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.
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