Giuseppe Verdi, Les vêpres siciliennes (1855)

Hey look, it's Verdi's stab at grand opera!  Well, not his only one; there's also Don Carlos, though at the time I wasn't aware enough of these conventions to know to call it that (Really, these fine varieties of opera rival the complicated taxonomy of different kinds of heavy metal).  But!  This one has a libretto by Eugene Scribe, who did the libretti for all of Meyerbeer's grand operas.  So there you go.  This is more often performed today in its Italian translation (I vespri siciliani), but I wanted to see the French original for the more authentic grand opera experience.  Also, this is the one that was available on Medici, so there you go.

It's about a historical event in the thirteenth century where Sicilian rebels started a rebellion to overthrow their French rulers.  Guy de Monfort is the French regent in Sicily.  Some rebels do not like him.  The main ones are Hélène, whose wants to avenge the death of her brother Frederic, an Henri, who turns out--shock!--to be Monfort's son.  With the abduction of some Sicilian women being the inciting event, the Sicilians attack their rulers; they're defeated, but then Monfort learns about his son, and promises to let everyone go if he'll acknowledge him as his father.  This he does, and more than just letting them go, he agrees that there will be peace between France and Sicily and that Henri and Hélène can be married.  But the rebels have a plan to use the distraction of the wedding to attack.  They...well, they do this, and kill Monfort, although the details of exactly who dies are unspecified by the libretto.

I think there's probably good reason this is less well-known than other Verdi operas of the time (it was written right after Rigoletto, Trovatore, and Traviata): there's some good music here; probably not one of Verdi's all-time best.  But we really have to talk about this production, by Christof Loy, which is polarizing.  I don't want to sound like a Reasonable Centrist here, but my opinion does indeed lie somewhere in the middle.

So first, the setting is updated to...when?  The box copy claims the 1940s, but we see the characters' birthdays are in the thirties and forties, so it must be the sixties or seventies.  But really, there's nothing culturally specific enough that you can nail it down.  Really, if you want to be specific rather than general--which this clearly does--then...you should.  That's a point against it.  The staging is very minimalistic and a bit visually boring.  Still, that's not what people think about when they think about this.  So let me name two things I liked and two that I did not.  First, there's a really compelling sequence over the overture (which here has been transplanted between the first two acts) of the Sicilian rebels' mugshots.  Each in turn comes to the forefront, and we see their pictures de- and re-aging.  This is really great, and gives us a more concrete idea of who these people are.  Second, in the last act, where everything seems all cheerful for a few minutes, we first see Hélène pregnant, and then Henri comes in with a baby carriage--which seems nonsensical, but it quickly becomes apparent that this represents his tragically delusional hope that there can be genuine peace.  It's smart, it's effective, I kind of love it.

And yet, there are at least as many really ill-advised things here.  So during the ballet sequence--which goes on for a while; it's longer than any of Meyerbeer's--we see a flashback to Henri, Hélène, and Frederic as children.  Great idea, in theory.  But it badly outstays its welcome and gets weird and psychosexual in a way that makes you wonder if maybe Loy didn't sort of lose the thread of what he was trying to do here.  Also, there's a very unpleasant sequence where the French authorities force the Sicilian women to crawl over broken glass.  It's not exactly contrary to the libretto, which does after all strongly suggest sexual violence, but it does seem a bit de trop, and the climax of this scene, where Monfort actually slits the throat of one of them?  Come the fuck on.  The purpose of this is so that it can be all symmetrical when he's killed in the same way at the end (as you can see on the DVD cover--spoilers!), but really: for the tragedy to work, you should be trying to make him more sympathetic, not less.  It's clearly a considered decision, but a bad one, I think.

Still, when you come right down to it, all these problems are really more related to the libretto itself than anything else.  I like Meyerbeer's grand operas a lot (well, seventy-five percent of them), but all of Scribe's libretti have their issues, and this is weaker than any of them.  I've never found him to be some sort of all-time great librettist.  The composition process was a frustrating one for Verdi, who had problems with it and found Scribe unresponsive when asked to make revisions.  He almost gave up on the opera altogether; obviously, he powered through in the end, but I think you can see the results of its troubled birth on the stage.  Point being: Loy does make some bad choices, and I don't want to wholly absolve him, but on the other hand, if the libretto had provided a clearer sense of character and of the dramatic stakes involved, he probably wouldn't have felt the need to embellish it so much.  Like it or not, he's not doing what he's doing just to be transgressive or arbitrary--it's considered work, and it deserves a certain amount of respect even if the results aren't always exactly what you'd want.

Of course, I say all that, but there IS the fact that, while all the other characters are in more or less formal dress throughout, Henri spends most of the opera looking like the Dude from The Big Lebowski--well, I have no theoretical or practical defense for that.  It's just weird as hell.

Giacomo Puccini, Edgar (1889)

I feel I probably need to revisit most of Puccini's oeuvre.  See, the thing is, I've definitely gotten better at opera appreciation the more I've watched, and most of them I only saw when I was less adept at it.  I think that more than anything else explains why my impression of him has been a bit lukewarm.  My own dern fault!  It's just, there's always something new to see.  Sometimes it's hard to motivate myself to revisit stuff that definitely deserves revisiting.

Well, in any event, here's his obscurish second opera, which he was not happy with: he spent a lot of time tinkering around with it, trying to make it better, before just giving it up as a lost cause.  Still, I actually don't have any big problems with the music.  It's pretty good, actually!  It's just, I think with this libretto, salvaging the piece was a lost cause.  It's an interesting theoretical question, whether you could potentially save a weak libretto by rejiggering the music, but...certainly not in every case, I'd say.

So there's this guy, Edgar.  He uses tools such as the autocrossbow, bioblast, and chainsaw to attack his enemies and...what?  Okay okay, I know that was the lamest joke ever.  Forgive me!  Edgar is some sort of knight or something who has a True Love named Fidelia (NOTE SYMBOLIC NAME), but he's cast her aside for the charms of Tigrana, who is some sort of gypsy or something.  But he's tired of all her debauchery, so he decides to join the army to escape her clutches.  But then, he dies in battle.  Only not really.  He reappears disguised as a monk with no explanation.  Tigrana shows up to mourn Eddie, but he plies her with jewels until she agrees to betray him.  Ed reveals himself to Fidelia and they sing about how much they're in love, but then Tigrana shows up again to stab her, after which she's captured.  The dern ol' end!

I mean, there's some nonsensical stuff here like the monk disguise, but that doesn't really bother me.  I didn't start to really dislike this until the part where our "hero" is bribing Tigrana to get her to reveal her venality, which is some really ugly, misogynistic stuff.  But beyond that, the relationship between him and Fidelia is never really convincing, in spite of this production including sepia-toned footage of their previous love over the fourth-act overture.  It's just really dramatically weak.  It has obvious echoes of both Tannhäuser and Carmen, but it is not on the level of either one.  I did think Julia Gertseva was very good as Tigrana; it's just too bad the character receives such ill narrative treatment.

Well, whatevz.  Now I've seen all Puccini's operas except his first.  Weird fact: both Wagner's and Puccini's rarely-performed first operas are called "The Fairies:" Die Feen and Le Villi.  Is it because that's a theme that naturally suggests itself to young composers just starting out?  In that case, you'd expect more examples.  Still, it's sort of interesting.

Kurt Weill, Street Scene (1946)

Weill's idea here was to fuse elements of European opera with American musical forms.  It's based on a Pulitzer-winning play (not that THAT means much), and has a libretto by none other than Langston Hughes.  This seems appropriate, as the characters are first- and second-generation immigrants, and Weill himself had become an American citizen in 1943--though I don't suppose his immigrant experience was much like those of the characters here.

It takes place in a tenement block where immigrants from a bunch of different European countries are living.  The main plot concerns a woman, Anna Maurrant, unsatisfied with her marriage and rumored to be carrying on an affair (which she is).  There's also her daughter, Rose, and her romance with their neighbor Sam Kaplan, a law student.  

There's not much more to say about the plot.  This will undoubtedly remind you significantly of Porgy and Bess: both try to fuse opera and Americana, both involve marginalized communities, both have large casts and feature a lot of slice-of-life material unrelated to the central plot, and both have indeterminate endings.  Oh, and they're both pretty great, really.  I think Weill succeeded admirably with his goals here.  There's a lot of really infectious music.  The best thing here--I think--is "Moon-Faced, Starry-Eyed," sung by a couple who play no other role, featuring a classic blues riff and which I can only describe as joyously horny.

Nice production, also.  And...it also reminds me of the Met's recent Porgy and Bess production--hard to believe that was just a year ago; anything pre-pandemic feels like ancient history.  Somehow, I didn't even realize 'til halfway through that, hey, that's Patricia Racette as Anna.  But...it is.

I'm currently reading a book about the immigrant experience with a Chinese student, so this felt highly relevant.  It's good, so you should watch it.

Henry Purcell, The Indian Queen (1695)

I was eager to see this, because Purcell.  I was incredibly skeptical of it, because Peter Sellars.  But I decided that if I was gonna, I might as well do it before my Medici account expires so at least it'll be free.  Hard to argue with that.

So yes, this one's going to be a little complicated.  The Indian Queen was originally a play by John Dryden, first performed in 1664.  Thirty years later, Purcell was commissioned to add music to make it into a semi-opera, with a libretto by Dryden himself.  But of course, and alas, Purcell died before he could complete the work, and his less-famous brother Daniel finished it.

Well, as I think I've noted before, semi-operas are problematic for most modern producers, who want the music but aren't much interested in the non-musical text.  The only semi-opera you're likely to see that's "authentic" in that sense is Jonathan Kent's fantastic staging of Purcell's Fairy-Queen.  Any other semi-opera you'll see--which really just means this and Purcell's King Arthur; nothing by any other composer--is gonna have its guts ripped out, the non-musical elements replaced with...well, something different, according to the producer's obscure whims.  That's...not necessarily a bad thing, is it?  We could still have fun.  Well, maybe.  But it also presents a perhaps overwhelming temptation for a producer to use the text to make some sort of hamfisted "point" that has zero to do with the original work.  Which would be...bad.   Hypothetically.

The original play really isn't about colonialism.  It takes place prior to the Spanish invasion and involves only Meso-American characters, and it's at least somewhat about Restoration politics.  of course, ideology doesn't have to be overt, but I think it would be pushing a point to see this as really being "about" indigenous Americans.  But Sellars' version sure is!  Here, the entire play is stripped away and replaced with monologues, all recited by one woman, from a novel by Rosario Aguilar, a Nicaraguan writer.  It is indeed about the Spanish invasion, from the perspective of several women, mainly a princess who gets involved with a Spanish commander and her daughter. 

You may have detected one problem here already: it's true that the music in semi-opera is only somewhat related to the spoken text, but it's not unrelated.  Dryden's libretto includes specific American names; it's obvious that the two are more closely intertwined than they were in The Fairy-Queen.  So...how does this work here?  Fairly incoherently, I would say.  

I can't say I'm a huge fan of the new story, such as it is.  There's a lot of steamy Harlequin-Romance stuff that doesn't really seem apropos of anything.  Some might say it verges on the tasteless.  It certainly doesn't present any kind of interesting message, if that was the goal, which it clearly was.  The production would clearly have to carry a lot of weight here, but as expected from Sellars, this could best be described as...cryptic.  A lot of dancers making dopey facial expressions, people in modern-dress...it's very hard to tell who if anyone a lot of the singers are supposed to be.  Or care.

According to Sellars, people who didn't like this “don’t understand that a work like this is about trying to complete a journey together through difficult issues and history.”  I don't think that's notably true, Pete.  We have a pretty good idea of what you're trying to do.  The problems are A) What the hell does this have to do with Henry Purcell; and B) you did a shit job of it.  Sorry.  I know you would welcome that kind of hostility, épater la bourgeoisie and all that, but while I don't like the production, to me, the bigger problem is that it's just really fucking boring.  At three and a quarter hours, this feels absolutely interminable.  I spaced out so hard for significant portions of it.

Of course, there's Purcell's music.  There is that!  And, of course, Purcell is great, even if maybe I didn't find this score quite as striking as his other work I've heard.  He actually completed less than an hour of music, and Sellars, having high-handedly decided that Daniel Purcell's completion was bad, replaced it with more, unrelated Purcell music.  How does this relate to the text?  It doesn't, really.  It just makes things more incoherent.  I have no basis to judge the relative badness of D. Purcell's tunes, but I am disinclined to take Sellars' word for it.

Honestly, I'm starting to kind of feel like I hate Peter Sellars and his stupid-looking hair (seriously, google him, he looks like the guy from Eraserhead).  If he wants to work with living composers like John Adams and Kaija Saariaho, okay, do what you want.  I'll allow that his libretto for Doctor Atomic is...fine.  But come on, man.  I've actually had the thought lately that maybe I shouldn't be so hard on Regietheater.  I mean, we're talking about old texts in the public domain, so why shouldn't current artists repurpose them to do new and interesting things?  Well, there's the practical problem that when you have a text, superimposing completely new meanings onto it generally just makes it incoherent.  But the ethical issue, I think, is you pretending that your work somehow "is" the original opera.  If Sellars wants to make The Peter Sellars Anticolonialist Power Hour ft. Henry Purcell, I wouldn't object.  But he would never do that.  Why not?  Because nobody would ever fund it, and if for some reason they did, nobody would want to see it.  Laying bare a dirty little secret here: nobody cares about opera directors that much.  You guys ain't that important!  As a defense of Regietheater, some people say, oh, well, opera's a dying artform!  We need to shake it up to engage The Kidz!  I am unaware of any statistics suggesting that Regietheater has that effect, but that's what they say.  But no!  People like operas!  They're sometimes willing to endure indignities inflicted on them, but that's all!  Nobody would give one single solitary shit about your work if not for the composers' names.

Anyway.  Not a fan, as you might conceivably have gathered.  Purcell deserves a lot better than this, and so do colonial studies.

Jean-Joseph de Mondonville, Titon et l'Aurore (1753)

I can't deny that Medici is making a solid pitch for itself with this, a for-now exclusive video--the first of anything by the composer, I think--by Les Arts Florissants. Mondonville was highly successful in his time, a younger contemporary of Rameau, but I fear he has fallen into obscurity. Alas!

We have a rather typical plot for a French opera of the time: after a lengthy prologue where Prometheus brings humanity to life and Amour gives their lives meaning, we have Titon (Tithonus, best-known, at least to English-speakers, from Tennyson's poem) is a shepherd in love with the goddess Aurore, which is great and all, but Eole (Aeolus, the wind god) is also in love with Aurore. On the advice of the goddess Palès, herself in love with Titon, he separates them and tries to put the moves on her, unsuccessfully. Palès is equally unsuccessful with Titon. To avenge herself for his indifference, she curses him with instant old age, but then Amour appears and reverses the curse, and everyone's happy. This last is kind of interesting, because the prologues of baroque operas are generally totally segregated from the main action: I think this is the first time I've seen a character from the prologue have a singing role elsewhere in the opera.

Could I distinguish between Mondeville's music and Rameau's? Almost certainly not! But it bangs pretty hard regardless. I thought it was doggone great. This is a brand-new performance, with a 2021 copyright date. You can tell it was recorded during COVID times because all the musicians are masked and the theater appears to be empty--there's a scattering of applause at the end, but I think it's all from the orchestra and singers. As usual from these guys, the production is a lot of fun. It's extremely sheep-centric: sheep wandering around, stacks of sheep, sheep floating around--perhaps the most ovine production I've ever seen. I also liked how we see Palès and Eole (who would otherwise just be written out) get together at the end--a generous touch that fits the spirit of the material.

Yeah, man. Mondonville wrote nine operas, and now I really want to see more. I realize that's a common sentiment when I see a new composer, but I mean it super hard this time. So you know I'm serious.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, La finta giardiniera (1775)

An opera by eighteen-year-old Mozart?  How can you go wrong?  I ask you!

Well, the story is that a year ago Count Belfiore stabbed his lover Violante in a jealous rage and left her for dead.  But she didn't die, and now she's in disguise as a gardener for unclear reasons.  I mean, she wants to get back with Belfiore, but that doesn't really seem to explain the gardener thing.  He's engaged to a woman named Arminda, son of a local official, Don Anchise, who is himself in love with Violante.  Arminda also has a previously-spurned suitor, Ramiro.  And there's the servant couple, Serpetta and Violante's disguised servant Roberto.

Look, you don't need me to tell you that the music here is going to be great.  But in spite of your lack of need, I'll do it anyway: the music is great, chock full o' gorgeous melody.  The thing you should look up is "Dentro il mio petto," where Don Anchise declares his love to Violante, comparing it to an orchestra, and the different instruments kick in as he mentions them.  Really brilliant.  Perhaps the recitative-to-aria ratio is slightly higher than I'd like, especially in the second act, but it's not a big problem.  I do like Mozart.

The libretto, on the other hand, is just a train wreck.  The above description might sound like a fairly standard opera buffa, but it's really much worse.  You might think, huh, that business about Belfiore having tried to murder his lover and her still being in love with her seems a bit questionable.  And that's true, but honestly, the text doesn't even rise to the level where it's a thing you can think about.  We never learn why the attack happened beyond the generic "jealous rage."  He never expresses remorse or begs forgiveness and she doesn't seem to expect it.  It's the inciting incident, but we are absolutely not meant to think about its implications beyond that.  And, to be fair, it's hard to think of implications when the whole thing is such a mess.  The characters just dash around in very incoherent fashion, nothing really gets accomplished, and then it's over.  The thing with Don Anchise being in love with Violante is basically dropped after the one (great!) aria, and bizarrely, the opera doesn't even bother to finish the stories of the two secondary couples, just leaving them in limbo (the wikipedia page claims otherwise, and you could make them get together through the production, but it's not in the text).  Crikey, man: I know the composer isn't exactly responsible for the libretto, but couldn't you have done a little quality control?

I saw a 2018 production from La Scala, which I believe is exclusively on Medici right now.  It's fine as far as it goes, but I feel that it is only possible to go so far with this piece.  People wonder why Mozart's early operas aren't more performed, but I think this one actually might be part of the standard repertoire if not for the disastrous text.  Bah to that, I say!

Thierry Escaich, Claude (2015)

So my subscription to Medici runs out at the beginning of next month, and I'm not planning on renewing it, at least for the time being.  I definitely got my money's worth this year: I paid ninety dollars and I watched thirty-ish operas there, some available nowhere else.  But I don't know that there's quite enough left for another year to make sense, and if I were going to renew, I would definitely wait for another sale; paying full price seems kind of pointless.  But my only point is: in the next few weeks, I'm going to try to squeeze in a bunch of stray Medici stuff that I'd been meaning to watch, including this one.

It's based on a story by Victor Hugo, so you know it's gonna be a barrel o' laughs.  The title character is a peasant who steals some supplies for his family and is sentenced to seven years in a prison-sweatshop.  It's hard for him because, in addition to the general brutality of the conditions, he's a big man and doesn't get enough food.  But then another prisoner, Albin, shares his bread with him, and they become friends (and lovers, though I doubt that's in Hugo).  It makes the situation somewhat bearable, but the sadistic director separates them for no reason other than general fathomless evil.  "Because I wanted to," is his only explanation when Claude asks why he did this.  So, further and further down the end of his rope, he ultimately decides to kill him.  Having done this, he tries to commit suicide, but survives, and the opera concludes with him awaiting his inevitable execution.  Fun fun fun in the sun sun sun.

Definitely one of the grimmer operas I've seen, and this debut production emphasizes the violence and brutality of the situation.  It's, well, pretty good, though.  The music fluctuates between doleful choruses and shrieking atonality in what I thought was a generally effective and sometimes exciting way.  Also, I was really impressed by Rodrigo Ferreira as Albin; he's a really striking Brazilian countertenor I'd never seen before.  Of course, you could well ask what the point of the whole affair is: the original short story is a protest against the French criminal system of the time, which, without having looked it up, I'm gonna guess is significantly less bad today.  Still, art is art!

Vicente Martín y Soler, Il burbero di buon cuore (1786)

Another Martín opera, another Da Ponte libretto--this time an opera buffa that's probably more the sort of thing you'd expect from him based on the Mozart stuff than L'arbore di Diana is.  

 Here's the plot: Angelica wants to marry her sweetheart Valerio.  But her brother Giocondo wants to send her to a convent (evidently he's her guardian since their father is dead and she's only sixteen, but it's not made totally clear).  He wants this because his wife Lucilla has incurred a shit-ton of debts and he doesn't want any more expense (though in the end, it turns out that it wasn't so much her being irresponsible as it was extremely poor communication about what their financial situation was like).  So she goes to her rich uncle Ferramondo for help--the burbero di buon cuore of the title (meaning something like "The Good-Hearted Grump").  He is what the title says he is.  He decides, okay, he'll find a husband for his niece.  It's really unclear why Valerio isn't just presented as her chosen suitor, but he's not, so he suggests his friend Dorval instead, who is of the unspeakably ancient age of forty.  Well, general hijinx ensue, as hijinx will, and in the end Ferramondo is prevailed upon to pay his nephew's debts as well as the dowry for his niece and her fiancé.  Everyone wins!  Oh, and there are also two comic-relief servants (wait, why does a comedy need comic relief?), Marina and Castagna.

Yeah, man.  What do you want me to say?  If you're thinking that I'll think this is great based on it having the same creative team as another opera I thought was great...well, you're right!  A winner is you!  The music here is hella fun, the story is good-natured and charming, and this particular production does it full justice; it's set in what appears to be a mid-century hotel lobby filled with faded elegance; it works quite well.  The whole cast is great (gawd, how many times have I said THAT?).  Not sure I'd ever before seen Carlos Chausson, in the title role, but he's very winning.  Also featuring Veronique Gens (as Lucilla) and Luca Pisaroni (as Dorval), who are in everything, for good reason.  Cecilla Diaz also stands out as Marina; she has a very good chemistry with Ferramondo.

Alas, this is the only other Martín opera available.  It's kind of amazing how cavalierly we cast aside so much great music.  I guess I can't really blame anyone; obviously this stuff is not as popular as it once was.  My appetite, however, is boundless, and Martín rulez, so gimme more!

Charles Wuorinen, Brokeback Mountain (2014)

I don't know if you remember what a huge cultural thing Brokeback Mountain the movie was when it was released in 2005.  Suddenly, absolutely EVERYONE was using "brokeback" to mean "gay stuff."  This includes committed homophobes, of course, but also people would wouldn't have thought of themselves that way at all but who nonetheless were uncomfortable with gayness on some level and were using it in a sort of nervous, desperate way.  The concept of "Brokeback Mountain: The Opera" would've been exactly the sort of quasi-joke you would've expected from Family Guy or whatever bottom-feeding Adult Swim cartoon.  It was weird times, man.  Of course, by 2014 this was well and truly over--Brokeback Mountain feels like a movie very of its time; one might well question the need for an opera nine years later.  And yet, here we have it.

It felt like there was some sort of cultural obligation to see the movie back in the day.  I distinctly remember standing in a video rental place (yes! those existed!) mentally debating whether to rent it, but somehow I never did.  Things that feel like obligations are never things you really want to do.  But hey, now I've seen this version, so...vindication?

Well, you probably know the story, or at least the first part of this story: two ranchers, Jack and Ennis, get summer jobs herding sheep on the titular mountain.  This is 1963.  When they drunkenly hook up one night, it leads to a years-long occasional relationship.  They both get married and have kids.  Ennis gets divorced.  At their last meeting, in 1983, they have a fight, and months later Jack is killed in an auto accident.  Ennis declares that there will never be anyone but Jack.  And that's it.  If there are differences between this and the movie or original short story, well, that's still the plot of the opera.

So...okay, the story is moving and tragic kind of, but it also has pretty significant issues, I have to say.  Firstly, just killing Jack off like that feels like a massive cop-out.  There's some vague effort made to connect the death to a homophobic murder that had taken place in Ennis' youth, but it's pretty half-baked (and to the extent that that IS meant to be what happened, I don't find "eh, homophobes probably killed him" overly compelling either).  This is part of why I'm not interested in Game of Thrones: it's just not interesting for characters to be arbitrarily killed off.  A little nihilism goes a very, very long way.  Not that I'm saying this is nihilistic, exactly, but in the end I'm just left thinking: welp.  The pathos feels unearned.

Then there's the matter of Ennis' and Jack's respective wives, Alma and Lureen.  These two need to either have much bigger or much smaller roles.  As it is, they're just big enough that you expect them to play more or a part in the proceedings, such that it feels weird when they don't.  Although, there is one extremely weird scene with Lureen: she's lamenting that her late father was right, she never should have married him, and then he appears and says, I'm your dad.  I'll help you as far as I can.  Stay tuned, and this is never alluded to again, but: is the narrative implying that Jack is eventually murdered by his father-in-law's ghost?  Seriously, double-you tee eff?  What kind of story IS this, anyway?

And then, just in general, the writing is extremely unsubtle, forcing the words to carry a burden that really should be held up by the music.  And the, I guess, central metaphor of the mountain is...seriously, it's NOTHING.  The opera opens with the ranch boss that Jack and Ennis are working for singing about how, like, bad the mountain is and how it drives men MAD and whatnot, but this is just not reflected in the actual story we see.  The libretto was written by Annie Proulx herself, and she did a BAD JOB.  Whether that's because the original story is bad or because she lacked experience writing libretti, I couldn't say.  But there you have it.

Well yes BUT, this is an opera, dammit, so how about the MUSIC?  Well...probably I spent so much time wittering on about the story because there's not that much to SAY about the music.  Sort of clanking and atonal.  It does at times evince a certain stark, ominous quality that seems appropriate to the story, but like so many contemporary operas, it's mostly just...there to carry the story along, it feels like.  Nothing you'd be likely to just listen to, no real stand-out moments.  And man, you contemporary composers have GOTTA learn to put actual ARIAS in your work.  You can't all be Wagners.  Though actually that may be a blessing, I suppose.  But STILL.

I will give it one thing: I always grew up pronouncing "coyote" as "kye-ote," whereas I know most people pronounce it in the Warner Bros way, and I had sort of accepted that my way was probably idiosyncratic and wrong, to the extent that there IS a right and wrong here, but here, they do it my way every time.  Vindicated!  So that's pretty great.  But that aside...I mean, this isn't a horrible piece of work or anything, and all the singers here give it their best, but I cannot help feeling that it's the very definition of inessential.

André Grétry, Guillaume Tell (1791)

Rossini's was not the first opera of this title.  And I can prove it: the proof is that this opera exists.  Ha! I've run rings around you logically!

This has basically the same plot as the later opera, though since it's less than half as long--just an hour and a half--obviously digging in less deeply.  So the Swiss people, including Tell, his wife, and some guy named Arnold Melchtal, are being oppressed by the Austrians, and particular the villainous Gessler, although here, there's no conflict of Arnold being in love with an Austrian princess.  Also, Gessler doesn't kill his dad; he just blinds him.  But there is--of course--a part where Gessler forces Tell to shoot an apple off his son's head, and it ends with all the Swiss heroically fighting on.  Yup.

So there's spoken dialogue here, this being an opéra comique.  This is actually the second Grétry opera I've seen; the first was Les fausses apparences ou L'Amant jaloux, of which I wasn't a huge fan--some okay music, but way to much spoken dialogue.  Or so I thought.  I don't remember it very well.  I like this one better; there's less dialogue, and the music is really pretty darn terrific, if not quite Rossini-level.  But boy oh boy, this production: I actually like the look of it; it's very colorful and fun.  But the director, for whatever reason, decided that the spoken dialogue should be performed in this horrendously irritating style, with the characters drawing out phrases in unnatural ways and mugging hideously.  The audience occasionally laughs, being either more charitable or more easily amused than I am, but damn, man.  According to one amazon review--an unimpeachable source--this may be authentic to how these things were originally done, in which case I suppose I can't object.  But actually...I can and do.  Because I don't like it.  And the thing is, apart from the silly voices and faces, this really isn't much of a comedy.  I mean okay, sure, there are a few scenes that are I suppose formally comic, but it's mostly dramatic in the same way as Rossini's version is.  The furious goofing around just feels out-of-place.

I'll see more Grétry operas given the opportunity, but I would humbly request that the producers focus a bit more on watchability than they did here.

Vicente Martín y Soler, L'arbore di Diana (1787)

I cannot for the life of me figure out why the DVD styles him "Martín i Soler." "Y" of course means "and" in Spanish. It's a thing you see in old Spanish names. But as far as I can tell, "i" is never used like this. And it certainly doesn't mean "and" in English! AND means and! If you do a google search for "Martin i Soler," most of the results are about some ferry by that name. WEIRD.

Well anyway. An immediate point of interest that pops up is that this has a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, who must surely be the best-known librettist ever. Well, there's Wagner, who wrote his own libretti, but people don't think of him in those terms. At a stretch you might think of Emanuel Schikaneder (though of course, both he and Da Ponte are only known through Mozart). Metastasio had by far the most market penetration, but today he's only known to baroque buffs, I think. But anyway! It's interesting to see Da Ponte with a non-Mozart conposer! Apart from Mozart and Martín (am I allowed to call him just "Martín?") he worked with Salieri--and others, but these three are the only ones with any name recognition these days.

Well, all that is neither here nor there. It takes place in Diana's...arbor. What an amazing fact that is. Diana wants it to be a fortress of chastity, but Amore has other ideas. When three hapless dudes stumble into the area, hijinx ensue with her and her nymph attendants. Ultimately, Amore wins out and Diana ends up with a lover of her own.

So how IS the libretto, then? Well...it's fine. A little bit baggy; sort of reminiscent, I thought, of a lot of seventeenth-century opera. I was sort of worried at first that it was going to have misogynistic undertones, but that's not a problem: it's not really a war of the sexes thing as you might think; Amore really just likes messing around with gods and humans, irrespective of gender. No problems there.

And that's all you need, really. It's plenty to support the music, which really kicks all kinds of ass. As you might expect, it sounds extremely Mozartian. I know all the foremost authorities identify Mozart (who apparently borrowed a melody of Martín's for Don Giovanni) as the stand-out composer of the time, but I would really like one of these experts to explain to me in what way this is inferior to the man at the height of his powers. I enjoyed it thoroughly. Diana in particular has some real stand-out arias that you would think would make the part highly desirable for sopranos. Also: Michael Maniaci as Amore! Woot! Would I actually be able to tell the different between him and a countertenor in a blind, um, taste test? Dunno, but I'm a big fan.  Interestingly, it wasn't originally a castrato role; it was written for, well, a soprano.  And because Amore is in drag for long stretches here, you would've had the tricky act of a woman playing a man playing a woman.  Nice!

I really want to hear what Maniaci's speaking voice sounds like, but irritatingly, and weirdly, there seem to be zero clips online of him talking. There's one link that leads to a dead youtube account, and that is IT. Dammit! Supposedly, his voice is high but not outside the normal range; recognizably masculine.

Got off-topic there, but I suppose the topic's about over. How many OTHER great composers are there who have been overlooked for totally arbitrary reasons? Nineteen. The answer is nineteen. Now we just need to find them!

György Kurtág, Fin de partie (2018)

Here's an opera based on Samuel Beckett's play, known in English as Endgame.  But it was originally written in French, so it makes sense for the opera to follow suit.  Whether a Beckett opera makes sense full stop...well, it's open to debate!  Certainly not a "normal" opera.  His aesthetic seems rather defiantly anti-operatic.  But here it is.  It's interesting to note also that this is Kurtág's first opera; he worked on it for eight years and completed it at the age of ninety-one.  That's the kind of dedication we're looking for!

So, yes.  Like Waiting for Godot, Endgame doesn't have much of a plot, per se.  There's a wheelchair-bound blind man, Hamm, and his attendant, Clov.  And there are Hamm's parents Nell and Nagg, who are stuck in trashcans for some reason.  And they babble incessantly at each other, going round and round in circles, all sort of barely tolerating each other.  And also, apparently it's the end of the world.  In the end, Clov resolves to leave Hamm but then doesn't.  Yup, that sounds like Beckett all right.  I actually read the play back in university, though naturally I don't remember it too well.

As for this opera, I think it, and this world premiere production in particular (at La Scala!) (exclusively on Medici for now, I think), is probably the best possible version of itself.  The grimy production seems dead-on, and all four singers give it their all and absolutely kill it.  I can hardly decide who's "best" but Frode Olsen as Hamm--the biggest role by some margin--might be it.  It's funny, because after never having seen him, I've now seen him in back-to-back operas: he had a smallish role as the Roman governor in Theodora.  He was effective there, and he is here too (and he is extremely NOT the Frode Olsen who comes up first when you google his name, a soccer player who, wikipedia matter-of-factly informs us, "was convicted to 7 months in prison for having sexual intercourse with his then 15 year old niece").  But I also kinda love Leigh Melrose as Clov; he somehow makes the character more sympathetic than you'd think possible.

And yet, sad to say, I ultimately admired this way more than I liked it (though, in case it's not clear, let me note that I admired it A LOT).  The music is...well, kind of the music one would envision accompanying Beckett: sort of clanking stuff, though not wholly unmelodic, mainly staying in the background.  It's not unpleasant, but it's hard to imagine just listening to the score here.  And watching the characters go 'round and 'round to it gets kind of boring, I'm not gonna lie to you.  Supposedly it includes about sixty percent of the dialogue from the play; I read an article that said that Kurtág was thinking of expanding it, but crikey man--is that truly necessary?  I think you've already well and truly made your point.

George Frideric Handel, Theodora (1750)

One of Handel's last oratorios, and most critically acclaimed.  It concerns two Christian saints, Theodora and Didymus, who were martyred, allegedly, in the fourth century, though from what I've read, it seems extremely unlikely that they actually existed.  But that is neither here nor there, obviously.

So there's going to be a festival to some goddesses, and anyone refusing to celebrate will be executed.  Sounds like a party!  Didymus is a soldier who has secretly become a Christian, and he objects to this idea, but is overruled.  His friend and coworker Septimius sympathizes but feels powerless to resist.  Theodora, a foreign princess, is secretly taking part in Christian rites.  Theodora is arrested (or maybe they're all arrested--it's sort of hard to tell; the action in oratorios is typically vaguer than in operas-proper).  She's going to be sentenced to a fate worse than death as a temple prostitute.  Didymus, her secret lover, goes to rescue her by exchanging clothes so she can secretly get out.  She does, but not wanting Didymus to die in her place, she goes back and they die together.  Your mileage may vary as to whether that's an improvement.

It's Handel, so how is it not going to be good?  This is musically great, for sure.  There are a few up-tempo numbers, but for the most part, this is the slower, more contemplative side of baroque music, as befits the subject matter.  There is a narrative, obviously, but it feels a bit less naturally suited to operazation than Semele, Hercules, or Belshazzar--lot of characters appearing to sing and making you think, wait, why is this character suddenly present?  But I'm not complaining.

This 1996 production by Peter Sellars is, like, a big deal, clearly: it was done at Glyndebourne with a very impressive cast, including Dawn Upshaw in the title role, sexual predator David Daniels as Didymus, and Richard Croft as Septimius.  And yet, I am not so sure about this production.

The first thing you'll notice about it is the way all the Roman officers are wearing these orange jumpsuits.  I think they're meant to be Air Force pilots, but they could be astronauts.  They could be racecar drivers.  Regardless, why are they supposed to be whatever they're supposed to be?  Extremely hard to say.  It's a modern-day production, obviously, and I think it's trying to say something about American authoritarianism.  It's certainly trying to say something about the barbarism of American capital punishment, as the leads are executed by lethal injection.  And then--seemingly neither here nor there--the characters keep making these weird, stylized gesticulations for reasons I can't even speculate at.  And Daniels and Croft both have name patches with their actual names (ie, "D. Daniels" and "R. Croft") on them.  Why?  It is a mystery.

Do I think that this is an appropriate place to vent your feelings about capital punishment in the US?  Not so much!  I mean, if this were Dead Man Walking, then okay; you know what you signed up for.  But a Handel oratorio?  Come on.  But, you know, while that part's clear enough, I really don't know what else Sellars was going for.  I doubt he was trying for some kind of right-wing persecution fantasy about Christians in America today, but that's something that unavoidably presents itself as a possibility.  So, you can sort of understand bits and pieces, but there's so much here that's bizarre, ham-handed, and nonsensical that unless he was specifically going for "inscrutable gibberish" I think he failed in whatever his goal was.

Someone uploaded this to youtube, so at least it was free, but there's actually another production of it which I probably would have liked more.

Carl Maria von Weber, Euryanthe (1823)

A huge influence on Wagner, this, apparently.  Come to think of it, it was probably one of the more prominent operas I hadn't seen, so there you go (now, the most prominent ones are probably lesser-known Verdi works--I shall get on that in the near future, maybe probably).

So...right.  There's this count, Adolar, who is engaged to Euryanthe, and he goes on for a while about how great she is.  But this other count, Lysiart, is like, pah, no woman is faithful.  So he makes a bet with Adolar that he can successfully seduce her (hoo boy).  Adolar has a tragedy in his past: his sister Emma killed herself by taking poison from a ring after her lover was killed in battle.  Euryanthe confides this to her supposed friend Eglantine--but Eglantine is secretly in love with Adolar and wants to use the secret against her.  Lysiart realizes, dangit, I can't seduce Euryanthe after all; she's too faithful.  But teaming up with Eglantine, he gets ahold of the fatal ring and shows it to Adolar as proof of his fiancée's infidelity (???).  This leads to everyone condemning her.  Adolar takes her out into the forest, where plans to kill her.  But then a serpent appears and she's like "no! I will sacrifice my life to this serpent to save you!"  And after that, he can't bring himself to kill her, so he just leaves her there, where she's found by the king and some hunters, who, hearing and believing her story, take her back to see Adolar again.  Back at the castle, Lysiart and Eglantine are going to be married.  Adolar is there too, and to punish him, the king tells him that Euryanthe is dead.  Eglantine is like, whoo!  Victory! and reveals the plot.  Lysiart murders her, and Lysiart is presumably going to be executed.  Euryanthe comes in and is joyfully reunited with Adolar.

Hmm.  Yes.  Indeed.  The wikipedia claims that this "is rarely staged because of the weak libretto."  There's no citation for this claim, but the libretto is indeed dogshit dumb: how is the ring meant to be evidence of Euryanthe's betrayal?  Why doesn't she just tell how Lysiart got it from the start, since she clearly knows, and avoid all this trouble?  What's this idiocy with the snake?  Why do the people, after having instantly condemned Euryanthe, then just instantly forgive her?  It's a real mixture of the nonsensical and dumb.

But you know, none of that really bothers me much.  Credulity-stretching libretti are common, and even with an egregious example like this, you can generally just roll with it.  The more pressing problem here is that Adolar is a reeeeeal piece of shit.  Betting on the fidelity of your lover is never good form, be it here or in Così fan tutte, but I'd have to call this significantly worse than Così in that regard.  I mean, the guys there behave extremely badly, but really, they're just dumbass kids, and anyway, isn't the whole point of comedy (in the Dantean sense) that we're redeemed even though we don't deserve it?  But here, man alive: Euryanthe should absolutely leave him, not as a matter of punishment but of simple self-preservation: this is a man who has demonstrated himself willing to believe accusations against you on incredibly flimsy evidence, and then he will murder you.  It doesn't get much more straightforward than that!  Sure, he gets a very mild slap on the wrist in the form of thinking she was dead for a few minutes, but considering that he'd previously been willing to make her dead...that ain't much.  Also, the whole chorus of men self-righteously condemning her is pretty sickening.  We're supposed to be on her side, of course, but only because we know she's innocent.  If she actually HAD slept with Lysiart...presumably all this would be okay.  BAH, I say!  It's too bad, because there really is dramatic potential here.  Lysiart and Eglantine are effective villains.  But of course, the real villain is Adolar, and the REAL real villain is The Patriarchy.  The problem is, Weber doesn't know this.

It's a shame, because musically, this really kicks ass.  Love that early German romanticism, and I also appreciate that this isn't a Singspiel like Der Freischütz; it is sung throughout.  There was recently a performance on Operavision, but I went with this Fisher Center version.  They've always done well by their material, and they do here also, with a handsome period production.  Probably about the best version you could hope for of a problematic opera.  There is one weird thing that I got hung up on, though: during the overture, we see a tableau of Emma getting the news of her lover's death and killing herself--only she does it by slitting her wrists, even though the poison ring is very explicitly how it's supposed to have happened.  Dunno what the deal is there.  Also, the serpent is visualized as a mass of roots from a tree hanging down onto the stage, and Adolar whacking at with his knife looks pretty goofy.  But ASIDE FROM THAT!  I really like this German romanticism.  It's too bad that Weber's operas other operas are rarely performed.

Gian Carlo Menotti, The Medium (1945) and The Telephone (1947)

Two short operas.  The latter debuted on a double bill with the former, so let's watch them together, shall we?

The Medium concerns a woman, Madame Flora, who, with her daughter Monica and mute servant Toby, makes an unsavory living tricking bereaved parents into thinking they're communicating with their dead children.  She's very cynical about this, but then, as a seance is ending, she thinks she feels some sort of phantom hand grabbing her and freaks out.  Was this Toby's doing?  Or was it something actually supernatural?  She decides she's not going to run her scam anymore, but the people refuse to believe she was faking it.  In the end, becoming ever-more unglued, she accidentally shoots Toby.  That is that.

There are some really good musical moments highlights here, notably Monica's waltz and "The Black Swan," the lullaby that she sings to her mother.  Furthermore, it is, at any rate, a fairly novel plot: I'm sure it's been done elsewhere, but "charlatan has existential crisis" is an interesting idea.  I have to admit, though, I didn't find it all that dramatically compelling.  I watched this old CBS production, of the same vintage as that Saint of Bleecker Street but of significantly better quality, though the lack of subtitles remains an issue.

The Telephone is a comedy.  Ben is going on a trip; before he leaves, he wants to tell Lucy that he loves her and to propose, but goshdarnit, she keeps getting phone calls and he can't tell her and time is getting short before he has to leave and this dang ol' telephone is going to doom his efforts!  It seems, for a while, that it might be a sort of dyspeptic thing about how technology ruins everything, but in the end he hits on the expedient of calling her himself, and that works out.  So it turns out to be good-natured, which improved my impression of it a lot.

Of course, if Menotti thinks regular ol' telephones are bad, how would he react to smartphones?  Well... this production very effectively updates the action to the present day.  There are popup text messages on the screen and everything.  Granted, you do have to suspend your disbelief and disregard the fact that young people today simply don't make phone calls period, but otherwise, it works remarkably well.  Extremely cleverly done--and filmed (safely, they claim) during COVID, too, so that's kind of heartening.

Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Simplicius Simplicissimus (1935)

This DVD has an average score of two and a half stars on amazon.  The most extensive review gives it five stars and opens by proclaiming that "I guarantee you won't enjoy this opera."  Well...forewarned is forearmed, I guess.  Anyway, I really truly cannot resist a challenge like that.

Right, so Simplicius Simplicissimus is a picaresque seventeenth-century novel treating of the horrors of the Thirty Years' War, which had recently devastated Germany.  The opera version repeatedly claims that in 1618, twelve million people lived in Germany; in 1648, it was down to four million.  As far as I can tell that seems like a bit of an exaggeration, but it's horrifying either way.  It's not a numbers game.  Hartmann, a committed anti-fascist composing as the nazis were rising to power, clearly had other things on this mind.  He couldn't have known quite how bad things were going to get, but I suspect he had inklings, and if he doesn't make specific comments on current events, the implications are clear.  Clear enough that--unsurprisingly--the opera wasn't actually performed until 1948.

It's a five-hundred-page novel, and this is an eighty-minute opera, so without having read the former, it's pretty clear that it's a rather skeletal version thereof.  As it opens, Simplicius is working for a farmer, singing to keep the wolves away, until some knights come around and slaughter all the peasants, as recounted by the chorus in gruesome detail.  Next, Simplicius comes across a hermit who agrees to let him stay with him and teaches him about right behavior.  When the hermit dies a few years later, he's taken to the local governor, who is amused by his constant, naive truth-telling and takes him on as jester.  Simplicius recounts a vision of a tree of life with the nobles at the top and the commoners down below supporting them.  I don't know if this is in the original novel; it sounds suspiciously like that old (and accurate) socialist poster:

At any rate, peasants storm the palace and kill everyone except Simplicius, whom they hold in too much contempt to even murder.  And that is that.  This production presents this all in a theater-of-alienation sort of way, with everything very abstract and modernist, characters in shabby modern-day dress, &c.  That seems perfect to me--the way this material demands to be presented.

So what did I think of it?  Well...I enjoyed it.  Quite a lot, actually.  It's a work of art of great merit.  Suck it, amazon reviewer!  Though actually, I suppose this is just a matter of semantics.  People--myself included, I'm sure--often do the thing where we feel like if a text is upsetting or unpleasant enough, it's wrong to say that we "enjoy" it.  The parameters of "enjoy" are very unclear.  Are we supposed to not enjoy anything sad/grim/depressing?  Only things based on real events?  Things that hit a little too close to home?  Well, these days, my feeling is that if you find something in some way edifying or artistically fulfilling or whatever...you enjoyed it.  I would hasten to add that in this taxonomy, enjoyment is not synonymous with "fun."  You can enjoy extremely unfun works.

And I liked this!  I wouldn't use the word "fun," exactly but...I mean, I've seen grimmer.  Wozzeck, Lulu, Die Soldaten, certainly, just thinking of musically similar works.  It's a dark piece, for sure, but not exactly hopeless.  The middle section here with the hermit is actually unironically sweet.  The music is some variety of serialism; maybe I'm just getting better at appreciating this sort of thing, but I thought it ruled.  Frequently very exciting and occasionally even beautiful.  And Claudia Mahnke there is quite brilliant in the title role (yes, a trouser role), ably embodying the character's naivete and feeling of lostness.

Really, I don't think this is that hard to like.  I don't know what you amazon people are on about.  Well, maybe I'm just a maniac.  But things like this elevate us, and I am grateful to be able to experience them.

John Adams, El Niño (2000)

Still technically Christmas, so this nativity opera is relevant!  Well, maybe.  It's actually not notably Christmasy.  Whevs.  But you know what's really exciting?  I'm pretty sure this is my first opera with a tilde in the title.  What a landmark!

Wikipedia calls this an "opera-oratorio," which sounds about right.  It's broadly about the birth of Christ and events surrounding it, but it doesn't really have a plot, per se.  It consists of various loosely-related texts set to music--some of them in Spanish, hence the title.  Don't expect a narrative, and certainly, don't expect the production to help in that regard--it's by Peter Sellars (who also wrote parts of the libretto), whose work tends to be on the inscrutable side--lots of abstract video footage and whatnot.  And so do Adams' operas, come to think of it, at least in part.  Certainly Doctor Atomic and The Death of Klinghoffer.  And ARGH, every time I think of Klinghoffer I think of the Met caving to the gibbering idiot hordes who were enraged about the planned HD performance.  FUCK those troglodytes.  ARGH.

Well, that's neither here nor there.  I would prefer my operas to have a bit more plot, but I really can't argue with the music here.  It's pretty rad, especially (for whatever reason) in the first act, and it kind of makes me want to revisit Adams' other works--it sounds goofy to say this, but I saw them kind of early in in my journey, and I feel like I've gotten better at watching opera since then.  So that's something to think about.

Gian Carlo Menotti, The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954)

Just recently, the indefatigable Gian Carlo Menotti Archive youtube channel uploaded the NBC Opera Theatre production of this, so I finally had a chance to see it.  Nice!  Can you believe that there was an NBC Opera Theatre?  I feel like back in the day, there was the sense that television ought to be providing viewers with some amount of "highbrow" culture.  It's hard to imagine such a thing today.  These days you'll only see operas on public television, and they certainly don't produce them themselves.  I know people grousing about how the world was better in THEIR day (or well before their day) generally falls prey to the golden age fallacy, but I think there might be something to this one.

Anyway!  There's a woman, Annina--she lives on Bleecker Street, amazingly enough--who's having visions and apparently suffering from stigmata.  As such, the neighborhood people have decided she's a saint and that she has healing powers, in spite of her brother Michele's disapproval of all this nonsense.  She wants to take religious orders; he doesn't want her to.  He also doesn't want her to go to this religious feast, but the mob ties him to a fence and takes her there against his will.  That's the first act.  Some months later, there's a wedding reception for Annina's friend Carmela.  Michele's secret girlfriend Desideria shows up, "secret" for reasons that aren't specified, but it's probably safe to infer that everyone thinks she's a Loose Woman and not respectable.  That's usually how that goes.  He causes a fight when he tries to bring her in, and shouts at the other guests about how they're denying their Italian heritage (?).  Desideria gets jealous and accuses Michele of being in love with his sister, so he stabs her.  As one does.  In the final act, Annina is dying.  She receives word that she's been approved to become a nun.  Michele, now on the run, shows up to try to stop her, but she does the ceremony and dies.  And that is about that.

It's definitely worth emphasizing that the quality of this recording is, predictable, REALLY dodgy, in both sound and picture, and without subtitles, there are parts that are just impossible to understand (also, it includes an announcement between acts two and three that German ambassador Heinz Krekeler will meet the press tonight, so look forward to that).  I have no idea where the GCM Archive dug it up; I'm glad they did, but hey, it's about what you'd expect.  I'm not complaining, but it seems inevitable that my judgment will be affected.  

Maybe?  Maybe not?  I don't know.  But actually, I'd say that while I basically liked the music, the real problem here is a weak libretto--and I think that would be position even if it were one hundred percent comprehensible.  This won the Pulitzer Prize, I would guess because it was dealing with, like, heavy issues of faith and such.  But does it really, in any useful way?  We really get very little idea of Annina's mindset, and there's certainly no conflict between faith and rationality, in spite of the brother's presence.  It's no Dialogues des Carmélites.  Then, the way the second act veers off into being about Italianness--that's whiplash-inducing and doesn't fit in comfortably with anything else, and don't get me started on the murder--sure, that kind of thing is SOP for operas, but it feels like Desideria was JUST introduced so she could die, and there's very little that would seem to motivate her killing.  It just feels like it was included because, well, things like this happen in operas rather than from any plot-based consideration.

I dunno.  Again, I do have to admit that had I seen a better production of this, everything might snap into focus and the libretto wouldn't even bother me.  But for now, I'd say that while I still like Menotti, on the whole this is much weaker than The Consul, and I can easily see why it's less commonly performed.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Lucio Silla (1773)

I thought this was Mozart's last opera before the standard-repertoire ones, but no: La finta giardiniera comes after.  I will have to see that one, and no mistake.  But who cares?  I know that Mozart was talented from the first.

This is set in ancient Rome.  An opera seria in Roman times?  What a concept!  Cecilio wants to marry Giunia, but is believed to be dead.  Lucio deceived her into thinking so because he wants to marry her, which she is extremely not down with.  There's also Lucio's sister Celia who is in love with Cecilio's friend Cinna.  When Cecilio reappears, he's going to be put to death, but ultimately, Lucio shows mercy, as opera seria rulers tend to do.  Everyone praises him and is happy.  

If this sounds like familiar territory, well, it is: the librettist, Giovanni de Gamerra, was advised by Metastasio himself.  It's definitely less psychologically penetrating than you'd get from something actually written by Metastasio: you really get very little insight into Lucio, such that the ending feels a little abrupt.  It's not the world's strongest libretto.

But what it is, is Mozart.  As I've noted before, I have trouble saying <i>why</i> some music is better than other, similar music.  Okay, sure, Mozart got better, but if I had to write an essay explaining why this isn't as good musically as La clemenza di Tito, I would have no idea where to start.  "The tootling sounds in Lucio Silla aren't as melodious."  Yeah, I think I'd get an F on that essay.  Regardless, there's some astoundingly great music here.  I basically loved it.

So the cast is very good, with Annick Massis really standing out as Giunia; that's no problem.  I do have issue with the production, however.  AND HOW.  Firstly, it's really distractingly busy, with a bunch of random silent people sort of milling around and doing stuff in the background for reasons that aren't always clear.  Still, you get used to that.  The REAL issue doesn't come to the forefront until the end: after Lucio does his forgiveness thing, while the chorus is praising him, his flunky Aufidio assassinates him.  There was stuff earlier on with him torturing prisoners--it wasn't especially well-done, but it was obvious what they were trying to do.  Yup.  Here we see the difference between Eurotrash and Regietheatre: you can change the setting of an opera, even to something weird, while remaining true to the spirit of the thing.  Such is my belief.  But when you're cutting against the intentions of the opera...that's where I have to draw the line.  You would never, ever see an ending like this in an opera seria.  The purpose of the production is to focus on what they see as justice, but justice is not the PURPOSE of these plots; mercy is.  How about a version of Nozze di Figaro where Almaviva gets murdered in the end?  Would that be to your liking?  Who the hell are YOU to think you know best?  

Who indeed: what really rankles is how damn self-satisfied the DVD notes are about this.  It's pretty much all they're about.  They say that the opera "was to be a tribute to the ruler and authority who exercises mercy, an entertaining opera seria that obeyed the conventions of the age."  Okay.  Next sentence "This was far too little for a director like Jürgen Flimm."  Well THANK FUCK we have a genius like Jürgen Flimm!  SOMEBODY needed to set Mozart, and indeed the entire baroque era, straight!  The oblivious arrogance is really something.  "If the original librettist...had said this ["Punish the tyrant! Restore justice to the stage!"] he would have ended up on the scaffold."  I don't know if that's true or not, but regardless, are you suggesting that he would have liked to do such a thing, if he could have?  Because THAT'S definitely not true.  Given their unwillingness to accept and/or inability to understand the eighteenth-century mindset, I frankly do not think ol' Jürgen Flimm was in any way qualified to produce this thing.  

Still, the fact is, Flimm's production isn't effective enough to be really distracting: you can easily see through it to the quality opera beneath, and the stabbing at the end just causes an exasperated eye-roll.  For all that Jürgen Flimm tries to inflict on him, Mozart emerges largely unscathed.