Ruggero Leoncavallo, Zazà (1900)

Which is better, Cav or Pag? is a question that has presumably been endlessly hashed out, although I personally have never been involved in the debate.  And I don't think I'd be very useful, either; I really, really just can't decide.  It could easily go either way.  They're both great.  

But what I DO know is that, even though they were both one-hit wonders, Mascagni had a much more successful composing career than Leoncavallo.  Even if they didn't have lasting success, the former's operas were consistently popular in their time, and some of them are still performed semi-regularly today.  More than we can say for Leoncavallo.  I suppose his other stage works are probably done somewhere sometimes maybe, but sure as heck not often.  I'm pretty sure this is the first of his non-Pag works to ever appear on video.  Nuts!

It's a kind of standard opera plot, and you certainly would recognize Leoncavallo as a contemporary of Puccini:  Zazà is a star singer; she was raised from poverty by Cascart, another singer and her lover as we open.  But that doesn't last; she's kind of had enough of him, and she's in love with another dude, Dufresne.  So they become lovers--Cascart, atypically, more or less accepts this, in spite of issuing dire warnings about Dufresne's character--but he's always having to go off to Paris, and this is because he has a wife and daughter.  So Zazà breaks up with him even though it breaks her heart, and that's that.  Nobody dies here, which is of course quite unusual in this sort of thing, but apart from that...yeah, you've seen it before.  The obvious parallel is to Madama Butterfly, except for the lack of pregnancy or death.  Honestly, in the long run, it's not going to be that big a deal.  I briefly entertained fantasies that she was going to realize how much better off she is without these destructive attachments and just start living her own best life, but that might be a bit much to hope for.

It's really good, though.  There are parts that drag a bit, but there's also a lot of real passion, and even if  Zazà's attachment to Dufresne is unconvincing at first, the narrative makes it work by sheer persistence.  There's also a lot of stuff with secondary characters, other performers, flitting about, creating a believable backstage world.  I was a bit wary of what the production would be like, because it's by Christof Loy, who also did that Les vêpres siciliennes which made some good but also quite a lot of bad choices.  What to expect?  Well, credit where due: he's on his best behavior.  There is nothing Eurotrashy or Regietheatrical here.  Apart from somewhat modernized costumes, this very faithfully follows the libretto, and its world of backstages and dressing rooms is very well-done.  Also, huge credit to Svetlana Aksenova in the title role.  She puts on a hell of a performance, both acting- and singing-wise.  It was quite unexpected to see her here; I've seen her as the lead in two Rimsky-Korsakov operas (Tsar Saltan and The Invisible City), but I didn't know she had an international presence.  Good!  We've also got Christopher Maltman as Cascart, his voice as booming as ever, though I have to say, his character is kind of an unlikeably smug douchebag.  Nikolai Schukoff is appropriately Pinkertonian as Dufresne. 

Honestly, I'd easily say this is, at any rate, better than any of the post-Cav Mascagni operas I've seen.  I really want to see Leoncavallo's La bohème.  It could happen.  It's not inconceivable.  But the reason we don't must at least partially be the same reason we never see any of the dozens of other clemenzas di Tito.  The better-known composer has sucked the air out of the room, and some portion of the audience would probably end up confused and annoyed that it's not the more famous work.  But do it anyway!  I really want you to!

Joel Thompson, The Snowy Day (2021)

Houston Grand Opera kept telling me about this premiere they were going to do, and I really wanted to check it out, but would it be streamed?  Well, obviously it was (free to watch with a free registration).  So I saw it!  It's based on the classic children's book, that I do indeed vaguely remember from when I was small.  It is, we are told, the first "mainstream" children's book with a black protagonist, though I have to admit, I absolutely did not remember that he was black.  Looking back, it's unambiguous; I think possibly ethnicity just wasn't a detail that my brain registered at a young age, particularly if it weren't the point of the story.  

As for that story, it's obviously been expanded A LOT.  The book doesn't really feature any characters aside from the main one, Peter.  He goes out and plays in the snow and then comes back in and is sad because the snowball he saved melted, but then the next day there's more snow so he's over the moon again.  That's it.  The only other people who appear, sort of, are the big kids having a snowball fight, his mom, and his friend, but they each appear in one drawing without much detail and never say or do anything.

So clearly some improvisation was necessary.  First, we see a lot more from Peter's parents, including a few arias from mom's perspective.  Then, the "big kids" are presented in much more detail: mean bullies (well, "bullies" might be pushing it: they're just rowdy), except that one of them, Tim, does a face turn and joins Peter.  He, Peter, also makes friends with a girl, Amy, who is--I gather--the daughter of hispanic immigrants or something of the sort.  She sings a number of lines in Spanish.

Yeah, man.  This is a real charmer of an opera--short and sweet at just over seventy minutes.  The music is sparkly and befitting of so snow-oriented a story, and the characters are all likable.  I'm sort of on the fence about how convincing Raven McMillon is as a boy.  She IS very short, I'll give her that much, but maybe still a bit overly feminine-looking?  Well, now I'm just doing dumb nitpicking.  Regardless of any of that, she's very good in the role.  It's all fun.  Definitely a nice piece for the holidays, so see it...or don't!

Matthew Aucoin, Eurydice (2020)

I think the first question we have to ask is, just what the HELL is going on with her face in that picture?  She appears to be cross-eyed with a giant, cartoon nose.  Please rest assured that that is never the case in the actual opera, at least as here produced.

This is actually kind of historical: with this, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, and the upcoming Hamlet, this year's Met on Demand series features three contemporary operas, a first.  Only one previous season has even included two (in 2011-12 they did Satyagraha and The Enchanted Island, if you even want to count the latter baroque pastiche as a contemporary piece).  This is really cool, and it's definitely due to the influence of Yannick Nézet-Séguin who, as I understand, is known for championing new operas.  An excellent trend.  He's an improvement on every possible level over Levine.  I mean, assuming he doesn't have deep dark secret of his own.  Don't break my heart,  Nézet-Séguin!

Well, this is more or less the normal Orpheus story, albeit--obviously--from Eurydice's perspective, more or less.  She's getting married to Orpheus; at the same time, her dad in Hades--who still remembers her on account of not being exposed to too much Lethe water--is writing her a letter.  On the day of her wedding, she meets a sleazy dude, who turns out to be Hades, who lures her to his apartment by saying he has this letter (which he does) and then trying to seduce her.  But she falls and dies somehow; don't worry about it.  Orpheus goes after her and blah blah; ultimately, of course, he looks and she has to go back, only her dad--who had urged her to go--apparently couldn't take her being gone and bathed himself in Lethe water.  So she follows suit and no one remembers anything and when Orpheus comes he's, like, sad.  Okay.

One interesting thing the opera does is give Orpheus a "shadow double" meant to represent his music.  Since he also sings himself, I'm not sure how this works conceptually, but it's interesting to hear the baritone and countertenor harmonizing.  The music in general is pretty good; the most obvious touchstone seems to be Wagner.  There's a bit of playing around with serialism.  It's pretty much fine.

But I don't know...the reason I took so long to write this after seeing the opera was on accouna not being altogether sure what to think, and the more I DO think about this, the less impressed I am.  The libretto sometimes seems a bit too cutely self-aware for my tastes, and some of it seems kind of ungainly, like it wasn't really altered sufficiently from the original non-musical play.  I don't regret seeing it (I don't think I've ever "regretted" seeing an opera, even the few I've hated, so what does THAT mean?), but I sure don't think I'll ever feel the urge to revisit it.  If Fire Shut Up in My Bones felt like it was for the ages, this one feels eminently disposable, with no disrespect to Aucoin intended.  But I still really, really want to see Jacopo Peri's Euridice.  Why did we all collectively decide to pretend that Monteverdi's Orfeo is the oldest surviving opera?  I don't get it!

I also want to note that, as the host, Renée Fleming egregiously mispronounces "Eurydice" in a way that's not only unlike the English pronunciation used in this opera, but really unlike any language I've heard.  Walk away Renée!

Gaetano Donizetti, Il borgomastro di Saardam (1827)

The wikipedia page for Zar und Zimmermann mentions that Donizetti did an opera based on the same play, and suddenly it became extremely vital that I see as many operas as possible about Peter the Great as a carpenter.  Imperative!  Fortunately, it turned out there was a DVD of this one.  Obviously.

The plot?  Well...it's basically the same as the Lortzing.  What else would you expect?  There are a few differences, though.  Here, Marietta, the mayor's daughter in Lortzing, is his "ward," whatever background that may imply (the wikipedia entry currently claims otherwise, but it's just wrong).  The mayor does have a daughter, Carlotta, but she's a very minor character.  Also, the international intrigue is significantly toned down; where in the Lortzing there were, like, three ambassadors from different countries running around and causing confusion, here it's pared down to just the one (who also plays a much smaller role than any of them).  But regardless of any of this, it's still fun on a bun!  How could it not be?!

I realized that this is one of the earliest Donizetti operas I've seen.  I mean, he's already written like a dozen of them, but he was hella prolific.  The only earlier one I've seen is Don Gregorio.  But regardless, that Donizetti spark shines through.  The music sounds very...Donizetti-an.  What a great tautology.  I liked it a lot, and this performance makes a few really good choices which address possible issues with the text: the climax is a bit protracted, with one chorus and aria after the other, and you think okay, dude.  This isn't necessarily dramatically effective.  Here, during Marietta's final bit of singing, we see everyone else looking on, clearly impatient with the proceedings and itching just to get on with it.  That's fun.  Another, bigger thing that's fun is what they do with the character of Carlotta: as I said, it's a small role, and you sort of wonder why the opera even bothers with it.  Shouldn't she have a love interest too?  Two of those is normally the way these things go!  Especially because early on there's a thing where Pietro (Marietta's amour) is remonstrating with the Tsar: yeah, you can make fun of me, but someday you'll fall in love, and then you'll see.  And he's all, ho ho, that will never happen, and okay, that's a very obvious indication that it WILL happen, innit?  But...nope!  Granted, it would be unusual for the secondary romance to involve characters of higher social class...well, nothing to be done about the Tsar, but in this production, there's an entirely mimed romance between Carlotta and his assistant Filiberto.  In the last scene she's set to marry some random dude; that is in the libretto, a bit, but the plot thread is just sort of forgotten about, so we get an argument and Carlotta angrily remonstrating with her father in the background until finally at the last moment she breaks away and goes off with the Russians.  It's very well-done and not at all overplayed.  Normally I'm against adding extraneous plot elements to operas, but this works so well you can't complain.

Anyway!  Donizetti: in my opinion, he wrote operas, and this, I believe, is one of them.

MNiatures II: The New Batch

So we're doing more of these, from Minnesota Opera (you can also still watch the original quartet if you want to).  I quite liked the first ones, so let's see what these are like.  By the way, if you were wondering, which you definitely weren't, I'm not counting these four as another opera for my list--we're just taking it for granted that these slot in with the first four under the "Mniatures" name.

Mitchell Bercier, Sapphica

Well, most of this seems to take place at some kind of rave, with a masked DJ and a few dancers.  It sometimes cuts to an outside view of a few women, one of whom presumably is meant to be Sappho, although I would've had zero idea that this was supposed to be about the poet if the title and description did not tell me so.  The lyrics are all--I can only assume--Sappho lyrics, sung in Ancient Greek without subtitles (there is an auto-translate CC option for, of all things Vietnamese, which apparently some algorithm decided it sounded most like).  So that's not super-rewarding, and although I can't call the EDM-sounding music bad, exactly, it's definitely not my thing.  I can't say I really cared for this.

Christian Bardin, Yr God My God

This one is about being queer/non-binary and growing up in a fundamentalist church, and shifting perspectives from childhood and looking back from the vantage of adulthood.  Well...that's the theory, anyway.  It's a good idea, but even at sixteen minutes--rather long for this sort of thing--I don't feel like there's really time to develop the concept adequately.  I do enjoy moments where the child protagonist is duetting with their adult self, but there's actually much less than you'd expect from the adult perspective, and honestly, the piece as a whole doesn't make much impression on me.  Sad to say.

The third and forth pieces are paired together as something called Semblance.  Both of them are about people who have or feel like they have dual identities.  They don't share characters or plot or anything.  Anyway, keep it in mind!  Or don't.  That would be just as good.

Stephanie Henry, Leigh Opulent

This is about a drag queen, inspired by Paris Is Burning, the documentary about African American drag ballroom culture in New York--a film I have seen.  It's very good.  And tragic.  The description alleges that "Leigh Opulent is coming to terms with the fact that his successful ballroom career never translated to real life," but his "real life" is never touched on in the actual piece.  He gets a call from someone telling him he's been made den mother, to his delight.  "All this really makes me reflect on my journey," he remarks, and it's hard not to laugh at such a clumsily on-the-nose, high-school-ish line.  But reflect he does, to an extent, as the action cuts back and forth between him sitting in his room and doing a drag act.  I actually kind of liked this, though at five minutes it's not really enough to get into the subject matter in any beyond a superficial way.

Leyna Marika Papach, Mina at Night

So Mina wants to be a musician, but as a single mother she feels her potential career has been derailed.  So she goes on about that for a while.  Eventually other random people show up in her room and sing about her son and her nascent career and hey, maybe she can still have something?  Who knows.  Once again, I didn't find this very interesting.

So...unfortunately not as good as the first set.  And yet I have a soft spot for these operatic shorts, even if the finished product is only sporadically what I might wish.  They seem a good way for musicians to be creative and develop.  And you know what else?  I'm feeling a weird nostalgia for those #OperaHarmony shorts and the way they evoke in my head pre-vaccine pandemic times, which I'm aware is a perverse thing to be nostalgic for, but that's the way the dumb ol' human mind works, I think.  Maybe I'll revisit them.

János Vajda, The Imaginary Invalid; or, The Cabal of Hypocrites (2020)

Contemporary Hungarian opera: that's the sort of thing I want to see from Operavision.  The Imaginary Invalid is a Molière play; The Cabal of Hypocrites a play by Mikhail Bulgakov of The Master and Margarita fame.

The bulk of this is Molière, though, and it has the kind of plot you'd associate with him: there's a rich hypochondriac, Argan.  He wants his daughter Angélique to marry his doctor's son so that, I suppose he can get free medical care.  Naturally, she has her own lover whom she prefers.  Meanwhile, Argan's gold-digging wife schemes, and the soubrette maid Toinette helps the young lovers.

You somehow expect contemporary operas to have some sort of serious "point," or at least some degree of self-awareness, but this is just an old-school comedy.  The plot isn't anything super-special, I suppose, but it's a lot of fun, and Vadja's music is just great.  It inventively flits between classical and romantic idioms--with some baroque moments, even thrown in--occasionally getting weirdly jazzy as suits the mood, with some really funny dramatic crescendos accompanying the goofy plot twists.  There are likewise arias, duets, and the odd trio, along with a couple of what you'd almost call patter-songs.  It really is trying to be a traditional opera, and doing a great job of it.  I seriously was just sitting there eagerly waiting for what he was going to come up with next.  

So...right.  There was a period when I was watching this that I was prepared to call it one of the best contemporary operas I'd seen.  Really terrific.  But...well, you may recall that this is based not just on Molière, but also on Bulgakov, and this is where we run into problems.  Massive, opera-destroying problems, I'm sorry to say.  So in the beginning and between acts we see Molière himself: he's trying to get his troupe accepted into the court of Louis XIV, and talking with the king himself.  I found these short scenes thin and inessential, but they didn't do anything to my enjoyment of the whole.  But then you get to what seems to be the end of the story, with Argan allowing his daughter to marry her lover and his wife's machinations being exposed, and you think, boy, there's another half-hour of this?  How is that going to work?  Well...we go back to Molière, only now he is out of the king's favor due to some scandal or other in his personal life, and he's very devastated, and as he's going to go on-stage one last time, he appears to have a heart attack, and if he's not dead, he's close to it (this is based on his actual death).  Then we see characters from the play come on stage, and after this ceremony where Argan is, allegedly, made a doctor, he likewise has a heart attack and is taken away in an ambulance.  

This (the heart attack, not the ambulance) might be in the original play; wikipedia asserts that "in the translation by John Wood, Argan suffers a heart attack during the dance and dies, whereupon the dancers stop dancing and assume deaths-head masks."  I don't know how to take this; did this John Wood character just make this up?  If so, why would you mention it?  And if not, why mention him at all?  BUT REGARDLESS, whoever we want to blame, the point is the same: this is a terrible, jarringly weird way to end the story; a total mismatch with everything that had gone before.  On the "insights" section of the operavision page, there's an interview with Vajda where he asserts that "I have no problem with enjoying a performance and then suddenly being left astonished."  I have no problem with that either, but it has to be justified in some way, for God's sake.  This feels wholly arbitrary, and it kind of ruins the whole piece.  Very frustrating!  I mean, certainly more than it would be if Vajda was a less obviously talented composer.  On the one hand, I'd kind of like to see his other operas; on the other hand, if his sensibilities there lead him to conclusions like this one, it might be better to leave well enough alone.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Davide Penitente (1785)

This can in no way be considered an opera, even by the loose standards I sometimes employ.  It  has no discernible narrative or characters.  Nonetheless, I am writing about it here, even at the risk of being decertified as the only opera blog.

What's it about?  Aren't you listening?  But, I mean, you could look at the title.  It's a religious cantata with a lot of asking God's forgiveness and whatnot, featuring a tenor, a soprano, and a mezzo.  The original thing is only forty-five minutes, so this is supplemented by three instrumental pieces which fit well with the generally solemn mood.  The music is great!  It's late Mozart!  Who can complain?

Well, as I said, you couldn't stage this as an opera, so what exactly are we watching here?  Well, that cover may give you a clue, and this is where the performance falls down a bit.  Yes, we are treated--or possibly subjected--to a dressage display throughout the whole thing.  The connection between this and the music is obscure; I gather that the performance took place at some sort of former equestrian center, so that's why, but I'm not sure if that really justifies it.

The first issue isn't the performers' fault; it's that the director is obsessed with doing these constant jump-cuts that make it difficult to really follow the action (if you want to call it that).  I do like the fact that filmed opera can do close-ups, but this might've been a situation where a fixed camera angle would've worked better.  As for the second issue: well, here's the thing about dressage: it's obviously super-hard to do well, both in terms of the necessary training and the actual performance aspect.  And yet...it still looks kind of lame.  I'm not a fan.  Of course, a dressage partisan might respond, "oh YEAH?  You know what ELSE is obviously super-hard to do well but nonetheless looks [or sounds] lame?  OPERA!"  To which I have no rebuttal.  I mean, the difference is that I'm right and you're wrong, but what else can I say?  Maybe I'm prejudiced because it seems like a hobby for rich bastards, which granted is pretty rich in itself, coming from an opera fan.  But still.  This is worth watching for the music, and maybe if you like your horseplay more than I do, you'll also love the visuals.  But I'm only half-impressed.

Reynaldo Hahn, Ciboulette (1923)

First twentieth-century French operetta I've ever seen.  For whatever reason, the French permutation of the form seems more a nineteenth-century thing.  But: this exists.  And I saw it!  Obviously.

Sort of a typical kind of plot: you've got Ciboulette, an orphaned country girl who sells vegetables in the city.  Now that she's turning twenty-one, she wants to get married.  She has eight suitors, but they're all kind of doofy and obvious no-goes.  So instead, there's another dude, Antonin, whose own lover has just left him.  What will happen next?  Probably hijinx.  But also romance.  A dude named Duparquet, himself unlucky in love, helps the two get together in the end.  Phew!

Who cares if it's a stunningly original plot?  It is quite charming, and the music sparkles.  I like the fact that both Ciboulette and Antonin are kind of sweetly dopey.  They really seem made for each other, and Julien Behr as Antonin has this really strong silent-film-star look to him that really seems to fit the character.  The only thing I was slightly dubious about was the opening of the last act, a lengthy comic longeur involving an operatic director and a skirt-role diva who has an entire aria with deliberately-bad singing.  I'm HIGHLY dubious of that as on operatic conceit, and this does little to endear it to me.  

Nonetheless, it would be difficult to deny the piece's charms.  I don't know how you wouldn't like this.

Albert Lortzing, Zar und Zimmermann (1837)

According to wikipedia, this should be considered, not as you'd automatically assume a Singspiel, but rather a "Spieloper," which is like a Singspiel only comic--to me, it seems like that's just a word for an early German operetta, but it's nice to know!  I suppose.

"Zimmermann" just means "carpenter" in German.  I never knew that!  This is based on the historical thing where Peter the Great disguised himself as a carpenter to study abroad.  Meyerbeer's L'étoile du nord is based on the same incident, but that takes place in Finland, whereas this is in Holland, where the real Peter actually went.  Both of these operas present it as him being in disguise and no one knowing who he was, which is kind of an irresistible idea, but per this reddit post, not at all true: he was trying to be as anonymous as possible so as not to have to deal with all the usual pomp and circumstance, but everyone knew who he was, not least because of his huge retinue.

Well, anyway, here, in the town of Saardam, there's Peter-the-Secret-Czar and also Peter Ivanov, another Russian working in Holland after having deserted from the Russian army.  He and Marie are in love, but her pompous, bungling burgomaster uncle is getting in the way.  There's also various intrigue--that gets a bit confusing in places--with French and English ambassadors who are there to make some sort of deal with Russia, though this is very vague.  Well, hijinx occur, Peter I and Marie are united (the deserting thing is cool, it seems), and Peter t.G. reveals his identity and sails off, and bob's yer uncle.

It's a lot of fun.  The plot gets a bit slack in places--a lot of bumbling around--but hey, opera.  The Rossini-esque music is quite good.  This is a filmed version from 1969, and it starts with a disclaimer that this is one of the first filmed operas in color and we've done our best to restore it but there may still be some small issues.  But if they hadn't included that, I wouldn't have found anything to complain about; there may be a few tiny, blink-and-you'll-miss-it visual artifacts, but in general it looks and sounds quite good.  Would recommend to kids of all ages.

George Gershwin, Blue Monday (1922)

Did you know that Porgy and Bess was Gershwin's second opera?  I didn't.  But you probably did, on account of how smart you are.  And sexy.  And...say, are you doing anything later?  Wanna grab a couple of drinks?

Well, this is only a short, twenty-ish-minute piece.  It takes place in some sort of café or bar.  Joe is, I don't know, just some guy.  His sweetheart is named Vi.  There's also some other dude, Tom, trying to seduce Vi.  He tells her that Joe is seeing another woman to try to pry her away, and tells her he's expecting a telegram from another woman..  It's not true, but he hasn't seen his mother in a long time and is expecting a telegram.  You see where this is going, probably.  When the telegram comes he refuses to tell her who it's from (why?), so in a spasm of jealousy, she shoots him dead.  That's all.

At a greater length, this plot could work: if there were more time to develop the characters and make it believable.  As it is, I quite literally el oh ell'd when Joe gets shot and collapses theatrically.  It's just so comically precipitous.  Really, if she's on that much of a hair-trigger, then if it wasn't this it would've been something else soon enough.  Sheesh, people.

I mean, the music's okay, attempting--as in his more famous opera--to fuse jazz and romantic music.  (although this one was originally performed in blackface, so...not great).  It's not overly memorable, though, with no real stand-out numbers.  Wikipedia quotes a review that's a bit meaner than I would be, but is funny enough to quote: "the most dismal, stupid, and incredible blackface sketch that has probably ever been perpetrated. In it a dusky soprano finally killed her gambling man. She should have shot all her associates the moment they appeared and then turned the pistol on herself."

I think I might have a sort-of explanation for why it is the way it is: it actually has a subtitle, "Opera à la Afro-American," which is a bit cringy (especially given the blackface), but you can see it, maybe, as Gershwin saying, okay, we all know about operas with white characters, but what about one with black characters?  It might look a li'l something like this.  So then rather than presenting a full-length thing, you can--in theory--sort of get the idea of what such a thing might look like from this abbreviated sketch.  Well, maybe.  Either way, it's not of especial interest outside the historical kind.

Clint Borzoni, The Copper Queen (2017)

Here's this.  It's an opera (what?!?).  Hearing the description, you think, man, couldn't they have released it a bit earlier for Halloween?  But actually, I think it's all right this way.  It's in part a ghost story of sorts, but I don't know that it's exactly seasonal.  Whatever!

The Copper Queen Hotel in Bisbee, Arizona is a historical establishment patronized by miners, and also, it's HAUNTED!  Allegedly.  By the ghost of Julia Lowell, a prostitute who is supposed to have killed herself after a romantic disappointment.  I'm not sure to what extent this is real.  Certainly, it's embellished for operatic purposes.

So here, we have a present-day narrative: a woman named Addison, traumatized by the death of her beloved grandmother, has decided to stay in the allegedly-haunted room (the logic of this is eventually explained), looking to see the ghost in spite of the manager's skepticism.  But the bulk of it does indeed take place in the...1920s?  I'm guessing?  It's hard to find hard dates.  At any rate, Julia is an in-demand prostitute, doing okay (as far as that goes), aside from her violent pimp, who wants her to make enough money to pay off some ill-defined debt.

(Side note: is there such thing as a kind, supportive pimp?  I feel like there's no profession more universally reviled in cultural depictions; the only neutral version is the cartoon with a huge fur coat and peacock-feather hat.  Well, I don't suppose it would naturally attract a better kind of dude.)

So this is going until she has the misfortune to fall in love with a client, Theodore.  They're planning on running off together, but...well, I won't spoil it, but nor is it particularly surprising.  It is a VERY operatic sort of plot.  

So okay, two things: on the one hand, this is great.  Julia's story, as noted, has traditional operatic values (which I kind of think are...slightly different than the "traditional values" that fundamentalists like to babble about).  There's some really extravagantly romantic music during the love scenes, and it's great!  Back to basics!  Also, some piano that evokes the proper Old-West atmosphere.

On the other hand, the present-day stuff just...doesn't work.  Addison is a very murkily-drawn character; there's the vague suggestion that she's suffered romantic disappointments of some kind, but she's basically nothing, and the denouement with her and the ghost (spoiler, I guess) is unsatisfying.  I appreciate what I take to be the motivation for the opera--to restore Julia's humanity from the kind of gross roadside-attraction that she's become--but I don't feel that the frame really does that.  Honestly, you wouldn't lose much by just getting rid of it altogether and letting the Puccini-esque story stand on its own.

Still well worth watching, though, whatever criticisms I may have.

Dave Ragland, One Vote Won (2020)

When I saw, okay, here's another opera by a black composer, I felt that I had to see it, given how I was talking last time (okay, two times ago).  Was that a good idea?  Well...

So there's a woman.  Apparently her name is Gloria, though I'm not sure if she's named in the text.  It's election day but she doesn't want to vote because voting is for total squares and nothing will ever change and she'd rather just watch shows on streaming services, but then the ghosts of Juno Frankie Pierce and Diane Nash (who isn't actually dead, but whatevz--in fairness, the piece does suggest that these may not actually be real ghosts, though I have no idea what they are in that case--they certainly SEEM to have an independent existence) appear to tell her about how, in fact, voting is hell of rad and she must do it!  Go!  Vote!  So she does.  That's it.

Now, at this point, you may be thinking, dude, this sounds absolutely unbearable.  But I am here to tell you that...you ain't wrong.  This is total cringe start to finish.  Yes, obviously, you gotta vote, but these exhortations to do so that are totally drained of any actual ideology are just risible.  If Gloria knows nothing about politics and has no idea who to vote for, what is the purpose of this?  All she's going to do is add a tiny element of randomness to the proceedings.  It was released in August 2020, so maybe it's implicitly telling the audience to specifically vote against Fascist Fuckface, and if it caused someone to do that, great (although I have my doubts).  But the message here as presented is completely vacuous.

And, of course, there's also the fact that we're living in a time where the idea of telling people that they can vote to make a difference does kinda seem like a bad joke.  At one point, the opera lists black people murdered by the police, by name.  That's as political as it ever gets, but given that Biden's answer to the problem of police brutality is to give them more money, I really don't know what it thinks voting is possibly going to accomplish.  You could say it's more about local elections, but in that case, ol' Gloria's even LESS likely to know how she should vote.

I mean ferfucksake, OF COURSE you should vote in spite of everything.  But I have to say, I found this piece kind of enraging, and if anything, it makes me want to never vote again.  The music isn't bad; a kind of peppy jazzy, bluesy thing (and Tamica Nicole as Gloria does the best she can with not much), but MAN ALIVE.  I know it means well, but the result is not pretty.  Direct your talents to a libretto more worthy of them, Ragland!

Bedřich Smetana, Dalibor (1867)

Hey, here's this.  The video is region-locked, but I was able to sneakily use my VPN to make it think I was in France.  I think that's actually the first time I've had to do that for an opera video.  There are subtitles in French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, and Polish, so it seems to be intended for a wide audience.

This is my first Smetana tragedy.  Dalibor's on trial for having murder a local lord--but he only did it because his friend was executed, so COME ON!  The guy's sister, Milada, demands his execution, but then she realizes she has the hots for him.  He's sentenced to indefinite imprisonment, so she teams up with Jitka, an orphan Dalibor had taken under his wing, to free him.  Jitka gets her boyfriend Vitek to gather some troops; meanwhile, Milada, disguised as a minstrel boy, infiltrates the dungeon where Dalibor's being held, where she reveals herself and declares her love for him, which he immediately reciprocates, as one does.  She tells him about the plan to rescue him, which is supposed to happen three days later.  Unfortunately, the king decides Dalibor should be executed after all, and that screws up the plan.  The rebels attack precipitously, but Milada is killed and Dalibor commits suicide.  Jitka's okay, apparently.  Vitek's fate is unknown.  Probably dead, though.

Let me be upfront: I didn't think this was a very good opera.  The music is only intermittently rousing, and the libretto is pretty bad.  You never get a good idea of the characters, the romance between Dalibor and Milada is really half-assed and unconvincing, and there's this part where Dalibor, anticipating his freedom, is singing about how, oh boy, now he can finish taking his revenge!  He appears to want to sack the entire city of Prague, and you think, dude, what the fuck?  This is psychotic!  They were right to lock you up!  Somehow, Budivoj, the commander of the king's forces, comes across as the most sympathetic character here, and I don't think that was intentional.  There's also a non-sequitur of an aria from the king lamenting the duties of office, right before he sentences Dalibor to death, and you think, was this a drama I was supposed to be paying attention to?  What is this?  There's a certain resemblance, I can't tell if it's intentional, between him and Pontus Pilate, but that seems like a weird parallel to draw, and I don't know what the heck is going on.  One weird detail in this production: in the first act, Milada and the other ladies of the court are wearing dresses with silk-screened images of (I assume it's supposed to be) the murdered guy on them.  Weird.  As I say.

I dunno...the more Smetana I see, the more it seems like there might be good reason that The Bartered Bride is his only opera that remains popular to this day.  But!  I shall see as many as I can to make absolutely sure.

Terence Blanchard, Fire Shut Up in My Bones (2019)

Funny thing.  I said that I wouldn't be able to see this until it appears on Met in HD "barring unforeseen circumstances."  Just goes to show--you can't predict things.  Maybe you can predict the general contour of things, okay, but there are always unforeseen circumstances of SOME sort.  That's not meant to be a pollyannaish sentiment--maybe the circumstances will be unexpectedly bad--but they'll definitely be something.  In the present case, some Russian folk hero somehow pirated the stream and put in youtube.  That youtube video, predictably, was taken down, but it's still available on the more piracy-friendly mail.ru.  The only problem with this--and it IS a bit of a problem--is that, naturally, it only has Russian subs.  But will that stop me?  Ha!  HA!, I say.

The Met of course is making a big deal out of this being their first-ever opera by a black composer, which is fair enough.  It would be easy (and fun!) to say, ooh, and only a hundred forty years after you opened!  So...maybe I'll go ahead and say that.  As this article demonstrates, they had a lot to choose from, but their choice was, nope!  Sucks, but I suppose it doesn't actually suck any more than every damn segregated institution.  I should also acknowledge that most of the Met staff would probably accept this criticism as justified (well, I can believe in Yannick Nézet-Séguin's sincerity; I'm slightly more doubtful about that sinister Gelb character, but WHATEVS).  So...there it is.

This is based on Charles M. Blow's coming-of-age memoir.  The opera begins with a twenty-year-old Charles, feeling homicidal, because he's about to go home and, so he thinks, wreak vengeance on his charismatic older cousin who had sexually abused him when he was seven.  From there, the oper switches into flashback: we see the seven-year-old (as played by the scarily precocious Walter Russell III; he's not called on to deliver a very heavy singing load, and his voice itself isn't amazing, but he's still damned impressive in the role), his brothers, his strong mother and philandering father; his life after that is more or less glossed over until he gets to university (having received a full scholarship from Grambling), and eventually we catch up to the frame narrative.  There's also a female figure representing in different places "Destiny" and "Loneliness," who then in the third act plays an actual woman, his first love Greta.

Gotta love it, man.  This deserves the praise it's been getting.  Blanchard is mainly a jazz musician; he only started writing opera later in life (this is his second), but it suits him.  As expected, this is largely jazz-based, though with a strong streak of romanticism.  Quite varied, also, from gospel-ish music to a sort of strip-club vibe (in a comic scene in a bar where Ma Blow confronts her cheatin' husband), to--this is something I've never seen in an opera--honest-to-god disco in the club where Charles first meets Greta.  And real arias!  Some quite moving.  The whole thing is quite stirring; if I wanted to cavil a bit, I'd suggest that the Destiny/Loneliness thing doesn't necessarily make as much of an impact as one might have hoped (in spite of being sung by the great Angel Blue); also, when you think about it, the entire second act doesn't really do much; it could easily be cut without affecting one's understanding of the story.  Although you shouldn't, because you'd lose some great music.  So okay!

Regardless, I can't wait for it to appear on Met on Demand, because I sorely felt the lack of comprehensible subtitles.  Sure, I could follow the basic plot, but...well, English-language operas vary in their comprehensibility, but here, I don't think I was able to understand more than half of the singing, and that's probably generous, although to my subjective perception, things did improve in that regard in the second act.

So how many operas by black composers have I seen?  Along with this, Joseph Bologne's L'amant anonyme, Joplin's Treemonisha, Nkeiru Okoye's Harriet Tubman, Still's Highway 1, USA, Daniel Bernard Roumain's We Shall Not Be Moved, and a number of miscellaneous operatic shorts.  I could conceivably be forgetting something, but I think that's all.  And actually...it's more than I thought there'd be.  Still less than I'd like, though.  I hope the Met will continue to atone.  Anything from that New York Times article would be great!  Or anything else that seems appealing.  All right.

Alva Henderson, Nosferatu (2004)

Boo.  Boo, I say!  Be petrified, dangit!  Are there any spooky operas, really?  Bluebeard's Castle is unsettling, but I don't know that I'd use the word "spooky."  There's one I haven't seen based on The Shining.  Well, at any rate, this seems like a good seasonal choice.

I have actually seen FW Murnau's 1922 movie.  I have to admit, it didn't do much for me.  I have enjoyed some silent films, but they're a bit hit-or-miss for me; it didn't feel like it had aged well.  But hey, Werner Herzog considers it the greatest German movie of all time, so what do I know?  This is interesting: I had always heard--and took it for settled fact--that the movie changed the names of the characters from Dracula for copyright reasons, but according to wikipedia, it was most likely done just to make the story more immediate for German viewers.  Go figure!

Anyway, I'm certainly not an expert on this milieu--I've never read the novel--but this follows it with some distinctions (one thing to start with is just inexplicable to me: in Nosferatu the movie Jonathan Harker is named Thomas Hutter, but here it's been further changed to just "Eric."  Why?).  Eric goes to Hungary to buy a house in London for a mysterious count (here, the guy who sends him turns out to be Orlok's servant, which I don't think comes from any outside source).  There's quite a lot of ado about how he needs money and whether he can leave his ailing wife (Mina/Ellen), which I think is original to this version.  But off he goes, and while there, he unwisely shows a picture of Ellen to Orlok, who then establishes some kind of psychic link to her.  Thomas returns quite insane (another innovation), but Ellen, having learned from Orlok's servant (I'm not sure why he told her) that she can kill him by distracting him 'til dawn, so she does this, although he bites her first, and they both collapse.  Finis.

I actually liked this quite a lot.  Unlike so many contemporary operas, there are actual arias here, and quite good ones, musically and lyrically, with rhyming text (the librettist, Dana Gioia, is an established poet, and it shows).  There are just all kinds of really cool moments, perhaps the best of which is Ellen having apocalyptic visions while a chorus of plague victims chant in Latin.  Definitely a good choice for Halloween!  The music is all very traditionally tonal, with some good spooky gothic twists of a sort I have trouble describing.  But there's not much to not like here.  Also, the dark, subdued production does a good job of capturing the feel of an old silent movie.

Well...the one thing not to like is the dang lack of subtitles.  Especially given the quality of the libretto, you REALLY want to hear what's happening, but sometimes you just...can't, and it does detract somewhat from the experience.  Still, the opera on the whole is a triumph, and it deserves more attention.

William Grant Still, Highway 1, USA (1962)

I wanted to highlight this, as I'm thinking about operas by black composers lately.  Still was--per wikipedia--known as the "Dean of Afro-American Composers," so there you go.  This is rarely performed, but it was recently put on by the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis; it was streaming, but no longer, unfortunately.  I don't know what to tell you.

It's a short, hour-long piece; as here produced, it does have an all-black cast, but the story isn't specifically about the African American experience.  Bob and Mary are a couple.  They have worked hard and they own a service station, so they're doing okay.  But there's also Bob's brother Nate; they sacrificed to put him through college, Bob having promised their mother.  But now what?  They're trying to build a future together, but Nate's just hanging around, not doing anything, overeducated and ungrateful, just being a drain on everyone.  One day when he's alone with Mary, he tries to put the moves on her, and when she rejects him, he stabs her and KILLS her!  DEAD, I tell you!  Everyone comes back and is horrified by the killing, naturally.  Nate's going to be arrested, but Bob, still unable to defy his self-abnegating instincts, is going to let himself take the blame.  But then, wait, it turns out Mary's not dead after all.  And her injury is so totally superficial that it's extremely unclear how anyone could've thought she was.  So they decide, screw you, Nate, and let him be taken away.  And NOW the future's so bright they gotta wear shades, I tell you.

The music here is super-dang-gorgeous.  Nothing avant-garde here; just beautiful tonal music with light jazz overtones.  No complaints there.  The only problem is that the story is pretty anemic.  You think that there's going to be some sort of real family drama, with Bob and Nate hashing out their resentments in some way.  But no!  It's very anti-climactic: "what will we do about Nate?  Oh wait he tried to kill you?  Screw you, Nate!"  I mean...dang, man.  I'm certainly not saying Nate has to be psychologically complicated or sympathetic, but this really isn't interesting.

Still worth seeing, for sure.  I hope this performance becomes available in some format again; it would be a shame for it to be lost.  And I'd love to see more of Still's operas, though I don't think any of them are performed any more often than this is.

Peter Schickele, The Abduction of Figaro (1984)

Schickele is a composer and musical comedian, most famous for his jokey fictional composer "P.D.Q. Bach" (P.D.Q. allegedly stands for "pretty damn quick," but that seems to have lost whatever cultural cachet it had--I don't think I've ever heard it in any other context).  My dad actually took me to see him in concert when I was small (late eighties, probably).  The only thing I remember is that the second half was an opera-type thingie of some sort--a broad Wagner parody if I remember correctly, but it also featured Greek gods, so who knows.  Funny how memory works: I actually remember one line from one aria sung by...some dwarf or something: "Zeus has a knack for changing things, especially things I don't want changed."  Referring to women, although I don't think it was Zeus himself who typically changed them.  Weird, and I can't find the line online so I could be wrong, but I don't think I am.  If there's a recording of whatever that show was, I'd love to revisit it--see how it holds up.  I remember liking it at the time, though no doubt a lot of it was over my head.

Anyway, whatever that was, it definitely had nothing to do with this, which is--obviously--a Mozart parody, taking, as the title suggests, DNA from Figaro and Die Entführung, as well as Giovanni.  The plot is really too silly and flimsy to even try to go over, but basically, this pirate captures Figaro and sails off, and the other characters go after him.  The main thing about this is the humor, obviously.  Your mileage may vary, it's fair to say.  Characters' names have real Mad Magazine vibes to them: Giovanni and Leporello are "Donald Giovanni" and, er, "Schlepporello;" Susanna from Figaro is "Susanna Susannadanna," a reference to Roseanne Roseannadanna, Gilda Radner's recurring character from early Saturday Night Live, one of actually quite a number of things that very firmly date the show (there's also a reference to the weirdly-common-at-the-time practice of hijackers forcing planes to reroute to Cuba).  Hey, I'm not going to sit here and claim that there aren't a few smile-out-loud moments, but the Washington Post's verdict of "screamingly funny" seems excessive to me.

Let's not forget the music, unless we want to.  It's largely sort of vaguely classical-sounding (gotta give Schickele credit for trying, anyway--trying to match Mozart is a tall order), with numerous quotes from popular songs: public-domain stuff like "Found a Peanut" and "O Susanna," but also recent pop songs like "Macho Man" and "Stay (just a little bit longer)."  The incongruity of these is slightly funny for precisely two seconds each, and the original music...it's just not memorable.  Arias go on and on, and you frequently wonder, why?  Even if this is, on occasion, a little funny at first, does anyone think it benefits from being flogged thus?  Yeesh.  The singers are bona fide opera singers, and they do their best, but the music IS kinda fundamental to an opera, and there's not really anything to latch onto here.

I don't know; this certainly isn't a horribly unpleasant experience or anything like that, and it feels ungracious to be attacking such a harmless, good-natured piece of work.  But it's definitely a bit toothless, and I don't think it's going to enter the standard repertoire anytime soon.

Ernő Dohnányi, The Tower of Voyda (1922)

 I would like to talk to you today about Fire Shut Up in My Bones...but obviously, I'm not.  Because the goddamn movie theater fucked everything up: they apparently didn't have the right feed, so we kept getting these loud previews (there aren't supposed to be movie previews before Met in HD screenings), and while it did apparently start eventually, it cut out the first part, and there was just no currency in staying.  The mood was wrecked.  Some theaters do reshow these things as encores on Wednesdays, but none near where I am, so fuck me, I guess.  Barring unforeseen circumstances, now I won't be able to see it until it appears on Met on Demand in nine goddamn months or whatever.  This pisses me off so fucking much, and the frustrating thing is, there's not really anyone I can blame.  That's something we have a really, really strong impulse to do, don't we?  Even as I write this, I'm trying to convince myself that it's somehow plausible that it's the underpaid theater employees' fault, but it's obviously not.  I suppose there's someone at some level that pushed the wrong button or something, but that's at a level of abstraction that is not cathartic to me.  It's certainly the case that this impulse to find a scapegoat is the cause of a lot of the fucked up shit in human history.

Well, I saw this instead.  It was a wholly arbitrary decision, and no parallel should be drawn between it and Fire.  Some time ago I had stumbled upon it on Operaonvideo; I'd been seeing if there was anything else by Ferenc Erkel I could watch and came up with this, which isn't by Erkel, but which does feature a cast member named "Ferenc," so close enough, I guess.  Dohnanyi was, I don't know, just some guy.  He mainly worked using the Germanized name "Ernst von Dohnányi," but this opera is in Hungarian, so let's go with the original.  He was apparently instrumental in saving a lot of Jewish musicians during the Holocaust, so that's good.

So here's the story: the Szeklers (a Hungarian tribe) are trying to build a tower to repulse attacks from the Pechenegs (a Turkic tribe of some sort).  These include the chief, Orbók, and two warriors, Kund and Tarján. Unfortunately, their tower keeps falling over.  They hear a spirit (the "spirit of hiring," as the autotranslate would have it) who tells them that they need to make a sacrifice: the first woman who walks across the bridge will be sealed in the tower as a sacrifice.  They finally agree to this, swearing that they won't tell anyone so as not to influence chance.

There are two women, Emelka and Orbók's daughter Iva.  Iva and Tarján are married, much to the regret of Emelka, who's in love with him.  Instead, she was stuck marrying dumb ol' Kund, whom she emphatically does not see as an adequate consolation prize.  In spite of having sworn, Kund in a moment of weakness warns his wife not to cross the bridge.  Seeing her chance, she encourages Iva to go (because she had wanted to go fight side by side with her man as per tradition but had been denied).  She does, and Orbók, with great reluctance, is compelled to sacrifice her, which he does by walling her in as the two of them sing, "Cask of Amontillado"-style.  In fairness to him, at one point he does decided, fuck it, not doing this, but she insists.  There's a very macabre bit where she requests that there be holes in the wall so she can breastfeed her infant child one last time, but nothing ever comes of this--I feel like the librettist just sort of forgot.

At any rate, she is sacrificed.  Six months later, Tarján is still feeling bummed; the tower held, but they're still being beset by the Pechenegs, and in addition to the thing with his wife, Kund has been killed in battle.  Orbók decrees that he is going to be the new chief and tells him he should marry Emelka, which he agrees to extremely reluctantly.  And there's a little dance when they've decided to do this, which, per google translate, begins thus:

...excuse me, there's a what whose name is Emelka?

I actually checked, and the Hungarian word is "menyecske," and yes, if you type "milf" into google translate, that IS what you get.  But if you translate "menyecske" from Hungarian, you just get "bride," which somehow seems more apropos in the context.  Does the word really have those two disparate meanings?  Seems like it could result in some awkward situations.  Hungarian readers, let me know what's going on.  Also, could you please get rid of your white nationalist prime minister?  Thanks a million.

Anyway, the truth comes out about Emelka's role in Iva's death, and Tarján stabs her, as you do.  A spring of fresh water emerges from the the tower as a result of Iva's sacrifice, and we learn that the Hungarian reinforcements are on their way, so...the future looks bright, I guess.

So how'd I like this?  Well, 'sokay.  Fire Shut Up in My Bones is almost certainly better, but we take what we can get.  The music is, unsurprisingly, late-Romantic, Wagner-influenced stuff.  It's pleasant enough, but I didn't find it overly exciting.  I sort of got into the story as it progressed.  What else is there to say?  There are many operas that almost no one will ever see, and this is one such.  That's not a tragedy, but nor is this particular opera wholly devoid of interest.  One thing that's of interest to no one is that for a long time I was tied as far as Polish and Hungarian operas go with eight each; now, Hungarian pulls ahead with nine.  Woo.  Hoo.

Kamala Sankaram, Interstate (2021)

WARNING: Saturday is your last day to see this, from Minnesota Opera! I could've written this earlier so you'd have more time. But I didn't, so you don't. So it goes.

It's an opera film about two women, Diane and Olivia, who were friends with unstable childhoods, only now, Diane has achieved a steady middle-class existence, whereas Diane has been arrested for serial killing. That was a weird way to phrase that. The libretto basically consists of letters back and forth between them, talking about their pasts and trying to figure how things got so fucked. Extremely unsurprisingly, this involved sexual violence.

(Diane has a Bikini Kill poster in her cell. Do they sell those at the prison commissary?)

You look at a serial killer and you pretty much just perceive a deeply broken person, and that's fair enough; as an avocation, serial killing really is only available to the horrendously fucked up. And yet, that person is still a person, and I feel like this piece does a good job of conveying that. It's quite good, really, with a few very memorable moments, as when Diane is trying to talk about what she did and all of a sudden she switches from the blank inmate look to the lurid hooker costume/make-up and sings a perversely jazzy little song about it. Also, the murder ballad "Banks of the Ohio" appears several times to rather spine-tingling effect.

Yeah man, pretty good stuff. I hope that it will be available in some form in the future rather than just disappearing into the ether. That's no good.

Franz Léhar, Der Zarewitsch (1927)

Okay, here's my question: at what point was the idea of giving operettas melancholy endings established?  Was it Léhar's doing?  In my experience, they're everywhere in his late work; I haven't seen them in any of his early works, but then, I may have seen too few to know for sure.  My other data point is Puccini's La rondine, from 1916, which was originally to be an operetta and which had an extremely similar sort of ending, but where did the inspiration for that come from?  I do not have any answers.

But anyway, this is one of those.  Obviously.  The Tsarevich (who is never otherwise named) is not interested in settling down, but then he meets a dancer, Sonia, and falls in love and they run away to Venice, but obviously, this idyll is not permitted to last.  Fairly normal stuff.  There's also a subplot which may be of interest, involving The Tsarevich's valet Ivan and his wife Mascha.  She is annoyed with him, as well one might, because after years, they've never consummated their marriage, and Ivan's obsessive loyalty to The Tsarevich and his general rejection of any female help gives it a very obvious gay subtext.  The resolution of their story is extremely dubious, though: also in Venice, a Venitian publican decides to help her by making her husband jealous, and this works super-well and suddenly he's super into her, which, even as operetta plot twists go, strains credulity a bit.

Well...regardless.  Great music!  If you think about who you'd consider the greatest opera composers of the twentieth century, you're probably going to come up with Puccini, Strauss, and Britten, maybe Henze, but I think Léhar's gotta be a dark horse candidate.  Also, random observation: not so much from super-up-close, but from a moderate distance, The Tsarevich and Sonia look remarkably like pre- and post-transition Philosophy Tube respectively.  Just thought I'd point that out for the benefit of no one.

Franz Lehár, Zigeunerliebe (1910)

Here's what I would call...an interesting one.  I didn't know anything about it before watching, but you have certain expectations of what you'll find in a Lehár operetta, and this defied those for me.

Right, so there's a woman, Zorika, who's engaged to a rich dude, Jonel, but then she meets this gypsy violinist, Józsi, and feels uncertain about her future and what she really wants.  There's this idea that you can see the future by taking a drink of water from the local river, so she does this, and it makes her decide to go off with Józsi.  But things are not as one might hope: Józsi isn't as charming as he initially seemed, and all the gypsies just seem greedy and cruel, and she's forced to degrade herself by begging for money and to tell people's fortunes.  Back home, her dad doesn't even recognize her, and refuses to be the father of a gypsy woman.  Józsi sings about how gypsies are never faithful, so she can't expect anything in that regard, and...does this seem like an operetta plot?  I feel like it doesn't.  How is this going to end happily or at least not horrendously tragically?  Well...then she wakes up.  Turns out she dreamed up the whole thing after drinking the river water.  It's the Super Mario Bros. 2 of operettas!  And how she's totes keen on marrying Jonel, so that's all right then!

It's an odd thing; it really is.  There's almost no humor here, or romance.  German operetta (and Léhar in particular) seem much more invested in having their operettas be romantic than the English or French are.  Well...I may be generalizing about those last two from too small a sample size, but regardless, it's notable.  There IS a secondary couple here that has such a tiny role it's easy to just forget about them; I suspect they might have a larger role in the original that was cut down for this film version.  Here, all we have is Zorika and Jonel, which is almost nothing; after she wakes up and he appears, Léhar certainly tries to play the ending as romantic, but it's hard not to feel that it's mostly just Zorika feeling relieved: phew, that scenario my subconscious cooked up never happened; compared to that, this dude seems pretty okay!  It's weird, for sure.

But the elephant in the room: racism.  Obviously.  Is this operetta racist against gypsies?  Well...yes.  But also, it's complicated.  A bit.  Maybe.  On the one hand, it fully buys into stereotypes, that's for sure, although on the other hand, one does have to admit at least a little nuance: Zorika's father is himself portrayed as pretty racist "gypsies need to be hit," he says repeatedly, and it's hard to see any situation where that would be seen as a positive.  And yet, on the third hand, their portrayal is what it is.  Still, on the fourth hand, it's worth noting that all of the negative stereotypes occur during Zorika's dream, which seems like it ought to mean something.  Unless, on the fifth hand, we're meant to assume that it's an actual magic vision, and not something that she just dreamed up.  We tend to assume the former, but does that accord with authorial intent?  I'm not sure.  But, on the sixth hand, even in that case, the fact remains, there's none of the bad stuff outside the vision (is the river meant to be racist?).  Then again, on the seventh hand, the piece is entitled "gypsy love," which would seem to be a strong indication that the message is meant to be "this is just what happens if you get involved with Those People."  It is murky and unclear and makes for somewhat uncomfortable viewing.  Also, I'm running out of hands.

Still, I'll tell you one thing: whatever Léhar thought of Romani culture, he was totally grooving on their music.  This brings in the gypsy folk in a big way, and it pretty much rocks.  There will be absolutely no complaining allowed on that score.  Also, as Józsi (a weird character--first seems to be the romantic hero, and he's definitely the largest male role, but then he's actually the villain...or is he?), Ion Buzea (or possible "Jon," but his website says "Ion") is very memorable--a big heldentenor voice that definitely makes you stand up and take notice.  He's had a huge and varied international career, so why hadn't I heard of him?  Well, there are lots of great singers I've never heard of.  The world, by some standards, is large.  

Modest Mussorgsky, Boris Godunov (original version) (1869)

Hey, Met in HD is finally back!  Whoo!  That was how I first got into opera, so it has a certain sentimental appeal to me.  Rather than just pushing back the previous season that never happened, they're moving forward.  That means we're left without HD performances of Il pirata, Die frau ohne Schatten, and Dead Man Walking, which is a shame (especially the latter--I really think they should reschedule it), but we also get some cool new stuff.  I'm most looking forward to the Met debuts of two contemporary operas, Fire Shut Up in My Bones (the first opera by a black composer they've ever done; it's been getting rave reviews and the preview they showed looked good) and Eurydice.  They're also doing Brett Dean's Hamlet, which is a great opera, but given that it's the same production as the ROH recording with most of the same cast, it seems like there won't be many surprises.  

Well...regardless!  I went to see Boris.  It's a wonder that our small-town theater gets these at all, so I wanted to show my support for the arts.  There were two other people in the theater.

There's a twist, which I noted in the title, so it shouldn't be a surprise at this point, but: this is the shorter, original version of the opera, which the tsarist censors didn't like apparently because it lacked a substantial female role.  I find it extremely weird that the censors would be in the business of enforcing gender inclusivity, but there you go.  I mean, you could say it was because they didn't think Russia was adequately represented without more femininity--a national pride thing--but considering that the character he added was Polish, I don't know about that.  But anyway, that's where Princess Marina comes from, along with the entire act set in Poland.  The original also lacks the coda in the more-performed version; it ends immediately after Boris' death.  That's another thing that makes it seem more Boris-centric.  And also--this is a small thing, but I noticed it--the later version includes a bit where his son Feodor sings a nonsense song to try to cheer up his sister Xenia.  I miss that; it was a really humanizing moment (also, here Feodor is a trouser role, whereas in the previous Met in HD performance, he was played by a boy soprano; I think that's just a contemporary casting decision, though).

Well, so how does it work?  Well, there are pluses and minuses to this version.  It feels much more small-scale, for one.  Also, the focus is more--although not entirely--on Boris himself, which is perhaps more what you'd expect from an opera of this title.  The Poland material can't help feeling a little tacked on.  On the other hand, it does add valuable context, and without it, all of the stuff with Grigoriy the Pretender feels kind of superfluous, and when we're told "oh no, he's attacking us with his army," you think, with his what not?  Where'd this army come from?  Weird!

This is basically quibbling, though; either way, it's still pretty great, and René Pape was born to be Boris.  Born to Be Boris--he should get a bumper sticker that says that.  His wrestling with his tortured conscience is powerful.  And again, I think the Holy Fool is a great and necessary role, though I can't say who played him here, since the credits don't appear to be online.

Jacques Offenbach, Un mari à la porte (1859)

This is a short, one-act (forty-five minutes) operetta.  I kind of want to know how these things worked.  This was popular in its time, per Wikipedia, but in what context would you perform a one-act operetta?  Was there other entertainment also?  Not that there's anything wrong with a short night out, but the evidence suggests that in general, people wanted something a little more substantial.  Also, on another note, it does feel a little cheep to release it on DVD, let along Blu-Ray, on its own.  Shoulda been a double feature.  OH.  WELL.

Very basic sort of plot where, through contrived circumstances, Forestan goes down a chimney and finds himself in a woman's boudoir.  It turns out she's Suzanne, a newlywed, and she shows up with her friend Rosita, and how are we going to get this dude out of here without him being seen?  Her husband shows up at the door (as per the title), further complicating things.

So there you go.  It's actually pretty impressive how it boils a standard opera bouffe plot down into a shorter piece of work without feeling too abbreviated.  Fun Offenbach music.  What else is there to say, really?

Emmerich Kálmán, Die Zirkusprinzessin (1926)

Here's an interestingly weird one.  The idea is that there's this Russian nobleman, Palinski, who was in the past in love with this princess, Palinska.  But his uncle was in love with her too, so he ended up disinherited, and went to join the circus, where he performs as an acrobat under the name "Mister X."  But when he sees the princess at the circus, his hopes are rekindled (apparently they'd never actually met before, as she never recognizes him from the past).  And there's a complicated plot where a spurned suitor of Palinska plots to get "Mister X" to marry her (not knowing who he really is) so that she'll be humiliated at having accidentally married a circus performer.  So this scheme works, and the two are parted.  Forever?  No indeed!  She comes to see him perform an even more death-defying stunt than usual, and they are reunited.  Oh, and also, as always, there's a secondary couple, yada yada.

So at first I was sort of confused: after it's revealed that Palinski is a circus performer, why doesn't he just immediately reveal who he really is and avoid all the further complication?  But then it became clear: it's supposed to be because he didn't want to be with someone who felt humiliated at the idea of marrying someone like that.  And that is an attitude that accords with our sensibilities--but it very much shouldn't accord with theirs!  People aren't supposed to marry outside their social classes!  They're just not!  What this seems to be saying is, sure, if you're a noble you have to marry another noble--but acknowledging this fact is kind of gauche.  An odd thing, for sure.

This is a 1970 German film version--not my ideal way to see it, and I'm sure Seefestspiele Mörbisch would've done a better job--but not too bad, in my view, and the film itself is kind of a historical artifact in its own right.  It's kind of cheap, some music has clearly been cut, and there are some pretty cheesy arrangements; also, Palinski in his Mister X costume looks like he's the hero of an old, zero-budget superhero movie.  But that's okay; I didn't not like it, and you may not not too.

Jacques Offenbach, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867)

I thought I would expand my operetta game.  Offenbach <i>is</i> known as the father of the genre, after all (so is Hervé.  Reports vary.  But Offenbach is important, at any rate).  Right!  Let's get right into it!

Fritz is an ordinary private in the army who just wants to marry his sweetheart Wanda, but the titular Grand Duchess is upset because she's supposed to marry this Prince Paul guy whom she doesn't like, so her chamberlain, Baron Puck, decides to start a war to cheer her up.  Inspecting the troops, she conceives an infatuation for Fritz, and repeatedly promotes him until he's the head of the whole armed forces, much to the chagrin of the previous head honcho, General Boum.  But Fritz goes out and wins the war (by making the enemy drunk--it's explicitly noted that nobody was killed, which seems a nice humanitarian touch).  So that's great, but he doesn't respond to the Duchess' barely-veiled advances, so she decides to go along with Paul, Boum, and Puck's plan to have him assassinated.  But she immediately calls off the plan and forgets about Fritz when she sees how hot Paul's chamberlain is, and she agrees to marry Paul so she can try to seduce him.  However, it turns out said chamberlain is married with children, so she resigns herself, okay okay, MAYBE this marriage can be okay.  And that is that.

(Interesting to note that this was banned in France after the Franco-Prussian War, 'cause I guess making fun of militarism--which this certainly doesn't do in any very biting way--is unpatriotic.)

Hella fun music.  A helephant of fun.  Here, I uploaded one of the highlights, but there are many, even if the plot meanders a little in the back half.  And the cast is really terrific, notably Dame Felicity Lott in the title role.  I was surprised to look at the wikipedia entry and see that the Duchess is meant to be twenty-ish.  It does make immediate sense; it explains her impulsiveness and general immaturity.  And yet, Lott playing her as a Woman of a Certain Age also feels entirely natural, and Lott is a great physical comedienne (is using the archaic female version of "comedian" sexist?  Well, I'm using it because it suggests a sort of old-timey Hollywood type that Lott embodies very well), and she just kills the whole durn thing.  I also want to give credit to Sandrine Piau as Wanda; even though it's a much smaller role, she has a similar physical expressiveness and is a lot of fun.

I'm going to see every Offenbach operetta available!  End of story!

Joseph Parry, Blodwen (1878)

This one came out of nowhere.  Somehow it had never occurred to me to wonder if there were Welsh-language operas, but now...well, now I know.  This was the first and still, as far as I can tell, the only.  But it is that thing!  No question!  This video is unsubtitled, which at first drove me nuts--YOU'RE PERFORMING IT IN FLIPPING BILLINGS MONTANA HOW MANY WELSH-SPEAKERS DO YOU THINK WILL BE IN THE AUDIENCE?--but then I realized that it's filmed at a fixed angle with the supertitle screen showing the English translation clearly visible.  So that's all right.

So it's the fourteenth century, and Elen and Arthur, two nobles of some stripe, are going to be married and everyone's stoked.  Blodwen shows up with her guardian, Hywel (her mother being dead and her father being MIA in battle) to congratulate them.  But there are dark clouds on the horizon: a representative of the English King Henry comes to demand that they surrender the castle.  They respond with stuff about the stoutness of Welsh hearts--you know the drill.  

Well, it turns out that Hywel is in love with Blodwen, and she returns his affections, and yeah, it's kind of creepy, although you could at least minimize the creep factor by not having him be as visibly older than her as he is here.  But there's no time for love, Sir Hywel--we got company.  Specifically, the English are attacking, and the menfolk, including Arthur and Hywel, have to ride to the defense.  Arthur is mortally wounded, and his death scene here is rendered unintentionally comedic by his insistence on making "blargh!" sounds.  Things are going badly in general for the Welsh, with lots of them being killed or captured.  But what has become of Hywel?!?  Well, he's in the "captured" category.  So Blodwen and some of the others go to visit him in prison (...you can just do that?).  Farewell songs are sung etc.  But then a mysterious stranger shows up to reveal that the English king is dead and that therefore all the Welsh people are being released.  Also, said stranger is Blodwen's dad, who is also free.  So now everyone is happy!  The end.

You might say that this is so rarely performed because it's in Welsh, but I think it would be more accurate to say that the only reason it's ever performed is because it's in Welsh.  That makes it stand out and gives it some cultural significance.  Because I don't think this is a very good opera.  The music struck me as pretty thin.  You expect a lot of rousing patriotic choruses in this sort of piece, but they mostly seemed pretty limp--although in fairness, the performances here aren't very high-caliber.  I can certainly appreciate the logistical difficulties of performing a Welsh opera in Montana (some of the cast are themselves from Wales; some not), but it is what it is.  Maybe better singing would improve my opinion.

But I dunno; the libretto here leaves a lot to be desired, especially the denouement.  This seems like the Welsh equivalent of those nationalistic Eastern European operas that are all about Hungarian or Croatian or Polish pride, which, okay, fine.  But then in the end...what are we meant to take from it?  The king dies and therefore England is just completely changing its colonialist policies with regard to Wales?  What?  In addition to making no sense, how is that meant to evoke Welsh pride?  And if you think, well, it's supposed to be about reconciliation between the two countries, the opera does nothing to make that apparent.  It's not like they sing a chorus of praise to English generosity at the end.

I dunno.  I can't see this being done at the Met anytime in the near or far future.

Franz Lehár, Der Graf von Luxemburg (1909) and Johann Strauss, Eine Nacht in Venedig (1883)

Der Graf von Luxemburg takes place in Paris.  Réne, the titular count, is flat broke, having spent all his money on wine women and song (and wasted the rest, presumably).  Then there's an older Russian prince who wants to marry Angèle, an opera singer, but he can't because he can only marry someone with a rank.  So he plots to get René to marry her for a few months, conferring his title on her, and then they'll get divorced and Bob's yer uncle.  You will NEVER GUESS what complication arises.  There's also another couple, René's artist friend who fancies himself a Bohemian and his girlfriend who's annoyed because he won't marry her.

Eine Nacht in Venedig, by contrast, takes place in Venice, and the city don't know what the city is getting.  Honestly, I don't know about these fetishizations of specific cities--ya seen one crowded, polluted, stinking town--well, anyway, the night in question is Carnival (naturally), and there are a bewildering number of couples whirling around trying to get laid (this is definitely the horniest operetta I've seen).  There's also a Don-Giovanni-esque Duke looking to cuckold as many senators as he can.  But things do not go according to plan, and we truly learn that one night in Venice makes a hard man humble.  When you think about it, there's not much between despair and ecstasy.  It's not a complicated plot per se, but it IS a bit hard to tell everyone apart.  Truly, this is a show with everything but Yul Brynner.  You like this?  I can keep it up all day.  If you want me to stop, send one thousand bitcoins to my account.

All right all right.  So the thing is, operetta is light, but there are degrees of lightness, and it can be a fine balance.  Here I think we can see a real contrast: both of these pieces have some great music, why wouldn't they?, but Der Graf von Luxemburg has a fun plot with appealing characters, whereas Eine Nacht in Venedig is almost alienating in its total indifference to anyone caring even a tiny bit about anyone involved.  Composers, do not undervalue your librettists!  They can make or break your work, and this is a very good example of that.

Elliott Carter, What Next? (1999)

I've seen four operas with exclamation points in the titles.  It's sort of harder to determine with other punctuation marks, because it's so often just a matter of how you want to stylize the title.  But one thing we can say for sure is that this is the first dang opera I've seen with a question mark in there.  So...there you go.

So there are these people standing around after a car crash, five adults and a kid.  They're dazed and can't remember what happened or what they were doing (it would obviously occur to you that they're meant to be dead or at least that this is meant to be ambiguous, but I truly can't tell whether that's supposed to be the case).  They stagger around and argue about where they were going and what they were doing in a kind of absurdist way.  This goes on for forty-five minutes.  They wander off.  And that's about all you have.

Carter was, says wikipedia, "one of the most respected composers of the second half of the 20th century," and this was his only opera.  This cachet is presumably why this performance is conducted by James Goddamn Levine.  And yet, I have to say, I was extremely underwhelmed.  I like a lot of contemporary opera, but you have to admit, there's this image of it as consisting of this sort of subdued music with mild stabs at atonalism but mostly tonal that doesn't really do much, with no arias or duets or any operatic things like that, that completely exits your brain as soon as the performance is over.  And as far as I'm concerned, that's this to a T.  And combine that with a very unengaging libretto and...you're not left with much.  Was conducting this really an edifying experience for Levine?  Maybe I lack discernment, but I knows what I knows.  Carter was ninety when he wrote this, which is certainly impressive regardless of anything else, but I say, BLAH.