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.
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