Luigi Rossi, Il palazzo incantato (1642)

After seeing Rossi's Orfeo, I looked him up and saw that he'd written another opera, but I thought, man, it's hopeless.  It's not available, it will never be available, all is darkness and despair. But!  With Operavision, all things are possible.  I should've had faith.  That's on me.  According to Operavision, this is the first time it's been performed since it's debut, which definitely make it the biggest gap in my operatic experience.

So first, we have a short prologue where allegorical representations of music, painting, poetry, and magic bicker over the upcoming opera (metatextual!).  Then, the opera proper starts, and...well.  Okay.  So this is based on an episode of Orlando Furioso in which Ruggiero is taken captive by a sorcerer named Atlante, who has foreseen that he's going to become a Christian and help to defeat the Saracens and then die, and to stop these things from happening, takes him prisoner in his, well, enchanted palace, until his betrothed Bradamante rescues him.  So...putatively.  But, as you know, these operas based on Italian epics are pretty loose with the source material, so here we have a whole bunch of other characters just thrown in higglety-pigglety.  The opera presupposes a degree of familiarity with the source material that, I don't know, maybe a half dozen Italian literature professors would have?  I've read it and reread most of it, so I've gotta be in a pretty high percentile as far as Ariosto-knowing goes, and it was difficult going for me.  Beyond the three aforementioned characters, here are some personages herein: Orlando, Angelica, Marfisa, Doralice, Sacripante, Gradasso, Astolfo, Mandricardo, Ferrau, Alceste, Iroldo, Fiordiligi, Prasildo, Olympia.  The libretto also includes references to characters who don't appear: Brandimarte, Melissa, Rodomonte, and characters go on about other events in the poem that have minimal bearing on the current story.  It's pretty intense.  And, I should emphasize, most of these people are just here.  We don't know why they are or what they want; they're just...here.  Extremely shambolic libretti are a common feature of seventeenth-century opera: see Rossi's Orfeo or any ol' thing by Cavalli.  But this may be the ultimate example of that.

I'm sort of of two minds about the production here, but not for the normal reasons.  It's a modern-dress thing, which...fine.  But that's not really the main point.  You could go one of two ways with this: you could either decide "okay, this opera is kind of confusing, so we should give it the most 'normal' production we can so as not to compound that.  Alternatively, you could decide, "this opera is kind of confusing, so we should have a production that play into that and compounds it."  The producers here went with the latter option.  This basically takes place in a hotel, except when it's in a prison or a hospital or an airport departure lounge.  Also, the action's always being filmed by a cameraperson, and projected onto a screen above the stage (actually, I'm not sure if it's his actual footage that's being projected in real time, but that's certainly the intended impression).  It all comes together to create a very labyrinthine construct.  They accomplished what they were trying to do, for sure.  It works.  I'm just not convinced it's what you want, however.  At two hundred fifteen minutes, this is a longish opera, and although I think Rossi's music is fantastic (lots of flowing arioso--Ariosto arioso), it does sometimes get a little boring in the back half.  Like any work of art, an opera needs some kind of dramatic stakes, and when those are lacking, the whole suffers.  It's possible that no production would adequately deal with this--it's jut baked in to the opera--but I'm not convinced this one does it any favors.

Regardless, not as good as Orfeo, but still in my estimation an enjoyable piece, and it rules that it's finally been rediscovered.

Friedrich von Flotow, Martha, oder Der Markt zu Richmond (1847)

Here's another one from M T.  Flotow was a prolific composer, but for whatever reason--who can fathom these twists of fate?--this is his only enduring work, and not even all that enduring these days.  But guess what?  I saw it anyway, through this German TV version from 1978!  I'm a madman!

So there's Harriet, a lady-in-waiting to the queen, who's sick of court life.  So she goes out to visit a local fair along with her attendant, Nancy.  At this fair, various women are auctioning off their services as servants, so for a lark, the two of them allow themselves to be hired by a coupla farmers, Plunkett and his foster brother Lyonel (using the fake names Martha and Julia).  But now they're sort of stuck, because the law sez that when you hire yourself out, it has to be for a full year, even though they turn out to be bad at the stuff they've nominally been hired for.  Nonetheless, the farmers fall for the girls, and they're sad when they sneak back off to the castle.  Later, Lyonel stumbles upon Harriet again, and tries to enforce his contract, but everyone decides he's crazy and that he should be locked up.  But! He has a special ring given to him by his father that he's supposed to show the queen if he's in trouble.  So he does this, and it turns out he's the son of an unjustly banished nobleman, and really, if you have any experience with this stuff, you would've guessed this plot twist or something like it as soon as I wrote "foster-brother."  Anyway, both couples get together, hurrah!

If you search for "flotow martha" on amazon, you will receive the suggestion to look for "flotow martha dvd."  But alas, your hopes will be dashed if you do this, as there is no such beast.  But there should be!  Because this is huge fun: very spritely, Donizetti-esque comic music.  I can't imagine you wouldn't like it.  The quality here is not the greatest, but better than The Snow Maiden.  This is a side of nineteenth-century German opera I'd never seen before.  Check it out.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, The Snow Maiden (1882)

I don't know how I'd missed this for so long, but I just came across a youtube channel by a character known only as M T (is this star Angels center fielder Mike Trout?  I don't know who ELSE it could be), which is entirely focused on uploading videos of operas with custom subtitles.  Some of these are commonly-performed works that you can see any ol' place, but there are also some great rarities that I don't think have ever been available with English subs, including--most excitingly to me--this one.  I love me some Rimsky-Korsakov, as you know.

So the Snow Maiden, Snegurochka, is the daughter of Spring and Winter.  She wants to go live with people, so her parents let her go to a nearby village.  She's mesmerized by this singer, Lel, but he goes away.  A woman named Kupava is going to marry a guy named Mizgir, but Mizgir, on seeing Snegurochka, becomes smitten with her and abandons his fiancée, even though she's expressed no interest.  This makes Kupava mad, so she goes to the Tsar for redress.  Is this something you go to the Tsar for?  Apparently.  The Tsar has his problems: the weather has been getting colder over the past few years, and he doesn't know what to do about it.  He listens to Kupava's plaints, and asks Snegurochka who she loves.  She says she loves no one (Lel not having counted, apparently), so the Tsar announces that whoever can win her heart gets a prize.  There seems to be some inchoate idea that this will make the weather better.  Lel and Kupava get together, and Snegurochka decides she's going to love Mizgir after all.  Unfortunately or perhaps fortunately, this causes the Sun to come out, which causes her to melt away.  Mizgir is so disconsolate that he drowns himself.  That's a bit of a bummer, but the people sing a hymn in praise of the Sun god nonetheless.

The libretto is...a little confused, I feel.  The thing that irks me most is Mizgir, who comes across to me as kind of a douchebag in away that I don't think was intentional.  This was NRK's favorite among his own operas; I wouldn't say it's mine (The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, probably) although it IS probably at a disadvantage due to somewhat suboptimal audio and video quality (and there is absolutely no information about when or where it was performed or who's in it or anything).  Still, not too bad!  Some rousing folk dances, as he have come to expect.

It would be really ungrateful to be overly critical of M T's work here.  They're taking what must be quite a lot of time and effort to do this, all for free.  But just as a factual matter, I do have to note that the subtitles provided are a bit difficult to process.  Look at this:

GAH!  How am I meant to process this?!?  To be fair, most of them aren't quite like that--they're usually not more than two lines--but still.  You can get a general idea of what's going on, but you're never quite sure you know exactly what a given line is saying.  I will watch more from this channel, but only the rarities: if there's another way to watch an opera, with less brain-breaking subtitles, I would go with that.

Hey, guess what, M T didn't just do the full-length opera--they also did this 1952 Soviet animated version--a fascinating cultural product for sure, and one I had to watch.  In spite of being severely abridged--slightly less than half the length of the full production--it does indeed tell the whole story, complete with the tragic ending--no punches pulled, as in Disney's Little Mermaid, the original of which ends similarly, as seen in Dvořák's Rusalka, which is also based thereon.  Did this traumatize any fifties Soviet kids?  Or is it even MEANT for kids?  Who can say.  It's a good chance to listen to some more NRK music, which is fine, but the product as a whole isn't exactly what you'd call...good, even if you don't mind that there's a lot of spoken dialogue (and Lel in particular is really weird: it's a trouser role, but his spoken voice is male, only for him to suddenly become a mezzo when he starts singing).  The animation and art style in general is pretty bad.  Here, I unfairly chose the most bugly image I could find:

Egads!  But to be fairer, the characters aren't generally quite that bad, and when we just have scenery, it actually looks pretty okay:

I'd love to know more context about this thing: how and why it was produced, how it was received...interesting, at any rate.

Antonio Vivaldi, L'incoronazione di Dario (1717)

Poppea or Dario!  Who will win?!?  Back when the virus was just starting to be a thing, I made a joke on one of my opera facebook groups about having contracted incoronazionevirus, which I sort of regret--it's not the world's most offensive thing, but eh.  A bit tasteless.

The plot's a zany kind of thing.  So the king is dead, and whoever marries his older daughter Statira will become the new king.  Dario wants to marry her, but so do do Oronte, a general; and Arpago, some other guy.  Who will win?!?  I feel like there might be spoilers in the title.  The thing about Statira is, shes really dumb.  A lot if made of this in the libretto.  Her younger sister Argene is smart, but also scheming and amoral.  She also wants to marry Dario and rule with him, and she is happy to use guile and possibly violence to get what she wants.  There are also other characters: the princesses' maidservant Flora; the villainous servant Niceno; and Alinda, Arpago's former lover by him spurned.  So we go round and round for a while, until finally Dario's going to marry Statira, Arpago's going to get back with Alinda, and Argene is imprisoned.  That's actually more punishment than the villain (anti-hero?) would get in a lot of baroque operas.  

It's highly amusing, and you can see the willingness to mix comedy and drama, which you saw in earlier seventeenth-century pieces but which went out of style when opera seria of the sort with libretti  by Metastasio became the big thing.  As much as I like opera seria, I have to admit that this is a more purely fun approach.  This legit has a few laugh-out-loud moments, mainly involving the two sisters.  The production is a very delightful thing, set in a contemporary Middle Eastern petrostate.  It's a sort of thing that sets off warning bells: is this going to be some sort of awful Regietheatre comment on contemporary geopolitics?  But no, nothing like that; there's no discernible political message here.  It's just a fun, clever production, and I realize that the way I've been using "Eurotrash" isn't as helpful as one might've hoped.  I was wrong; it's NOT just any production set in a different setting.  It's probably closer to just "Regietheatre," but I persist in believing that there's a distinction: both of them involving often-transgressive elements alien to the original opera, but I tend to think of the latter as having more of an actual political message.  Eurotrash can, in theory, work: that production I saw of The Tale of Tsar Saltan where it's all stories being told to an autistic teenager worked brilliantly until it didn't, and there was no need for the point where it didn't to ever come.  Whereas I don't think I'll ever appreciate a work of Regietheatre.

But anyway, that's neither here nor there.  L'incoronazione di Dario is an unending delight, and I recommend it.

Jake Heggie, Three Decembers (2008)

The biggest loss to me from the Met's cancelled Live in HD series this year was Heggie's Dead Man Walking.  His Moby-Dick was very good, and Dead Man is universally acclaimed, so I was really looking forward to it.  And just as a matter of general principle, I think they should put on more contemporary operas.  Well, at least I have THIS, available this weekend (so...probably not anymore by the time this goes up) from Florida Grand Opera.  It was actually supposed to be a few weeks ago, and I was irked that I hadn't gotten a link, so I sent them an email asking, and in response, I received an actual factual telephone call from a really friendly dude from FGO explaining that there was a delay, which he thought had to do with the need to prepare subtitles.  That was a new one on me.  But it is neither here nor there.

It's based on an unperformed play by Terrence McNally, and it definitely has the feel of a certain sort of play.  The Decembers in question are at ten year intervals, starting in 1986.  The characters are a brother and sister, Charlie, and Bea, and their stage-actor mother Madeline.  The siblings want to learn more about their father, who died when they were small.  The main source of friction concerns Charlie's partner, Burt, who has AIDS, and while Madeline isn't exactly overtly homophobic, she's not all she could be either.  The 1996 section starts soon after Burt's death, as the kids are expected to go to an awards show with their mother, and the 2006 one at a memorial for her following her sudden passing.  There's drama, high emotion, secrets revealed--you know the story.  Still, even if it's a familiar type, I really got into it, to the extent that I sorta wanted the instrumental parts to go faster so I could see what would happen next. 

Is that a good thing for an opera?  Well, maybe not, but I really enjoyed this in any event.  As indicated, I have to admit that I paid less attention to the music than appropriate, but that's neither here nor there.  The three singers--Amanda Sheriff, Efrain Solís, and Emily Pulley--act the hell out of their parts, and a good time was had by all.  Although "all" may be much: it was made available as an unlisted video, which, as of this writing, has all of...seven views.  Is that normal?  Was this really only purchased by seven people?  That ain't right.  It should be seen far and wide!

Kaija Saariaho, Only the Sound Remains (2015)

Another piece by the composer of L'Amour de loin, which I more or less liked.  What really made me want to see this one, however, was the fact that it was written with parts specifically for Philippe Jaroussky, a countertenor of some note.

"Two Noh Plays," the back of the box informs us.  Well, based on Noh plays, at any rate, as translated by Ezra Pound, it seems.  Both of them have very simply plots, as, I suppose, fits the stylized nature of the source material.  I don't know anything about Noh theater.  Forgive me!  "Always Strong" concerns a priest praying for a dead soldier.  His spirit appears.  For some reason, they make out a bit.  Okay.  That's about it.  "Feather Mantle" concerns a guy who finds a mantle.  Turns out, it belongs to an angel, who needs it to do angel-related activities.  The guy doesn't want to return it, but then he does.

The music is, well, like L'Amour de loin, more or less.  Shimmery.  Not my all-time favorite thing, but perfectly palatable.  The production is by--whee--Peter Sellars, but hey, if Saariaho wants to work with him, that is her prerogative.  And in truth, there's not a lot to say here.  The production feels almost aggressively unprovocative: we basically just have a curtain in the background with marks on it that might be some sort of writing.  Could be the back of a cave.  Or anything, really.  The figures appear in front of it, their shadows playing a big part in the action.  And that is that.

But the question is, did I like it?  Well...I DID like Jaroussky's singing!  But to be honest, I found the whole a little boring.  I can see how, potentially, if I were in a different mood, how I might like it.  But I wasn't!  I was in the same mood!  So...you know.  I am sorry to say, it did not make much of an impression on me.

Giovanni Paisiello, Nina, o sia La pazza per amore (1789)

Dang, man, that DVD case looks gothy as hell.  This is supposed to be a comedy.  What is this?  Well, in point of fact, it's an extremely accurate reflection of the opera itself, which isn't quite like anything I've seen.

The story is nearly nonexistent: in the past, Nina was in love with this dude, Lindoro, but her father wanted her to marry someone else.  The two of them fought and Lindoro was killed, driving Nina insane.  After a truly excessive amount of Ophelia-like babbling, Lindoro turns up on the scene, not dead (and not even the most perfunctory explanation provided for this).  So, she stops being insane.  As you do.  People know about mad scenes in operas, but lesser-known is how surprisingly often people stop being mad on a dime when it's called for.

I mean, the music's good, but there isn't enough of it: there's a lot of spoken dialogue here, which made me realize: I'm not sure I've ever seen an Italian opera with spoken dialogue, or not more than the odd line or two.  Maybe I'm forgetting something obvious, but it's not common: you have German Singspiel, French opéra-comique, and any-language operetta.  But Italian?  Dunno.  So that's interesting, though I would rather have had more music.  And the story...yeesh.  I once read an eighteenth-century novel called The Man of Feeling, by Henry Mackenzie, which consists of a series of scenes meant to emotionally manipulate in the most shameless way possible.  It was not good.  "Lugubrious emotional pornography" is how I characterized it on goodreads, and I think that applies to this as well.  

It's bothersome the way the title character is infantilized, but if I'm being honest, I have to ask myself: why does this bother me in a way that, say, the extended mad scene in Lucia di Lammermoor doesn't?  I guess it's because Lucia seems to have more of a legit reason to lose her mind--I mean, in operatic terms, of course--and it doesn't feel so gratuitous.  There's this awareness through the whole thing that we're just being made to feel sad for her (at least in theory) so that she can be happy when her lover reemerges.  But I'm not having with it!

It's kind of crazy that it features both Cecilia Bartoli and Jonas Kaufmann.  You can definitely see why they're stars, but the material seems beneath them.  Bartoli hams up the madness in a way that's consistent with the libretto and sometimes amusing but frequently just really irritating.  I somehow expect more from Paisiello.

MNiatures (2021)

Right here for the next few weeks.  A set of four mini-operas from Minnesota opera.  MNi-operas.  Are they MNspired?  It's a MNteresting question.  Let's MNvestigate.

Asako Hirabayashi, Dear America, Beat Your Heart Defiantly, Naked and Open with Love

Well, there's no way you can call this an opera.  It's really a short song-cycle, as singer and librettist Rebecca Nichloson performs a series of short pieces accompanied by a cellist and Hirabayashi herself on piano and harpsichord.  That's not a criticism by any means.  The music is very arresting, and Nichloson has a resonant voice.  The subject matter is the typical sort of The Way We Live Now stuff we're seeing so much of this year.

Chim Lạc (Lost Bird)

A short story about a young Vietnamese-American woman whose grandmother has just died, who, through magical realism, gets to delve into her cultural heritage and learn things about her family she never know (my policy of only identifying operas by composer is very stupid in a case like this, as the librettist, Oanh Vu, is indeed Vietnamese-American and really just as important).  Very visually distinctive, with the characters in silhouette accompanied by paper cut backgrounds.  I've never seen anything quite like it.  Very lush, jazzy music.  A definite winner.

Ritika Ganguly, Xylem

Boy, hard to say what THIS one is about.  There's a brief intro where the composer and director talk about it, but that's not much help.  It's about a magic tree, apparently, that has the power to realize its desires through its roots.  "She's basically a bored tree," Ganguly helpfully clarifies.  The thing itself consists of people on stage playing and singing, interspersed with some crazy cut-out animation and singing in...I'm embarrassed that I don't know what language, but I would guess Hindi if I had to.  Really, though, it doesn't matter if it doesn't make sense, because it's really exciting and artistically rich.

Khary Jackson, Don't Tread on Me: A Century of Racism

Three brief vignettes about the African-American experience at fifty-year intervals, in 1920, 1970, and 2020.  The first is about a World War I veteran back home and forced to deal with the habitual casual indignities of institutional racism.  The second is about a woman just come home from her first day of work as manager (of something; hard to say).  And the final has a guy reading headlines about the (real) instances of white people calling the cops on blacks for no reason.  I liked the second one best, by a wide margin; there's this ebullient sense of promise, like sure there's racism and sure it sucks but we've got in and we're moving on up.  Very optimistic.  Justifiably?  Well...stay tuned, I guess.  The other two segments felt under-developed to me.  A huge theme like this might need more space to stretch out.

I'm impressed, I must say.  The quality level of these four pieces is consistently high.  If they ever want to do more MNiatures, I will definitely be along for the ride.

Gian Carlo Menotti, Martin's Lie (1964)

This is a one-act church opera.  Pretty simply plot: it's Medieval Times.™  There's a church orphanage where Martin and other kids live.  One night, Martin's assigned to sleep in the kitchen to keep the rats away.  A stranger appears, demanding to be hidden, because he's a heretic who worshipped in the wrong way and he's gonna be executed.  After some debate, Martin agrees.  The inquisitors show up.  They demand that the heretic be given to them.  Martin insists that he's not there.  They threaten to torture him if he doesn't talk.  BLARGH, he spontaneously dies.  The end.

Seriously, foax, I'm on record as being a fan of Menotti, but this is just embarrassing.  Just SUCH a mawkish story, lugubriously told.  Did they actually threaten to torture random kids suspected of hiding heretics?  Conceivably, but it seems more likely that this is just playing into our prejudices, and what is even the message here?  "It's good to help persecuted people?"  "It's bad to torture children?"  Hard-hitting stuff, for sure.  There's definitely some unintentional comedy, especially with him dying for no reason, but I don't think it justifies this thing's existence.  That this is rarely performed is not much of a surprise.

George Frederic Handel, Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (1707)

Okay.  This is an interesting thing.  This was the young Handel's first oratorio--and, I think, the only one in Italian, though it was revised multiple times, and a version in English was one of the last things he ever worked on (note: I just remembered that there's one other, La resurrezione).

The first thing you will note about this is: it is extremely not an opera.  Handel's oratorios that are performed as such generally have simpler plots than his operas proper, but they still have, you know...plots, such that staging them makes some dramatic sense.  This one, however, really isn't like that.  What's this about?  Well, it's pretty simple.  There are four allegorical figures: Beauty, who wants to stay young and beautiful forever but knows she won't; Pleasure, encouraging her to just think about, um, pleasure; and Time and Disillusion warning her that her existence is transient.

That's it.  So how the heck are you going to make that into a drama?  There's no setting, no action, and only "characters" in the loosest possible sense.  Anybody who wants to stage it is going to have to decide what these people are like, where it all takes place, and what exactly is happening.  I mean, come on; there has to be some action.  Any two different productions are going to be completely different things.

I can vouch for that because I saw two different productions: the first from 1916 at Le Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, and the second this 2020 version from Staatsoper Hanover.  In the first, we have Beauty as a girl whom we first see partying at a rave, when the guy she's dancing with has some sort of fatal drug overdose.  It takes place sort of at the club, sort of in a hospital room...hard to say.  Pleasure is a sleazy DJ/drug dealer, Time is an older guy who's possibly supposed to be the club owner, and Disillusion is his...wife and/or personal assistant.  In the second version, these are supposed to be four characters having four personal crises, sort of.  Beauty is a housewife thinking about her choices, Pleasure is a young woman with a breast cancer diagnosis, Time is a gender dysphoric man, and Disillusion is a, um, disillusioned writer.  

What these things have in common is: they have action with very little relation to the text that's really just impenetrably obscure.  I had no idea what was supposed to be happening in either.  The latter features text overlays introducing the characters and spoken-word interludes, but they don't really help.  The former production I found more interesting-looking, but I don't think either of them really worked.  If I were trying to dramatize this...well, I wouldn't, because I just don't think it's something that's likely to be productive.  But if I were, I wouldn't focus on concrete meaning.  I'd just include some arresting imagery and encourage people to think about the text's themes.  It's just distracting and pointless to try to graft the text onto a separate drama.

I dunno, man.  There are so many Handel operas that are rarely staged and unavailable on video, along with oratorios that would probably be a lot more appropriate than this as operas.  It seems like an act of perversity that this one somehow gets two separate dang productions.  I guess the openness to interpretation is appealing, but I have my doubts about the potential to create something really great out of it.    I'll watch anything by Handel, but while the music is of course good, I sort of feel like, if anything, the visuals just took away from it.  I'd just listen to this one.

Samuel Barber, Antony and Cleopatra (1966)

This was commissioned for the opening of the Met's new location in 1966.  It was not a critical success.  The production was considered overdone and vulgar (charges that the Met is certainly not always innocent of in my experience), and people were lukewarm about Barber's score--this was very disillusioning to him, and possibly why he never wrote another opera, though he did extensively revise its score.  I was able to see it via this Chicago Lyric Opera production from 1991.

I must admit, before seeing this I was totally unfamiliar with the Shakespeare play.  About all I knew about it was that it's the source of the phrase "salad days" (which, tragically, it not in the opera).  But the plot (of the opera, at least; I don't know whether it diverges from the source in any wise) is basically what you'd expect: Antony is carrying on with Cleopatra, but is called back to Rome, where he marries Octavius' sister to cement peace.  But he just cannot resist the Egyptian siren song, and soon he's back there with Cleo.  This leads to battle with Rome.  He's losing, and worst comes to worst when Cleopatra, to make sure of his love, decides to send word that she's killed herself.  This great idea backfires when he decides to kill himself in turn.  And what happens to Cleopatra?  Aren't you glad you asped?

I've gotta be honest with you: I thought this was pretty darned fantastic.  Beautiful music, and a lot of great set-pieces: the leads' death scenes, and also Caesar's lament at his former friend's demise.  The only criticism I could level at it, really, is that there's less actual material between the leads than you might expect, but it's no biggie.  Dunno if Barber's revisions actually made a difference, but in spite of not necessarily expecting much from this, I was greatly rewarded.  It's a fine tradition production, and Catherine Malfitano and Richard Cowan in the title roles are both very pretty with great stage presence.  This is a bootleg recording of a TV broadcast; it has subtitles and everything, and the fact that it's never officially been released is a shame and a puzzlement.  Three cheers for Barber!

Niccolò Jommelli, Il Vologeso (1766)

This is an extremely odd one, I must say.  On paper, it is the world's most normal opera seria: the Roman emperor, Lucio Vero, has defeated the Parthians, and the Armenian queen, Berenice, has been taken prisoner.  She's in love with the Parthian king, Vologeso, but he's dead, only it turns out he's not dead, duh.  But Lucio is also in love with her now in spite of having a fiancée, who he eventually goes back to and Vologeso is forgiven and he gets Berenice, hurrah.  I feel that I have seen this is the seventy-seventh opera seria I've seen with this exact plot.

And yet, it's...weirder than that would make you think.  The characters relationships are oddly tentative; it's not clear whether Vologeso and Berenice are really much of a couple.  She seems to be appreciative of Lucio's efforts at fliration.  And you wonder: is this actually going to end in the normal way?

Of course, it does, but the sincerity seems in doubt.  At the end of an opera like this, there will be a chorus in praise of the emperor's mercifulness and generosity.  This is known.  And there is a thing sort of like that here, only then it doesn't quite end.  The music meanders on for another few minutes before just petering to a halt.  It's impossible for me to imagine that a composer at the time would have been trying to deconstruct the opera seria as a genre, but damned if that's what it doesn't look like.  This production is as off-kilter as the opera itself.  You can, if you like, object to the very end where the singers are just sort of wandering around the stage, looking dispirited, changing back into their street clothes...but if so, I'd like to know what you think a more satisfying denouement would be, given the text and music that any producer has to work with.

The music is fine.  More classical than baroque, I thought.  I can't say I thought it was an all-time great, or anything; sure, I'd see more Jommelli if if were on offer, but I'm not gonna sit here and say that I'm exactly desperate for it.

Harrison Birtwistle, The Minotaur (2008)

I hated Birtwistle's Punch and Judy more than I knew I was capable of hating any opera, so naturally, I was keen to see more of his output--although I should note that I found this one posted online.  I wasn't keen enough that I would've been willing to pay full price for it.  Come ON.

So hey, you know that story?  The one about the Minotaur?  With Theseus?  And Ariadne?  Well, that's what this is, though obviously in a heavily deconstructed way.  Theseus and Ariadne negotiate.  The Athenian youths are slaughtered by the beast.  The Minotaur, Asterios, dreams.  And finally, he is killed by Theseus.  Spoiler!

Yes.  So actually, I thought this was fine.  Not my all-time favorite thing ever, but a lot better than I would have expected from precedent.  It probably helps that unlike that other one, this features some normal damn operatic singing.  The music is modernistic, atonal stuff; not my absolute cup of tea, but it worked with the atmosphere of the piece.  I liked the Minotaur scenes best; Theseus and Ariadne got a little...dull at times.  They reiterate bits of the myth to not super interesting effect ("Theseus and Ariadne will set sail for Athens," he promises, and the phrasing seems very obviously problematic.  We all know how that turned out from Ariadne auf Naxos).  But seriously, whether he's killing people (precipitating the appearance of some terrifying Keres) or agonizing over his split identity...it's really impressively bleak.  And his appearance is really ingeniously done: the singer, John Tomlinson, is wearing this sort of translucent bull head, so depending on how you happen to look at it, you may see it either as the beast or the man.  It could hardly work better.

Yeah, man.  I was concerned that this might turn out to be one of those perverse endurance tests, but it really wasn't.  I wouldn't call myself the world's number one Birtwistle fan (that...would be a weird thing to call yourself), but I would not object to seeing more of his work.  Regrettably, no more is currently available in recorded form.  But if it becomes so...I'll see it!  Whaddaya want from me?!?

Modulation (2021)

This is from the LA Opera; it was advertised on facebook as an interactive piece, which certainly made me raise an eyebrow. I was skeptical, but I definitely had to see it. And it's my first 2021 opera, if we want to call it an opera!

Well, okay, let's be serious: "interactive" is really pushing it, and in fact I have to laugh--hopefully not in a mean-spirited way--at their idea that this is some sort of groundbreaking thing. "The piece puts audience members in control," their press release reads, "allowing them to navigate through a landscape of new musical pieces exploring themes of isolation, identity, and fear." What this amount to in practice is a menu with three submenus, each featuring new-age-y images. Ambient music plays over them, and there are twelve short pieces, between four and six minutes each, that you can select from. This seems less "groundbreaking" and more "hypercard-based CD-ROM release from the nineties." That's okay; I actually found it kind of charming in its quaintness. But i wouldn't say it's exactly pushing any boundaries. Still, it is a bit rich to say that it "puts audience members in control:" sure, you can watch them in whatever order, but there's absolutely nothing that would make your "choices" anything other than totally arbitrary. Come on now.

Okay, but what are the individual pieces like? Well...in theory they're meant to be in some way about 2020, meaning a lot of stuff "about" COVID and BLM and whatnot, but all presented very obliquely, like the more obscure #OperaHarmony pieces--none of them even try to create any kind of narrative. There's one by Daniel Bernard Roumain--who wrote We Shall Not Be Moved, an opera I rather liked--but otherwise, I don't know any of the composers. And...I'm not overly impressed with most of their work, either. I suppose if I had to choose a favorite, I might go with Sahba Aminikia's "Ayene," which is apparently in some way about US/Iran relations (I say "apparently" because it's really not easy to discern, even if I like it)--sung in Farsi! Haunting music; good groove. Least favorite? It seems mean to single one out, but Paul Pinto's "Blanc," about racial relations and whiteness, just has this tremendously irritating slam poetry aesthetic that I can't stand.

In fairness, it's becoming clear that it's extremely difficult to create a really satisfying micro-opera; one that scratches the same itch as full-length pieces. But regardless, I can't say I'm overly impressed here. Access to it costs twenty-five dollars. I don't begrudge LA Opera the money; they do some good work and of course I believe in supporting the arts. But if I were thinking about it just in terms of Modulation itself, I'd have to say: definitely not worth it.  Say what you like about #OperaHarmony, but it featured a number of pieces better than anything here, and it was free.  So...you know.

Giovanni Paisiello, Il barbiere di Siviglia (1782)

Rossini's was not the first Barbiere!  But as with Guillaume Tell, he assimilated the subject matter and drove the original into obscurity, just like the Borg.  Is that like the Borg?  It's not, really.  I just used the word "assimilate."  That's hardly good enough.  But although this one isn't well-known today, it was very popular in its time.  Paisiello's wikipedia page claims he was the most popular opera composer of the late eighteenth century.  How the wheel turns.

Well, this has a completely different libretto from the later version, but it's the same story: Count Almaviva wants to marry Rosina, but her guardian Don Bartolo also wants to do this thing.  But with Figaro's help, everything is resolved happy and amusing fashion.  I think I'd have to see the two back to back to elucidate the specific differences between the two.  

Hey man, Paisiello was popular for a reason, and don't you forget it!  This is really good!  According to the DVD sleeve notes, some people were indignant when Rossini did his version, that this upstart would try to upstage Giovanni P.  He certainly became the dominant force in Barbiere operas, but is that merited?  Well...honestly, it's not clear to me which of the two is better.  They're both really good.  The only thing I didn't like in this production, at least, was this one scene where the music is punctuated by servants loudly yawning and sneezing in turn.  I found this tremendously annoying, but I don't know if it's part of the libretto.  I doubt it.  But IN ANY CASE, even if we stipulate that Rossini's is better, it's definitely not better enough that there should be eighteen thousand filmed productions of his version and only two of Paisiello's--though it's actually kind of surprising that it's that many; it's certainly more than many an obscure opera.

Seriously, he's one great music dude.  He wrote a shit-ton of operas, but only a tiny handful are available on disc.  It really is a shame that I can't get absolutely everything I want the instant I want it, but maybe if the rest of the world wakes up to the importance of this, there will be more in the future.

George Frideric Handel, Serse (1737)

I'd seen this before.  Of course I had!  But...only sort of, I feel like.  It was before I really got my head around baroque opera, so a lot of its artistry was kind of lost on me; plus, it was this Operavision version, sung in German; at the time, I was so clueless I didn't know that wasn't normal, but THE POINT IS, I wanted to see a more authentic production.  And this was the last thing on Medici that I wanted to see but hadn't, so I decided to squeeze it in right at the end.

When I first saw it, I found the plot totally impenetrable, but now it's much clearer.  Yes, some of the specific convolutions are a bit hard to follow, but the basic plot is extremely normal opera seria stuff.  Serse, or Xerxes, wants to marry Romilda, not knowing that she and his brother Arsamene are in love.  Romilda's sister Atalanta is all for this marriage, so that she can have Arsamene for herself.  And there's also Amastre, Serse's former fiancée who was spurned and now seeks revenge.  She's disguised as a man because sometimes in baroque opera, that's just what you gotta do.  In the end, Romilda gets Arsamene and Amastre gets Serse, and Atalanta determines that she'll find a new lover.  There are also comic elements, mainly centering around Arsamene's servant Elviro.  At the time, some people were very upset by this: you can't have comedy in your opera seria!  That would be like combining chocolate and peanut butter!  Blech!

Of course, this opera is most famous for "Ombra mai fu," Serse's hymn in praise of his favorite plane tree.  That actually comes right at the beginning of the opera, immediately after the overture.  It's a gorgeous tune for sure, and you'd think it would overshadow the opera, but nah.  The whole thing is as beautiful and great as you expect from Handel.  I have no complaints.

This 2000 production from Dresden is extremely fine.  It doesn't really call attention to itself; not that I don't often like productions that do, but this works well.  It's some sort of nineteenth-century Ottoman kind of thing.  The operavision production was kind of strenuously wacky, which is okay as far as it goes, but less may be more here.  The only castrato role here, actually, is Serse himself; Arsamene was always a trouser role.  But here he's played by a mezzo, Paula Rassmussen.  It really wasn't until quite recently that it started to be normal for countertenors to play these roles.  But either way can be good!  And she's really remarkably convincing in the part.

Interestingly, Cavalli wrote an earlier opera using a version of the same libretto.  I really want to see it, but as great as Cavalli is, is he as great as Handel?  Let's be honest.  If only one of the two had to be available (though I wish it didn't), this was almost certainly the right choice.

Gioachino Rossini, La pietra del paragone (1812) and Il viaggio a Reims (1825)

Here we have an opera from early in Rossini's career and one from late in it.  It feels odd that when it comes to Rossini, "late in his career" is not the same as "late in his life."  But I've lamented that enough, probably!

First, La pietra del paragone, by a twenty-year-old Rossini.  Not bad, I have to say!  Whether he was on the level of Mozart, one can argue, but it's definitely impressive.

The plot really couldn't be more flimsy.  There's this count, Asdrubale, and everyone wonder why he isn't married yet--he's almost thirty, fergawdsake!  Ods bodkins!  But he doesn't trust women; he thinks they're just after his money.  People will say that the story is of him pretending to have lost his fortune so he can see which of the women courting him really loves him, but that takes up seriously, like, two minutes from start to finish.  The libretto could fairly be described as baggy: you have two hangers-on, a journalist and a poet, sort of dicking around.  You have a thing where the count's lover's dead brother reappears--or so it seems!  You don't watch this for a tight, cohesive plot.

You watch it for some great music, obviously.  Young Rossini definitely had it.  You can hear echoes of his later work here; suffice to say, it's great.  You also watch it, perhaps, for the super-fun production.  It takes place in a fifties Hollywood-style mansion, which seems highly appropriate for the story and allows for a lot of fun goofing around.  I feel like I need to revise what "Eurotrash" means to me, because instinctively, I don't think this is it, even though it should be under my definition.  Well, more on that later, maybe.

This is also the opera that led Napoleon's viceroy in Milan to declare that Rossini should not be drafted: "I cannot take it upon myself to expose to the enemy's fire such a precious existence; my contemporaries would never forgive me. We are perhaps losing a mediocre soldier, but we are surely saving a man of genius for the nation."  I don't how likely Rossini was to be drafted otherwise, but I sort of have mixed feelings here: obviously, I'm extremely glad that he didn't die in the Napoleonic Wars.  That would've fuckin' blown.  And yet, imagine that someone else was drafted in his place, and this person was killed.  Was his life fundamentally worth less because he wasn't a musical genius?  If you pursue that idea, it can lead you to some dark places, I think.

Il viaggio a Reims is a late work.  I don't think the La Scala production that I watched is otherwise available.  This is an interesting one, in that it was written for the coronation of Charles X in the city of Reims, performed a few times, and then set aside.  It was intended to be an ephemeral thing, which i why Rossini reused about half the music in Le Comte Ory.  But really, could he possibly have been oblivious enough to his own talent to imagine that people would be content to just let it fade into obscurity?  Really now.

The plot is even less of a plot than La pietra del paragone.  There are eighteen named characters, but without checking, I don't think I could name a one of them.  But they're all various lords and professionals dallying at a hotel preparing to head off for Reims.  They're all from different countries, and there's a lot of music that's supposed to reflect their national characters including--no joke--an aria by the English colonel to the tune of "God Save the King."  Anyway, as I said, they mill around, there are various romantic entanglements...that's about it.

Could I determine from the music which of these is early Rossini and which late?  Alas, I fear probably not.  But again, the music is beguiling.  Good lord, everything Rossini ever wrote beguiles.  Not all of his operas are available in video form, but most of them are, and I definitely need to make a concerted effort to see as many of them as possible.