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.