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.
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