huge shout-out to Kate Aldrich as Fidès. You would think that Berthe would be the female lead, what with being the soprano and the love interest, but no, it's Fidès. She gets some of the best arias in the piece, and HOLY HELL Aldrich is incredible in the role. She sings and acts the hell out of it, and I love her to pieces.  How have I never seen her before?

It's easy to understand why Meyerbeer was the most popular composer of his time. Not that he's necessarily the best, but he wrote some very rousing, accessible music, and I'm not sure why his star has faded so much. Is it just Wagner's dickishness? Could be, but I'll say this: I'll take Meyerbeer over Wagner not every day of the week--let's not get carried away--but probably three or four of them, anyway. I'm a big fan.

Mark Grey, Frankenstein (2019)

I have to admit, I have never read Frankenstein. Actually, what am I saying? I don't have to admit that! I could easily fake it just by reading the wikipedia entry. Boy, I sure screwed this one up. Stupid! Stupid!

Um, where were we? Right. I suppose it would have actually made sense to see this around Halloween time, but...I didn't. This is a production (the debut, from La Monnaie de Munt) that was on Operavision some time ago, but for whatever reason, I didn't get to it until now. The plot is the plot of Frankenstein. Mostly. It DOES have a new frame narrative: a group of scientists in a future, science-fictiony Arctic salvage the block of ice in which the creature is frozen and thaw him out to try to get him to tell his story. This replaces the frame narrative of the original novel. And the creature does indeed tell about his past: about him being scorned by the people and framing a servant, Justine, for the murder of Doc Frank's brother; about him trying to get the doctor to make him a bride and about him killing the Doctor's bride-to-be. Well, that's Frankenstein!

Very fancy production, with a big futuristic, set that freely slips into the past. But did I like the opera? Well, I'll level with you: not very much. The music does reach a few sort of dramatic crescendi (is that how you pluralize "crescendo?" I realize I don't think I've ever done it before), but mostly it's the kind of thing you get with a lot of contemporary operas where it's really not that interesting in itself, and mainly just supporting the story. Which can be okay, but (of course there's a but) I...really didn't find the story very engaging either. Granted, part of this may be that somewhat confusing staging and my unfamiliarity with the novel made it harder than it needed to be. Or maybe I'd find the novel boring! Who knows? But I just at no point felt involved with the story. It maybe perhaps didn't help that all the non-creature characters, male and female, are made up to look the same, with shaven heads, pale skin, and sunken eyes. If this is meant to be a "who are the REAL monsters?!?" thing, it didn't work for me. And if it's meant to be something else...it also didn't work for me.

You know I like seeing all kinds of operas, and this was really the only old operavision production I'd missed, apart from a few that were only available before I knew about the site. So in that sense, I'm glad to have seen it. But in another sense, I do not feel that it is any great loss to you if you missed it.

Alessandro Melani, L'empio punito (1669)

I will automatically pounce on any seventeenth-century opera I can find, as there are dramatically fewer available than those of any other century. This DVD just came out a month or two ago, giving us a look at a hitherto obscure piece.

So...it's about this rake. He's married, but he abandons his wife to chase after others, with the help of his servant with whom he has a love-hate relationship. Eventually, he kills a man in the course of a seduction. Later, in a graveyard, he sees a statue that speaks and, defiantly, invites it to dinner. Then--hmm...does this sound vaguely familiar? That's right: all opera lovers will have immediately thought of Alexander Dargomyzhsky's Stone Guest. There might also be other operas on the subject; I can't recall at the moment.

Yes well in all seriousness, obviously, this is based on the Don Juan legend--the first opera to be so, and therefore of automatic interest. It feels very different than the others, though (obviously comparing it to Don Giovanni isn't exactly fair, but it's probably unavoidable). Firstly, the names are completely different: the Don Juan character is Acrimante, Leporello is Bibi...the other characters don't really have exact parallels to Mozart. There's also a whole goofy subplot involving a romance between Bibi and the pants-role nursemaid Delfa. But I'd say that the biggest distinction, really, is that you don't get the impression that Acrimante is quite the remorseless seducer that Giovanni is. The opera doesn't emphasize the extent of his conquests, and he sings a lot--to himself, not as a seduction technique--about how in love he is with his latest prey. Flighty and inconsistent as this may be, it somehow makes him seem more sympathetic than Giovanni, who knows exactly who he is and what he wants. As such, the drama and the moral don't quite come home as hard as they might. The title means "the wicked punished," but you might wonder, really? Is that what happens?

Still extremely interesting, of course! The music isn't quite Cavalli level, but it's still great fun, with a lot of proto-arias. The production is...well, it's fine, you get used to it, but I feel like something slightly less Eurotrashy might have been called for under the circumstances. The opening--with servants singing a chorus about how hard their life is--is undercut in a weird way by the fact that they're all lounging around in old-fashioned bathing costumes. What? 'Sokay. I liked it.

Rufus Wainwright, Prima Donna (2009)

Huh. Rufus Wainwright writes operas? Who knew? Well, I guess anyone who was even cursorily following his career knew. Apparently he's a huge opera enthusiast, which I never would have guessed, as his pop music does not sound at all opera-y.

This is inspired by Maria Callas. It's about an aging diva, Régine Saint Laurent, whose career abruptly stalled out six years prior when, while singing her signature role, her voice suddenly gave out in the middle of a big duet (her signature role is the lead in an opera about Eleanor of Aquitaine; I initially thought it might be a real opera--certainly seems like something Donizetti would write--but it's not). She's planning to mount a comeback, and a journalist, André Letourner, comes to her apartment to interview her. He's a big fan of hers and a tenor manqué himself. She finds him very charming, but when she tries to sing the duet with him, she breaks down in the same place as before. She has kind of a breakdown, so everyone (meaning her long-time butler and new maid) decide that he'll come back that evening. Anyway, things don't go well, she realizes that she can't sing after all, and when André (whom she's sorta-kind convinced herself she's in love with, returns with this fiancée, she is...sad (this seemed a little odd, since at least here he's pretty clearly coded as gay, but given the time he could easily be closeted). It happens to be Bastille Day, so she steps outside on her balcony to watch the fireworks and sees a parallel between the transience of them and her career.

Some critics have objected to this story on the basis that it's not dramatic enough; that there needs to be more conflict. But I don't know that I agree with that. It's true, I suppose, that there's no life-and-death drama like a Verdi opera, but...really, small-scale tragedy has its place as well. A totally internal conflict can still be apocalyptic: see The Passion According to GH or "Mad Girl's Love Song." Not that this is exactly on the levels of those, but I still think it works very well--and it's bolstered a lot by the really impeccable production from the Royal Swedish Opera, which absolutely nails the seventies look--in terms of setting, costumes, props, hairstyles--and a cast who really act the hell out of it. Nobody can have any objections to it.

But as for the music, which of course is inseparable from the drama: I have to admit, I was not familiar with Wainwright's career. But I listened to a random assortment of his songs on youtube, and I have to admit, I did not find them overly exciting. Perhaps I would warm to him if I gave him more of a chance, but what I heard seemed like pretty bland singer-songwriter stuff. I have to say, I think he should probably stick to opera, because in contrast to that, this rules pretty hard. Very unabashedly romantic music; beautiful and exciting. The troubled duet is particularly great. In the interview accompanying this, Wainwright names Janáček as someone he'd like to sound like; I regret to say, then, that this sounds absolutely nothing like Janáček--but what it does sound like is a very impressive talent that I'd like to hear more from. This opera was actually initially commissioned by the Met, but Peter Gelb rejected it because the libretto was in French and he wanted AMERICAN opera! This is America! Why do I have to press one for English?!? Very weird, but hey, his loss.

Baldassarre Galuppi, L'inimico delle donne (1771)

When did the baroque era end? The year you hear bandied around is 1750--I'd say 1759 when Handel died, 1764 when Rameau died, or 1762 when Orfeo ed Euridice debuted--but obviously all of these are pretty arbitrary. And whatever year you choose, it's not like all the baroque composers just dropped dead the instant the clock ticked over. And I doubt that they received postcards reminding them that, hey, we're trying to transition from the baroque to the classical period now, so if you could please adjust your music accordingly...but maybe they did! I might have missed that.

Still, as I think about it, I realize that this may actually be the first opera I've seen by a baroque composer in what most would consider a post-baroque world. And now I feel like I'm being put on the spot: IS THIS MUSIC STILL BAROQUE YES OR NO? Leave me alone! 

Well, whatever it is, it's perfectly fun. The plot here is featherweight and not to be thought about too hard: we're in some sort of European vision of China or Japan or something where the emperor, Zon-Zon, has to get married as per custom or lose his throne. But there's a problem: for unspecified reasons, he hates women. An Italian women, Agnesina, and her father Geminiano happen to stop by. But guess what: she hates men. So what will happen?!? Well, obviously, this immovable object and unstoppable force will, in coming together, create a massive explosion that destroys the known universe. Or maybe something else happens. I'm a bit hazy on the details.

Seriously, we never get any kind of explanation for why they feel as they do. It's not exactly deep stuff. It's a bit Orientalist, of which my favorite example: when they first arrive, the visitors wonder why the people all speak Italian. The explanation is that an Italian guy visited their country years ago, and they liked his language so much that they all started speaking it. Seriously? You just abandoned your own language? Sure, I suppose they could speak both, like how French was fashionable in nineteenth-century Russia, but that is clearly not the idea.  The production is colorful, with occasional humorous anachronistic touches (my favorite: at one point Zon-Zon is seen reading the Tintin book Le Lotus bleu).  As I said: fun.  A bit trivial, but fun. One of the amazon reviews claims that this is a reconstruction of a mostly-lost opera, but I can find no confirmation of that elsewhere, so I'm going to assume it's pure Galuppi until shown otherwise.

Francesco Cavalli, La Calisto (1651)

So is this the Only Seventeenth-Century Opera Blog from now on?  The only way to find out...is to keep reading!

Got some more Cavalli cominatcha. Even by the standards of time, I feel, the plot is extremely shambolic. Basically, we have just the two mortal characters, Calisto (obviously) and Endymion. Their stories don't really intersect; I don't think they ever interact with each other throughout the course of the opera. Everyone else is Gods and their attendants: Jove, Juno, Mercury, Diana, Pan, sundry satyrs and things. Calisto's story involves Jove using cunning disguises to seduce her; Juno is not happy about this, so Jove, thinking quickly, turns her into a bear. I don't know what it says about him that that was the first solution that occurred to him. Anyway, later she's going to be a constellation, so don't worry too much about her. Endymion, meanwhile, is hopelessly in love with Diana, so he's gotta deal with that. Oh, and of course, the omnipresent comedy skirt role of the horny nursemaid--here an attendant of Diana--is ever-present.

I feel like there are Cavalli operas that sort of try to have a somewhat more focused, semi-serious story (Erismena, Eliogabalo) and ones that...don't (Il rapimento d'Helena, La virtù dei strali d'Amore). This falls very much in the latter class. Which is fine! Basically. Okay okay, I probably prefer the other kind, but frickin' 'eck, man, it's Cavalli! You can't complain too much. This definitely is not an opera you'd watch for the story, however.

Musically, of course it's fine, though perhaps not Cavalli's all-time greatest work. The production is fun; it features very stylized period costumes and a whole shit-ton of trapdoors in the floor that characters emerge from and dive back into. I must imagine that the choreography took some doing to get down.

The unfortunate thing is that I believe I have now exhausted the supply of Cavalli on video (I've seen nine of his operas). But the good news is, he has plenty of extant operas I haven't seen, so hopefully there will be more in the future.

Antonio Draghi, El Prometeo (1669)

Draghi was a hugely prolific seventeenth-century composer--wikipedia lists somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred fifteen operas (!), and given that said list doesn't include this one, it's clearly incomplete. But in spite of this, he's barely been recorded, even in audio-only format: seriously, check youtube: you'll find this, and excerpts of this, and a few short excerpts of other things and...that's really truly all. Look on amazon; the CD of this is the only thing you'll find. Nobody seems to care about Antonio Draghi. He can't be that bad! Can he? Well, let's see!

The amazing thing about this--maybe you already figured it out from the fact that it has an "el" rather than an "il," you clever clogs--is that it has a Spanish-language libretto. Holy shit! What the heck?!? Well, it's because it was written for the Queen of Spain's birthday. Surely that it must make it the first-ever Spanish-language opera, and therefore the first first opera in any language I've ever seen, other than languages where the first is almost certainly the only (Esperanto, Sanskrit) (okay, on reflection, that's wrong; John Blow's Venus and Adonis is the first English-language opera.  But it's still fun!).

It's about Prometheus, as you will have gathered, but it's a very strange mixture--based on some play or other. There is definitely no mythological precedent for a lot of the story here. So...here, Prometheus is not a Titan but just a mortal human, and also the brother of Peleus, who would go on to marry Thetis and father Achilles. Here, both brothers are vying for her hand, but, obviously, she goes for Peleus. Their romance is complicated by the fact that Jupiter also wants to marry Thetis (isn't he, uh, already married? Well, he's Jupiter!), but obviously things work out in the end for them. Prometheus, meanwhile, is apparently channeling Pygmalion, as he's creating a statue of a woman that he wants to come to life so he can be in love with. He steals fire from the gods and uses it to make this happen, but she blows him off, and the Gods tie him up to be vultur'd. Oh, and while this is going on, there's also Arachne, who's going to be turned into a spider for daring to place herself above the gods. "Because your name is Arachne, like arachnid, we're going to turn you into a spider," Minerva explains. I'm...pretty sure that's getting cause and effect backwards, but whatever. The point is, she intervenes on behalf of both Prometheus and Arachne, and they are freed. And there's also a nymph, Nessea, who gets with Prometheus.

Strictly speaking, this opera isn't wholly authentic: the entire libretto was extant, but the score for the third act was lost, and thus conductor Leonardo Garcia Alarcon took it upon himself to complete it. Definitely a tall order to recreate a seventeenth-century baroque style like that, and to his credit, he really does a seamless job: I certainly would never have known that it wasn't all Draghi if I hadn't been told. The less positive news, however, is that, whether it's Draghi or Garcia Alarcon, on the whole I found the piece...a little boring. I don't mind the silly plot, but musically, it feels a kind of monotonous, with few real high points. It's one of Draghi's earlier efforts, so it would be unfair to judge him based upon it, but if I were going to do that, I would say that he's no Cavalli. If not for the novelty of the language, it's hard to imagine anyone would've been interested in reviving the piece.

In fairness, the production is pretty fun: Prometheus dressed in a lab coat working on his automata (just like the modern Prometheus), Arachne wearing a spider hat, Mercury zooming around the stage on a scooter--if nothing else, it was clearly fun to put on. No times people ask me, "how do you discover obscure operas?" In this case, it's because Scott Conner made such an impression on me in Eliogabalo that I looked him up, and on his website if listed his roles, and one of them was Peleas in El Prometeo, so I looked that up to see what it was, and Bob's yer uncle. Anyway, he's impressive here as well.

That is all.