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.
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