François-André Danican Philidor, Tom Jones (1765)

When I first saw there was an opera based on Tom Jones, I figured it had to be a contemporary British thing.  Why contemporary?  I don't know; I suppose because I have the irrational ingrained idea that anything I don't know about must be new.  Which is obviously extremely wrong.  As it happens, there IS a British opera, but it's from 1907.  And it's not this.  Obviously.  I don't know a lot about the history of copyright law, but you do have to wonder: Henry Fielding's novel was published in 1749; he was dead by the time this opera appeared, but was any kind of licensing fee to his estate necessary?  Well, I suspect that any copyright law in those days probably didn't cover derivative works, and in any case, it probably would've been hard to take international legal action.  Who can say?  Apart from people who know things.  Man, what kind of weirdo knows about things?

I've read Tom Jones!  It's great!  But that was probably five-ish years ago, so many plot details are fuzzy in my mind.  But of course, it's a thousand-page novel, so an opera is going to be severely abridged in any event.  But it's basically the same: Tom Jones (who I think might never be referred to by first name in the opera) is a foundling, which is why the book's full title is The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling.  Dead giveaway!  He's been raised by the benevolent Squire Allworthy.  He and Sophie Western, the daughter of a neighboring squire, are in love, but her dad is dead-set that she marry Allworthy's nephew, the loathsome Blifil.  There are complications, but then it turns out that Tom is actually Blifil's half-brother, and now him marrying Sophie is A-Okay.

(Tangent: you know why so many of these old narratives where a lower-class boy is in love with an upper-class girl are resolved when it turns out that he's actually secretly a noble of some kind?  It's because they were written from a pre-modern mindset.  These things upset our contemporary democratic sensibilities: wouldn't it be better for the world to just learn to accept interclass unions?  But for older writers, it was undesirable if not unthinkable to do anything that would upset the stable foundations of society, which include classes being separate.  Sorry, but that's JUST how it is.)

This is a fun piece of work.  Maybe slightly too much yapping--this being an opera comique--but perfectly fine!  Oddly, Jones himself doesn't really make that much of an impression; by far the most memorable character here is the, let's say, earthy Squire Western, as ably portrayed by Marc Barrard.  The music is definitively classical; none of the baroque here, if that's what you were hoping for.  But that's fine!  There's nothing here you haven't heard a thousand times (though a French opera of this vintage is at least a little unusual), but it is fun as shit!  What more do ya want?!?

Uzeyir Hajibeyov, Koroğlu (1937)

This was Hajibeyov's last opera.  It's very different from Leyli and Majnun, but not so much because of his artistic development--well, maybe because of that, but the main thing is, the earlier work--as most of his operas--was based on the Azerbaijani folk idiom known as mugham.  That's why it sounded stylized in a way totally different from most familiar opera.  This one is still unmistakably culturally distinct, but it makes uses operatic conventions in a much more recognizable way.  Does that make it more accessible?  Maybe!

Koroğlu is a folk hero in Azerbaijan and other Turkic countries.  As far as I can tell, this isn't based on a single epic poem or anything like that; it appears to be purely an oral tradition.  Certainly, no primary sources have been published in English.  

The idea here is that the people are super bummed out because they're being oppressed by the khans.  Who exactly are these people?  They seem to be from a different ethnic group, probably, but it's difficult to say.  The inciting incident comes when they blind an old man named Ali because he can't get them a good horse.  Ali is the father of Rovshan, and following this, he takes on the name of  Koroğlu, which means "blind man's son."  Seems weird to change your name to match your parent's condition, but so it goes.  Anyway, he starts a rebellion.  The next act jumps a few years later; rebellion still going on, khans very annoyed by the whole thing and eager to capture Koroğlu.  The best idea they can come up with is to capture his beloved horse, Girat.  This will cause him to come to the rescue so we can capture him.  A dude called Hamza bey agrees to get the horse, on condition that he be allowed to marry Koroğlu's sweetheart, Nigar, who is a captive, and I really have to point out that, if he's not motivated by the desire to save her (and to be clear, he definitely knows she's a prisoner), why is he gonna come for the horse?  What priorities are these?  

Well, regardless, now we're at the rebels' redoubt, an idyllic place where everyone lives in harmony.  Indeed, Koroğlu brings over some oppressed people from other ethnic groups--Armenians, Georgians, Kurds--to help out.   Hazma bey appears disguised as a beggar, and even though all the people treat him with hostility, apparently having forgotten that they were all about class solidarity five seconds ago, but Koroğlu lets him tend the horses.  Naturally, he runs off with Girat.  There's a party at the palace, and Koroğlu shows up in disguise.  When he's exposed, he's made a prisoner, but there are complications: it is revealed that Nigar's brother Eyvaz was acting as a messenger between her and him, so Nigar goes ahead and confesses: yes, we were working against you.  Screw all y'all!  In the ensuing confusion, Koroğlu kills Hamza bey and rides off on his horse.  Nigar and Eyvaz are going to be executed, but the cavalry headed by Koroğlu shows up to set them free and kick some khan ass, and there is much rejoicing.

JEEZ, how did that get so damn long?  Was it really necessary?!?  Well, what's done is done.  You can really see the difference between this and Leyli and Majnun if you compare their libretti.  The earlier piece basically consists of a series of poems or individual songs--back and forth back and forth, with little to no recitative and not much else.  Whereas this one has much more variety: there's some recitative, and in addition to lengthy arias, there are lots of  complicated choruses.  Also--what you might not be able to tell--is that it's heavily dance-focused, with no less than four ballet sequences, two for the bad guys and two for the good.  Which rule.

It may not be very helpful to compare the two, and I may just be displaying my prejudice in favor of traditional opera, but I liked this a lot better than Leyli and Majnun.  Not that I didn't like Leyli, but there's a lot more variety here and, I think more emotional range.  I'm super-glad to have seen them both, though.  You're certainly not going to get an accurate idea of Hajibeyov's range from just the one.

Ástor Piazzolla, María de Buenos Aires (1968)

An Argentine piece, as the you might've guessed from the title.  I just randomly found it while looking for some more Spanish operas.  It's freely available (with subtitles in seven languages!) until the end of the month.

Certainly not a typical opera, if there is indeed such a thing.  It's very abstract, with a lot of dancing, and along with the singing, a lot of reciting of the abstract and somewhat hermetic yet evocative libretto.  The title character is sort of seduced by the allure of the tango and becomes a prostitute; she dies at the end of the first act, but reappears in the second as "Shadow Maria," and is revived, bodily or otherwise, and has a child, who may be herself.  This is very much of a piece with the Latin American Boom fiction that was, uh, booming at the time.

And of course, it's all tango-based, Piazzolla having been known as a tango pioneer.  That's cool; I like a good tango just fine.  And I liked this just fine, or even loved it.  Such lush music, and even if the specifics of the plot are obscure, it's fine to just let it wash over you.  Am I a vile hypocrite for disliking the obscureness of El público but liking this.  Possibly, possibly.  I may just have to live with that.  But I also liked the music a lot better, so there's some justification.  

I genuinely don't know what to think about the production, or how it might compare to another.  It's very minimalistic, involving a huge amount of black paper (?) being dropped and spread around the stage.  The dancing, I don't know.  I probably could've liked it more; this may be because I'm a philistine, but a lot of it struck me more as flailing than anything else.  However, this did not meaningfully affect my enjoyment of the whole, which was extensive.

József Ruzitska, Béla futása (1822); and György Orbán, Pikkó herczeg (2004)

This is interesting...well, interesting to me.  Maybe not anyone else, but hey, this is the only opera blog, so I've kind of got you over a barrel, don't I?  You must listen!  Well, so I check Operaonvideo every day to see what the latest additions are; sometimes I will find something interesting.  And this is one such time!  

This is a double bill of Hungarian operas, recorded in 2017, which were put online to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the opening of the first Hungarian stone theater.  What's a "stone theater?"  I don't know, man.  A mistranslation, probably.  All I know is that that's what this Hungarian website says when google translated into English.  Anyway, I downloaded this, and it's a good thing that I did; usually when I download opera videos to make sure I'll have them, it's just paranoia; they're not going anywhere.  But this time, it was very strictly up for only one day (which I didn't know at the time), making me feel vindicated.

Now, the video does have subtitles--and not burnt-in subtitles either, so you can auto-translate from the Hungarian.  Or so I thought, but as it turned out, when I turned that on, most of them either weren't translated at all or were one hundred percent gibberish.  So I looked in the subtitle file, and I quickly figured out the problem: the little introduction at the beginning, explaining where and when it was recorded, was indeed in Hungarian, which is presumably why it was set that way--but the actual operas are subtitled in Romanian.  A person who doesn't know anything about these things might assume the two are similar, but they're not; Romanian's a Romance language (funny how that works), whereas Hungarian isn't even Indo-European.  I took a look and found that Romanian is a "co-official minority language" in Hungary, so that might explain it...but then again, so is German, which has many more speakers in Hungary, so who knows.  Seems very weird in any event.  

But the good news is, google translate likes Hungarian a lot more than it does Danish.  The subtitles to youtube videos are stored in .srt files.  I'd never dug into these before, but on opening it, I found that it's just a text file that also specifies at what point in the video each line should be played, so it was easy to translate the whole thing with.

(Also, side-note, Romanian seems like a very interesting language: it has enough roots in common with other Romance languages that you can tell what it is easily enough, but the orthography and all the spiky diacriticals make it look more like a Slavic language.  It seems to be on the border.)

Was that pretty boring, and self-indulgent?  It was, wasn't it?  Well, I'm not deleting it, but as your reward for wading through it, I'm going to make these extremely rare pieces exclusively available to readers of this blog, complete with English subs.  They're a bit rough in places, I made some mistakes, but you can follow along easily enough.  I really hate the idea of art just disappearing like that, so have fun.

...but will you have fun?  That remains to be seen.  József Ruzitska is a pretty darned obscure composer; you can find a short entry about him on German wikipedia, and that seems to be about all the information that exists.  He was born in 1775, worked for a while as a conductor, wrote three operas, and then after 1822 vanished from the historical record.  When he died, or even IF he died (he could be the world's first bicentenarian; YOU don't know) is a mystery.  However, he was important in that he introduced this kind of historical opera to Hungary, having a big influence on Ferenc Erkel, who jumped into that milieu with both feet.                       

Béla futasa is set more or less in Crusader Times.  Kálman is a noble, formerly a favorite at the court of the king, Béla IV, but now he's left and he wants revenge: his son had joined some sort of rebellion out of naivete and idealism (so he says), and in spite of him begging for mercy for him, Béla let him be executed.  So now he's living out on his own, plotting vengeance, but also feeling ambivalent: can I kill him and cause chaos and suffering to the Hungarian people?  Ultimately, the king comes to his castle, a fugitive from Batu Khan's Golden Horde.  When Kálman reveals who he is and what he wants, he tells him that actually, his son committed suicide before he could be convicted.  An emissary of the Khan appears and demands that he turn the king over, but his Hungarianness wins out, and they chase him off.  Get the heck outta here, you emissary.  And to make up for his son's death, Béla gives Kálman his own children to raise, which seems like a terrible idea that would be satisfying to nobody.  Kind of a weird ending, really: it's about the nobility of the Hungarian spirit and all, typical patriotic thing, but the queen--at least in this production--is also shown to be devastated by the loss of her children, so...?

Well, notwithstanding the slightly weird ending, I liked this a lot; it's a rousing sort of thing.  You can see why Erkel was impressed.  It does have substantial spoken dialogue, which I didn't love--would it kill you to stick a li'l recitative in there?--but no biggie!  I would definitely recommend this one.

As for the second piece here: Pikkó herceg és Jutka Perzsi, by Jézsef Chudy from 1793, is known as the first Hungarian opera.  Unfortunately, it's lost, and as I understand it (if any of this is inaccurate, it's because it all comes from Hungarian auto-translations), the libretto only survives in palimpsest form from a later Singspiel that was a parody of the work.  So this is an effort by Orbán (an unfortunate name to have, it seems to me, but hey, there are decent people named T**** out there) to sort of work backwards and retrieve the original to the limited extent that that's possible.  Well, that's the idea.  I don't think anyone thinks you can really do it very well.

Perzsi is a Tartar princess.  She wants to marry Pikkó, a Kalmyk (if I'm getting that translation right), but no no, sez the Khan her dad.  He has an advisor, Sibuk, who's some kind of wizard, and he comes up with the idea of telling Pikkó that Perzi isn't really his daughter so that she can't inherit and Pikkó won't want to marry him.  This great plan fails, because he still wants to.  He fights with the Khan and accidentally kills him; Perzsi takes poison.  Pikkó does likewise (goofily visualized as a bowl of pills).  It turns out, apparently, that the Khan really ISN'T her dad, and she and Pikkó are secretly siblings.  Sibuk decides to summon a tougher wizard to bring them back to life, but nope, he sez, no can do.  You have to go through the world helping people and doing good deeds.  And that is IT.

I didn't like this very much.  The music isn't terrible; I wouldn't say it sounds like the typical fare of the late eighteenth century exactly, but, you know, not bad, and there are some nice love duets.  But man, I feel that if the goal was to make it less silly, that goal was not quite met.  The whole thing about the lovers' parentage, and the whole business with the wizard--these feel to me like they would've been additions added to make it more jokey, and I found it very hard to take this at all seriously as a drama.  The characters are not well-delineated.  After watching Bella futása, it felt like an anti-climax, and if the idea is to celebrate Hungarian history, I feel it isn't really a success.  Also, while it's fine to appreciate their musical past, let's always keep in mind that Hungary these days is extremely shitty.  Not that as an American I really have much room to complain, but still.  Yeesh.

Pancho Vladigerov, Tsar Kaloyan (1936)

Breaking down barriers left and right: here's a Bulgarian opera for you.  Oddly enough, Bulgaria was very late to the party, not producing their first one until 1900.  This page seems to imply that this is because Bulgarian was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, but the Ottomans weren't anti-opera.  Well, maybe when you're being dominated like that, you have other things to think about.  Regardless, here we are.  According to wikipedia, Vladigerov was "arguably the most influential Bulgarian composer of all time."  I'm afraid I wouldn't have much to contribute to that argument one way or the other, but maybe he's a good dude to start with in any case.  This is his only opera.

You want the story?  Here's the story: it's Crusader Times.  The new tsar of Bulgaria has just been crowned, and already he's clomping off to fight the Latins in Constantinople.  His troops are victorious and they capture the emperor, Baldwin.  But Kaloyan, being the chivalrous type, returns his sword and allows him to live freely among the Bulgarians--though he's still a prisoner, obvz.  The tsar's wife, Maria, conceives a passion for Baldwin, but he rejects her because of his friendship with Kaloyan and because he's still mourning his dead wife.  The tsar's scheming nephew Boril knows that Maria has the hots for Baldwin, which she worries could ruin her, so she tries to get ahead of things by telling her husband that he, Baldwin, had tried to seduce her.  Kaloyan initially refuses to believe this, but then gets the idea that there was a conspiracy against him and that Baldwin was in charge and therefore it must be true, and orders him executed.  His innocence is proven mere moments later, and Kaloyan tries to stop the execution, but it's TOO LATE.  You know, if tsarist Bulgaria had had even the slightest bit of due process, this whole tragedy could very easily have been avoided.

That's the end of the opera.  Historically, Baldwin was indeed captured and treated with respect but executed, although in reality it was because he was in fact trying to foment a rebellion.  The thing with Maria is totally made up, as far as I can see.  Kaloyan was killed in battle months later, and Boril ended up marrying Maria and becoming tsar himself, albeit not a terribly distinguished one.  So it goes.

This was a kind of new sort of opera-watching experience for me, because this video is unsubtitled, and there's no libretto or anything that I could find.  However, I DID find a fairly detailed synopsis, which I figured would probably be enough.  And it is, more or less.  I could basically follow the story, but I do have to admit, not being able to follow it line-by-line was suboptimal.

Did I like it?  Well, it's divided into two hour-long chunks (with a credit scroll in the middle); the impression I get is that it was shown in installments on Bulgarian television, though I'm not sure of that.  I liked the first better than the second; all the folk dances are in the first half, and they're really great--not that the rest of the music isn't good: romantic stuff, somewhat reminding me of Rimsky-Korsakov.  Still, I think the opera as a whole does suffer from a general lack of drama, and I don't think it's just the lack of subtitles making me say that.  I don't know; clearly, it's a tragedy, but emotions didn't feel heightened to me in a way you'd expect.  I don't NOT recommend it, but I think for most people who aren't maniacs like me, it would be better to hope that someday it gets a proper release with proper subs.

Still, a Bulgarian opera, man.  We're moving on up.

Hakon Børresen, The Royal Guest (1919)

Hey, look, another Danish opera--one of the most popular, I am told.  There's a video here, I assume from Danish television--in black and white, but with quite good picture and sound quality for the time.  It's not subtitled, but I paid five dollars for the CD release, which includes the complete libretto in Danish, German, and English, so I was able to follow along.

It's a fairly simple one-act opera: a couple is preparing to receive guests--sometime in the winter--only, they cancel.  But this mysterious dude who won't give his name shows up, waxes poetic, charms them, and then leaves, teaching them a li'l something about being less up-tight.  I guess.  

This is extremely delightful and charming; the story sort of makes me think of Schoenberg's Von heute auf morgen--in that they're both short comedic operas about couples clarifying their marriages--but the music here is pretty much the opposite of that: it's gorgeous, late-romantic stuff all around, coming to some really transcendent crescendos.  Crescendi?  The libretto is mainly conversational, with little that you could call an aria per se, but there are little bits of what I guess you could call arioso occasionally bubbling up.  Suffice it to say, it's a fine piece of work that is extremely easy on the ears.  It's easy to understand why the Danes like it; really, the only mystery is why Dacapo hasn't released a DVD--if you want to promote your national culture, The Royal Guest would be a great way to do that.

Joseph Bodin de Boismortier, Don Quichotte chez la Duchesse (1743)

Dons everywhere you look!  Where will it end?!?  As I've noted, it's sort of difficult to find non-Rameau French operas from this time period, so let's appreciate what we get.

Have I complained about how hard amazon makes it to find opera dvds that may not be that well-known?  You'll find this is you just type "Boismortier," but the title will do you no good, because the site calls it "Don Quixote at the Duchess," which even aside from the bad translation is simply not a thing that exists, and so nobody would search for it.  Yeesh.

So yes, obviously, this is based on an episode from Don Quixote--I don't remember the book well enough to tell whether it's a specific episode or just an "in the spirit of" thing.  Certainly, there are episodes of nobles fucking with Quixote for laffs, which is what this is.  It's really not a very heavily-plotted thing.

The music is great, Rameau-ish stuff--one might wish there were more of it, but you can't complain about what's here.  The other fact that must be noted, however, is that--per the notes--only the musical parts of this are extant; the connective tissue is lost.  So, they improvised their own material.  Some of it is kind of what you'd expect it to have been like, but especially in the latter half, it gets a bit flakey.  There's a lot with the characters, the duke especially, interacting with the conductor, Hervé Niquet, who, it must be allowed, has some pretty decent comic chops.  But some of this stuff, I dunno.  All this stuff was conceived and written by a French comedy duo called Shirley and Dino, and both of them appear in non-singing roles, him as the duke and her as a supposed Spanish singer who is going to perform in tribute to Cervantes.  Did I say "non-singing?"  Well, except that they both do sing, sort of, in deliberately terrible fashion (not over Boismortier's music, thankfully), which I am given to understand is a common part of their act.  And I dunno; I suppose you have to accept a thing like this for what it is, but I couldn't help wish for more opera and less dicking around.

Still, you could do worse, if you're willing to not take anything too seriously.  Chantal Santon Jeffery stands out as the duchess in question.  Once again, I will say: either watch it, or don't!

Gaetano Donizetti, Don Gregorio (1826)

Speaking of bel canto!

How many operas starting with "Don" can we see?!?  Let's find out!  Everyone likes the three "main" Donizetti comedies, but does anyone ever stop to think that the man wrote a shit-ton of operas, and therefore there are probably other ones worth seeing?  Well, there's also the hilarious domestic violence comedy of Rita, which we should probably just delicately overlook, but other than that...

Well, there's a marquis with two sons, who's kept them very sheltered as they've grown up.  However, this hasn't totally worked: his older son, Enrico, is secretly married and not only that, he secretly has an infant son.  That level of secrecy must've taken some doing.  Regardless, he's freaked out that his dad will explode on finding out, so he enlists the help of his Latin tutor, Don Gregorio.  There's also a younger son and and an older maid causing comic confusion.  In the end, inevitably, the marquis is reconciled to his son and daughter-in-law's situation, and all is well.

And THAT is what it's about!  And delightful, is what it is, also.  Additionally.  Lots o' really fun, boisterous music, including a bunch of good patter songs.  I would venture to say that this is at least better than La fille du régiment; there's certainly no excuse for it not being filmed more.  This is a fun production that--as you can perhaps glean from the cover--adds the twist of Gregorio dressing in women's clothing when alone.  It seems like a very appropriate character beat, and it allows for extra comedy as other characters' try to hide their identities by doing likewise.  Speaking of, there's a fair bit of spoken dialogue here, which I ordinarily wouldn't be fond of, but here it's more engaging than usual, creating the air of a classic farce, and Paolo Bordogna in the title roles proves to be a highly adept comic actor.

Vincenzo Bellini, Il pirata (1827)

I'm pretty sure this is the biggest-name opera that isn't officially available in video form anywhere (unless you count this old, long-out-of-print PAL VHS tape without subtitles as "available").  It recently came up on Operavision, but alas, that turned out to just be a concert version.  Hey, I can't blame you for not wanting so do an opera with large choruses during COVID, but still.  And speaking of that, it was going to be on Met in HD--would've been coming up in May, if I recall correctly--until...stuff happened.  Might have been a mixed blessing, since it was to feature Diane Damrau as the heroine, and I know that's a super-unkind thing of me to say, but I said it anyway!  She's a big star; she can afford to have an unknown blog throwing a little shade at her.

Of course, there are recordings online, but as far as I know, M T has produced the first-ever version with dang ol' English subs.  Actually, I now realize that for a well-known composer like Bellini, you're going to be able to find English translations of all his libretti online, so that would be another way to see it, but really, having actual subtitles, even of the somewhat scattershot M T kind, is just more convenient.  Other interesting fact: they mentioned in the comments to the Martha they uploaded having first seen it in 1948, meaning they must be at least eighty-ish.  Very impressive youtubing, considering.

So it's Sicily.  There's a storm, which causes a ship to crash on the rocks.  One of those onboard is Gualtiero, a former noble who had been exiled by the villainous duke, Ernesto, who then forced his beloved, Imogene, into marriage.  Ernesto had been fighting against some pirates, and it turns out that this is the pirate ship in question.  He knows that Gualtiero isn't dead but wants to make him so; meanwhile, Gualtiero has similar ambitions for him.  Ultimately, Gualtiero's identity is revealed, and he kills Ernesto (off-stage), and is then condemned to death.  Imogene watches this happen (also off-stage) and goes mad.  The heroines in La somnambula and I puritani also go mad, but they get over it.  I fear it may be more persistent here, but hey, who knows.  What's going to happen to her, anyway?  Does she get the power?  She does have a young son with Ernesto, so is she the dowager duchess now?  I smell a sequel.

Yes, well.  Honestly, I thought this was kind of just okay.  It certainly has its moments, and it's not unpleasant to watch, duh, THAT was never a possibility, but it's also Bellini's earliest opera that's commonly performed, so why wouldn't it be less interesting?  The plot isn't massively interesting or well-developed; there's the suggestion that Ernesto isn't actually all-villainous, but it's never really developed.  And why are the climactic deaths both off-stage?  Seems, rather than climactic, anti-that.  Also, it's not very pirate-y.  I think Verdi's Il corsaro is better in that regard.

Mainly, this makes me want to see some better bel canto, but hey, watch it or not!  The choice is yours!

Mauricio Sotelo, El público (2015)

Well, here's a Spanish opera, based on a play by Federico García Lorca, who was later murdered by Franco's fascists (fuck all fascists forever).  I think a lot of people only know him from the name-drop in the Clash song "Spanish Bombs."

I hardly know how to describe this.  This is not a play (or opera) with a straightforward plot.  To my primitive understanding: there's a theatre director, Enrique.  I got that much.  And he's doing <i>Romeo and Juliet.</i>  His former lover Gonzalo appears and accuses him of not being transgressive enough, or words to that effect.  There's a long scene with Juliet.  Enrique decides to recast with a boy in the role, which causes widespread outrage and violence.  Gonzalo is crucified, for some reason.  

You can read a much more detailed summary on the wikipedia page, with a lot more detail and a whole bunch of explanation of what characters (there are a lot of characters) symbolize.  And yet, I sort of felt like I felt during my abortive effort to read Finnegans Wake: I had a guidebook, and with its help, I could sort of dimly see some of what was going on, but I still had to take a lot on faith.  This is a thing: if there's any kind of work of art that you don't understand or appreciate, you want to just dismiss it as pretentious trash, because to do otherwise would be to admit that the problem was on your end; that you weren't smart or sophisticated enough to understand it.  Sure, I'm prey to that.  And then you get into the thing where you suggest that people who did like it are just, like, faking it, or trying to seem smart.  Jerks!  But I am extremely over that, so I will just say that this really didn't do anything for me and leave it there.

The music's, well, at least kind of interesting, melding traditional romantic stuff with a certain degree of atonality, and then a bunch of flamenco, which is apparently something Sotelo specializes in.  There's a prominent guitar part.  But to me, it's just not enough.  This is two hours and twenty minutes, which isn't that long, and yet I had to watch it in two sessions, because I just got too bored.  This isn't my worst operatic experience--it didn't make me viscerally angry the way Punch and Judy did--but it is surely in the bottom ten.  I wish I'd been able to appreciate it, and it's not inconceivable that I could with practice, but for now, blah.

Farewell My Concubine (1918)

Damndest thing: I am totally unable to find who actually wrote this.  It's nowhere on the opera's wikipedia page or any other page, as far as I can see, nor is it listed anywhere in the credits.  If you look for "Farewell My Concubine composer," you'll get Zhoa Jiping, who wrote the score for the (non-musical) film; if you look for "Farewell My Concubine opera composer," you'll get Xiao Bai, who wrote a contemporary Western-style opera on the subject, but this one?  It is a mystery.  Are we just meant to take it as a given that any older opera in this style is going to be anonymous?  Hard to say.

So this takes place in ancient China, as perhaps all of these do.  After the fall of the Qin Dynasy (200-ish BC), there's a struggle between the Han and the Chu.  The Chu emperor Xiang Yu is tricked into attacking the Han by a supposed Han defector (in spite of Yu Ji, the concubine in question, warning against it) but he's actually a double agent, and the Chu are outmaneuvered.  And that's a not all; the Han also use the most diabolical weapon imaginable: folk music.  The idea is that if the Han are heard singing Chu folk songs, they'll assume that the Chu people have defected and thus be demoralized.  So things go from bad to worse, and Yu Ji suggests that Xiang Yu should run to try to regroup while she stays and commits suicide, as she'd slow him down; he refuses but she kills herself anyway, and rather than be captured, he does the same.  And that...is that!

I'm trying.  I'm really trying.  In particular, the dan singing from Yu Ji sounds immediately hilarious to me.  That's not, obviously, because there's something intrinsically ludicrous about it it's just because of my ingrained sensibilities.  But you don't have to just accept that: I did my best to suppress my instincts and hear it as a culturally neutral observer (as if such a thing were possible).  And this did work, to the extent that I stopped finding it funny, but we haven't quite gotten to the point where I really appreciated it.  Is the thing.  And that's true of this whole art form, I think.  If you know what it sounds like, you know what it sounds like.  

This certainly looks good, I'll tell you that much for free.  It was filmed (in 2014) in 3-D, and it's obvious that a lot of money was lavished on it.  The background CG can be a little cheesy at times, but the colorful costumes look really good, and the movement is clearly done in such a way as to take best advantage of the 3-D.  I'm sure it would be really breathtaking if you saw it as intended (it bums me out, not a lot but a little, that the most recent 3-D movie fad has died down), and even otherwise, it looks great.

But to me, the drama just isn't there.  It's probably--definitely--ludicrous to imagine that I could have a reasonable grasp on this whole artform after seeing two (2) examples of it.  It took way more than that for me to appreciate Western opera, and that's a lot less alien to my sensibilities.  Still, if I want to have any hope of appreciating Chinese opera (as compared to Western-style Chinese opera, which is much easier), I'll need to watch a lot more, and I kind of don't think that's possible right now.

Uzeyir Hajibeyov, Leyli and Majnun (1908)

I'm always super-horny for unusual languages, so I'm very excited to have seen my first Azerbaijani opera.  Wikipedia calls says that this is "considered the First Opera of the Muslim East," complete with weird capitalization.  You can "consider" it whatever you want, but still, as a purely factual matter, this is definitely not true (there may be other examples, but one is enough).  Well, we can be generous if we want and assume that this one is felt to have ushered in a new age of opera from the Muslim world.  It does seem to be considered a big deal, as does Hajibeyov tout court.  Many of his operas and operettas are available on video online, but none with subtitles.  However--this is so cool--I stumbled onto this ancient website ("best viewed in Internet Explorer" it says, if that gives you an idea) devoted to his work, which offers pdfs of libretti to many of them translated into English.  Thank you, Azerbaijan International!

The story of Leyli (normally "Leyla") and Majnun is well-known in the Muslim world; I first heard about it from this combination of it and the Orpheus legend.  As presented here, Leyli and Geys are in love, but in spite of his father's intercession, her parents won't let them get married.  It doesn't seem to be a class thing; instead, the problem seems to be that Geys is mad ("majnun"), which confuses cause and effect to me: I thought be became mad because they weren't allowed to get married.  Well, regardless, her parents make her marry someone else, and he flees out into the wilderness.  His dad's efforts to cure him are in vain.  This random emir, Nofal, appears and agrees to fight Leyli's family on his behalf, and they whack each other with swords for a while, but then her dad says okay okay, we give up, but come on, my daughter's already married, which makes him back off.  Back home, Leyli dies of a broken heart, and a little later, Majnun does the same at her graveside.

You know, I've seen operas in somewhat less well-known operatic languages, but if I see something in Polish or Spanish (say) it may have some specific Polish or Spanish flavor to it, but it's not going to be radically different on account of its origin from any other opera.  But this is something else; I can safely say I've never seen the like.  It really it a melding of Eastern and Western music.  The singing is...well, it's not totally unlike what you might be used to.  It does feature the usual musical instruments, though often you just have one or two traditional Azerbaijani (I assume) instruments playing.  The singing will really strike you, however: it's definitely more of that sort of Arabic-style.  I wish I had better vocabulary to talk about this, but you know what I mean, certainly if you've ever heard the Muslim call to prayer.  Like that.  There's not really any recitative; it basically just jumps from one aria to another, with the occasional duet or chorus.  It's striking and oft beautiful, although I do have to allow that it can get a little samey: there's not all that much difference between a love ballad and a death aria.  Regardless, fascinating stuff, and I will definitely check out more of Hajibeyov's work. This production is fine, with good audio and video quality, although you do notice that the singers, even when they're meant to be, rarely seem to actually, like, be talking to each other.  There's a little of the ol' "park and bark" feel to it.  Honored to have been able to see it nonetheless.

Li Yuntao, Sandalwood Punishment (2018)

For the last few days, a bunch of operas from the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing have been appearing on Opera on Video.  I want to see them!  The problem is, most of them are either unsubtitled or subtitled only in Chinese.  However, for whatever reason,  this one has English subs accompanying the Chinese, so bam, I saw it.  I wanted to do it right away because I have no idea whether its availability is time-sensitive (and it's not on a platform that I can download from).

This is based on a novel by Mo Yan, who also wrote the libretto.  It takes place during the Boxer Rebellion and concerns a woman, Sun Meiniang, whose father, Sun Bing, an opera singer, is going to be executed for leading an action against German invaders: this being the titular sandalwood punishment (or "sandalwood death"), which involves driving stabbing the victim with wooden stakes and leaving him to die over the course of many days, like crucifixion.  She begs her father-in-law, the executioner, Zhao Jia, to spare him, but he won't, and her gormless husband (I'm afraid I missed a lot of the characters' names), in training to follow in his dad's footsteps, is no help.  After a scheme to replace Sun Bing with a lookalike beggar (why he agrees to this is never made clear) goes wrong, as the punishment is beginning, Sun Meiniang's lover decides that he can't go along with this.  He kills Gormless Husband and mercykills Sun Bing, while Sun Meiniang kills her suddenly-ex-father-in-law.  The chorus sings about sandalwood and the barbarity of the punishment.  The end.

First thing to note is that this isn't what you might expect when you hear "Chinese opera:" it's not the indigenous form; this is a Western-style opera sung in Chinese (presumably Mandarin, though I am forced to confess that I can't tell), as are all of the operas that the NCPA made available.  I knew that that was a thing, but this is the first time I've ever actually gotten to see one, so that's neat.  Though here, you won't know immediately that that's the case: each act opens with a guy singing actual, traditional Chinese-opera, providing exposition and accompanying himself on what I think is a jinghu.

I always wondered how well opera singing in Chinese would work, given the tonal nature of the language.  Turns out, pretty reasonably well.  I definitely perceived this as a mixture of Eastern and Western musical sensibilities; the characters' gestures and the way they vocalize were reminiscent of the other kind of Chinese opera, even if this isn't that, and there are traditional Chinese instruments as part of the orchestra.  There aren't exactly arias, but nor does the singing really feel like recitative; I really don't know what to call it.  Musically, it's not unpleasant to listen to, but I struggle to pinpoint highlights, other than the final chorus which is indeed pretty darn great.  Not that I don't appreciate hybridization, but I think maybe if it wants to be a Western opera, it should lead harder into that.

This extends to the storytelling as well.  I've always had so much trouble with Chinese narratives.  I have to reject the idea that Chinese sensibilities are fundamentally alien to my own.  People are people!  Cultural differences are one thing, but that doesn't seem like it should be possible.  And yet.  This barely even seems to be trying to create any real sense of drama, and weird shit like Sun Meiniang's husband and father-in-law being totes cool with just killing her dad without, it appears, even recognizing that there's a conflict, is just...blah.  Maybe if I read the novel, some things would be clarified.

Look, I'll tell you one thing: I'm not going to let my somewhat lukewarm experience here put me off from trying to learn more about and gain more appreciation for Chinese opera of whatever kind.  But just the same: blah.

Peter Heise, Drot og marsk (1878)

Nineteenth-century Danish opera ahoy.  Boom.  This is fun: there's a 1988 TV movie of this that someone uploaded to youtube.  Only problem is, naturally, the language thing.  But!  It DOES have Danish subtitles.  So is there anything stopping me from just typing them all into google translate?  Well, there's the fact that this takes WAY longer than you might think.  Well, I don't know what "you" think, but I had it in my head that given that operas generally have less text than non-musical plays, it maybe wouldn't take that long.  That was a dumb thing to think.  Less text it may be, but it's STILL twenty-four dang pages' worth.  Also, there's the fact that google translate is REALLY bad at Danish, or at least this nineteenth-century Danish, and a lot of it comes out as baffling gibberish.  So...those might be things that stopped you, if you were going to be stopped.  But I was not, and it DID let me follow the plot in spite of everything.  In the wildly unlikely event that anyone's interested, you can download the fruits of my efforts file here.

So!  Yes.  The title means "king and marshal."  The King is Eric V of Norway, who historically was assassinated by Stig Andersen, the marshal.  Eric is a bit of a womanizer: the opera opens with him swooping in to seduce a charcoal girl, Aase, whom one of his knights, Rane, had likewise been trying to pick up, claiming he'll make her his queen.  Back at the court, Stig shows up.  He's going off to fight the Swedes (as you do if you're a Dane), and he wants to leave his wife, Ingeborg, under the king's protection.  Bad idea: the instant Stig leaves, Eric's putting the moves on her, even though Aase is right there.  He's quite a piece of work.  In spite of her resistance, he persists, and it's unclear whether he ultimately rapes her or just seduces her, but something happens.  Stig returns victorious, learns that his wife has been dishonored, and accuses the king of raping her.  He claims it was consensual, but either way, he swears his revenge.  It seems that just about everyone hates Eric, so he cooks up a conspiracy with them: they'll dress up as monks and Rane will convince him to go out hunting and lead him to where they're waiting for him.  As for Ingeborg, after saying her goodbyes with her husband, she seems to just disappear.  The wikipedia article claims that she commits suicide, which is certainly what you'd expect from an opera like this, but if that's anywhere in the libretto, it fell victim to google's incompetence.  Anyway, the hunting trip meets with logistical issues, and Eric finds himself at Aase's hut (she having returned to the woods to resume her humble life).  After making a failed cursory effort to re-seduce her (this guy!), he runs away, leaving his sword behind.  He and Rane find a farmhouse at which to take shelter for the night, during which Stig and his men come and murder him, he being helpless without his sword (I mean, they probably would've taken him anyway, but still).  Aase come by with said sword, but it's too late.  Stig is going into exile, we're told.  The real Stig became an actual-factual pirate after his exile, apparently.  Way to reinvent yourself, man.

So yes!  I really enjoyed this music.  It's nothing mind-boggling, and nothing I would call typically Danish (I have no idea what that would mean), but it's very strong romantic stuff of the era, with some very dramatic moments.  What I really appreciated about it was the characterization of the king in the latter half: his feelings of angst, his premonitions of doom--very atmospheric, and definitely makes him into more of a character than he might've been.  That's enough to elevate this above other, similar works.  The video and audio quality here is okay, but a contemporary performance with better sound, picture, and subtitles would be just ducky.  I'm sort of surprised there's no DVD of this, given that there IS a Danish classical music label.  Go for it, guyz!

This was a positive experience, and now that I have this sort of proof-of-concept, I feel that the variety of opera recordings available to me has expanded, which is awesome.  So we'll see what the future holds!

20 Shots of Opera, part two

 11. Jenn Kirby, "Dichotomies of Lockdown"

I was sort of skeptical about Operavision's claim that this was seven vignettes (that's one minute per vignette), which is kind of dumb when you think about it or even when you don't: it's extremely easily verifiable, and why would they lie about that anyway? Well, Kirby actually pulls this off pretty darn well, I'd say. We have a man and a woman, presumably a couple (although actually, they aren't necessarily the same people every time--well, it's not very relevant), in an institutional-looking room with a table in the middle, presumably meant to evoke prison. And they're doing various quarantine things: helping with disinfectants, social distancing, being annoyed at people not taking precautions, Zooming (how inevitable was that?), and so on. Nothing groundbreaking, but still enjoyable, and, again, very impressive to actually cram so many scenes into such a short thing.

12. Conor Linehan, "The Patient Woman"

This one is about a woman visiting a doctor. It's filmed in black and white in a style trying--not altogether successfully, I have to say--to mimic classic Hollywood. I do like it in theory; in practice, it's just okay. But beyond that, I'm not really sure what to say. The Operavision description calls it a "tragicomedy," which I think might be suggesting more than it can actually deliver. It's apparently about her getting bad news, and possibly dying, but it's very abstruse. The doctor babbles in Latin. I don't know; in spite of its lofty ambitions, I didn't really find this interesting.

13. Conor Mitchell, "A Message for Marty;" or, "The Ring"

So this Marty douchebag broke up with his girlfriend Jackie via text message, and her (unnamed) sister is pissed about this and sends him an angry video message of her own. It seems like an appealing thing, as does the Operavision blurb: "a comic short which shows what happens when Belfast girls lose their temper in a very, very public way!" Yeah, sure, gimme some of that. And yet, somehow, I expected more. It doesn't quite live up to its premise in a way I can't quite define. Also, the music is kind of generic; perhaps a Berg-esque atonal sound would have been appropriate for the subject matter. I dunno. Anyway, blah.

14. Gráinne Mulvey, "La Corbière"

Allegedly, this is about the wreck of a ship carrying Nazi soldiers and French prostitutes, though it would probably be hard to figure that out if you didn't know. Well, the Nazis are absent from the piece (as indeed nazis should be absent from the world); instead, we just have two women talking about how the situation is bad, over disconnected images of them in flashing lights and fog. Well, again, it's okay, but when you claim that i "highlights the dehumanizing power of fear--in particular fear of the Other," I think you're giving it somewhat more credit than it really deserves.

15. Emma O'Halloran, "The Wait"

A woman recounts seeing a horse drown in a flood, and the water is still rising. Um. That's it. I suppose you can't say this isn't exactly what it wants to be, but...I dunno, man. What's the punchine? "But who is the horse and who is the watcher?" asks the Operavision page. "And will we be next?" That's the kind of pretension that this thing can't support. Again, not very impressed.

16. Hannah Peel, "Close"

Two women try to go on a date while observing social distancing protocols, after having previously only communicated online (I feel like when you're belting out opera at one another, six feet probably isn't adequate, but okay). Perhaps I just tend to enjoy these things when they're more straightforward, but I thought this was just ducky. Very sweet, with an optimistic conclusion.

17. Karen Power, "TOUCH"

A man and a woman, in boxes on separate sides of the screen, his yellow-tinted, hers green. Video footage in the background. They "sing," or perhaps rather "wordlessly moan" over minimalistic music and environmental sounds. We get two words: "listen" and "touch." Fuck me, man. I don't like to be excessively vehement about these judgments, given that these are free to watch and all, but this is just worthless. Let's move on.

18. Evangelia Rigaki, "The Gift"

An old man in hospice and his estranged daughter, who I guess then achieve some kind of reconciliation. Man, I just said that I like those of these are that are straightforward, and this is certainly that, but it nonetheless left me cold. I feel it does not succeed in really presenting characters or saying anything meaningful about the situation. As I am sometimes known to say, blah.

19. Benedict Schlepper-Connolly, "Dust"

Well, this is at least a bit more like it. A woman sings an Irish-folk-ballad-styled thing about extinction. She "has not seen" various animals and plants, presumably because they are no more, although that use of the present perfect tense does suggest an underlying optimism. Meanwhile, the action is very unclear, as two dudes in hazmat suits stand by and help her change. Honestly, it does get a bit monotonous before it ends, but it's still fairly credible.

20. Jennifer Walshe, "Libris Solar"

So, can we end the proceedings on a high note? Well...not really, no. Not that this is a notably low point, but nor does it impress. A scientist sings about this "Libris Solar," who apparently, and probably only figuratively, is some sort of hybrid human-something creation. There's video footage of the guy, along with various cellular images. A voice babbles in the background. Look, what do you want to me to say? All I have is: WHATEVER.

Well, so what do we think about this project as a whole? Well, we think it's very much like a slightly weaker #OperaHarmony. It probably doesn't have notably more or worse low points than that, but the high points are fewer and not as high. The best of these COVID anthologies remains Tales from a Safe Distance.

20 Shots of Opera, part one

Hey look, ANOTHER goldang set of opera shorts!  It never ends!  Well, these are all by Irish composers, so that's different.  I guess.  Covering all twenty in one go might make for a slightly unwieldy entry, so I'll break it in two.  The second half coming tomorrow, probably.

01. Gerald Berry, "Mrs. Streicher"

Okay, this is pretty amusing: it features Beethoven, sitting at a table and singing (actual factual) letters to his landlady complaining about poor laundry service, uncooperative servants, and so on.  It's done in a very stylized way, where he frequently pauses in the middle of a sentence or word until the next line.  The only musical accompaniment is a dude occasionally tootling a note or two on a tuba.  This actually isn't my first encounter with Berry: I saw his Importance of Being Ernest when it was on Operavision, and then never wrote about it (hey, it happens).  But it was likewise zanily entertaining, and the style here feels extremely similar.  You can associate the subject matter with lockdown stir-craziness, or not.  I'm not forcing you one way or the other.

02. Éna Brennan, "Rupture"

Here we have a close-up of a woman's face, and she's singing and trying to be positive about her situation and her future, only then her negative side starts coming out (her face blurs and doubles), and starts singing negative stuff.  Not bad, although I have to say, she kind of has the glassy-eyed look of a cult member, and I really, really hope that's the way she's made up and not how she actually looks, because if if is it's just me being a jerk.  Looking at her website, I think it's that she's always wearing really distracting contact lenses, but I could be wrong.  Either way, not a bad piece.

03. Irene Buckley, "Ghost Apples"

A ghost apple--if I understand the explanation aright--is an apple that grows just as winter is settling in, and then gets encased in ice such that the actual apple rots away leaving an empty apple shape.  I'd never heard of these, but they're a real thing.  Neat.  Here, they're a metaphor for environmental degradation and loss.  The action takes place in a lab with a scientist ruminating about all this stuff, and the Pacific Garbage Patch (and she has a highly visible Macbook--is this opera branded?).  I thought this was all right, but I definitely get too depressed thinking about these things to do it for long, and that extends to this piece.

04. Linda Buckley, "Glaoch"

Here's a piece about...videochatting and disconnection under COVID.  Nooooo!  You thought we'd get through this without another of these?  You FOOL!  You foolish fool!  Well, even if I'm not impressed by the subject matter, this does actually have pretty good ghostly music which carries the day, and--as you might've guessed from that title--it's sung in Irish, which adds a bit of novelty to the proceedings.

05. Robert Coleman, "The Colour Green"

So there's this Irish writer, Mark Boyle, who lives without technology, and this is about him and also he wrote the libretto.  The visuals are all in the form of mildly-animated paintings, which I liked a lot, but that's about all I liked here.  There are recordings of Boyle talking--repeated a number of times--and some really annoying singing about his sleep patterns and things.  Erg.  I don't know what to say.  There's certainly something appealing about this lifestyle, but regardless, boo to this one.  If you don't think a five-minute piece can feel excessively long, I would recommend you check this one out.

06. David Coonan, "verballing"

I think a policewoman is being instructed on how to question people.  There is lots of text on the screen, but she only says "yeah," "no," and "[wordless moaning]," over some screechy violins.  This is all animated, in a style that's so perversely ugly that I feel like it has to be intentional.  But either way, I did not care for this even a tiny bit.  Two clunkers in a row?  Let's try to do a little better next time, yeah?  Okay.

07. Alex Dowling, "Her Name"

A boy lives at a boarding school, and recounts his situation in a slightly abstruse way.  His mother has died, is the long and short of it.  I liked this.  The boy soprano, Seán Hayden, acquits himself very well.  It made me think about my own mother and start feeling a little Verklempt.  I may not have much to say about it, but it's a poignant piece.

08. Peter Fahey, "Through and Through"

This uses traditional folk music: it starts with what seems to be some sort of mutated version of the last part of "The Outlandish Knight," the weird part where she bribes her parrot to not give away that she's been out (though in a different context).  Then, it switches into "Henry Lee," which probably most of us know from the Nick Cave version.  Well, the woman's not really singing, in any operatic sense, and the minimalistic backing squawking is what it is.  I like the kind of Child Ballad stuff this is riffing on, so I sort of liked this, but it's really not that memorable as its own thing.

09. Michael Gallen, "At a Loss"

A woman sings about--apparently--her mother's imminent death (from COVID?), and thinks about energy in general.  And stuff.  One does sort of get numb to this sort of effort at profundity, but it's actually okay.  The visuals are good: she seems to be in a hotel room or something, and behind her we see stars, and there are flickery lights, and it's admittedly kind of eerie.  Whevz.  I've seen worse.

10. Andrew Hamilton, "erth upon erth"

"A response to a terrifying walk through a Covid Hot Zone," the Operavision description says, and I will have to take their word for it.  This is largely close-ups of a frightened woman's face, acompanied by something that is apparently a Medieval poem, but again, I must take their word for it.  It doesn't really say much of anything.  Especially since this is the last entry in the first part, I'm sorry to say it, but I basically hated this.  Really irritating nothing.

Tobias Picker, An American Tragedy (2005)

Just a few days ago, Tobias Picker (or whoever runs his youtube channel) uploaded performances of three of his operas, including this one from the Glimmerglass Festival in 2014.  It was commissioned by the Met, but apparently not video recorded, so only the audio is available through Met on Demand.  And because you want the one you can't have, I was really keen to see it.  Well, also, I enjoyed his Fantastic Mr. Fox.  As far as literary sources go, these two may be polar opposites.

So we've got this Clyde Griffiths fellow.  He's super-ambitious, and he gets a supervisor's job at his rich uncle's clothing factory.  In spite of being told to keep his hands off the women on the floor, he quickly takes up with one Roberta Alden.  But while this is going on, he meets a woman named Sondra, one of his uncle's daughter's friends, another rich girl, natch.  They starts flirting and this is GREAT, marrying her would be perfect for his ambitions, but whoops, turns out Roberta's pregnant and he has to do...something.  And that "something" is murder (introducing a bit of a noir-ish element to the proceedings).  He takes her out in a boat and overturns it, her having casually mentioned earlier that she couldn't swim.  The perfect crime?  No, an extremely imperfect one, as investigators find her body and then their correspondence, and in spite of lying a very determined fashion, he's ultimately found guilty and executed.

I think a story like this works because it's so easy to identify with Clyde's dilemma.  I feel like some people wouldn't like to admit that, because it's a little scary, but it's true.  I mean, I certainly hope that I would behave in a more mensch-like fashion, but fuck, man.  You don't sympathize with him, but you definitely understand him.

It's kind of weird, when I think about it, that I've never read Dreiser.  I suppose I should.  The main thing I know is that when I was in grad school, various students from some class I was not in were kvetching about how incredibly boring Sister Carrie was.  Who can say?  This one isn't boring, certainly.  The story compels, and the sort of mostly-tonal neo-romantic music, with a few gospel or general Americana-ish elements, is very good.  I enjoyed it.

As for this production, well, it appears to cut out a prologue about Clyde's earlier life, which is less than ideal, but the piece doesn't feel incomplete or anything.  The video is archival footage (the words "Property of Glimmerglass Opera Not for Distribution" periodically appear at the bottom of the screen--Picker is a rebel at the gates of hell, apparently), and it's shot from a fixed camera, meaning no close-ups or anything like that.  I suppose that makes it in some sense more like watching live, but the limitations of the format and the video quality make it impossible to really get a good idea of what any of the singers look like.  Not the hugest deal, but I do think the drama would have been enhanced by being able to see it better.

Picker's pretty good, and I do believe that all his operas are available in video format currently (putting him ahead of most contemporary composers), so I'll probably see them all at some point.

Siegfried Wagner, Sonnenflammen (1918)

Seriously: is there any composer--hell, any artist of any type--laboring under a longer shadow than Richard Wagner's son?  I have my doubts.  And naming him after his Ring Cycle hero was just adding insult to injury.  I suppose, however, that his name must also have opened doors for him.  Well, here's this, recently released for the first time on DVD.

So the plot: I must say, it was rather hard to follow, though whether that's the opera itself or the production is hard to say (more on that later).  I was thankful for the summary in the booklet.  It's Crusade Time, and there's a knight, Fridolin, who is supposed to be crusading.  But he's not.  He has forsaken his oath and is living in Byzantium as a guest of the Emperor.  He is in love with a woman named Iris, daughter of the court jester, but she won't return his affections because she wants him to crusade.  Meanwhile her father, Gomella, has his problems: he's in trouble for stealing from the emperor, but he'll be spared if he can procure his daughter for him; the emperor doesn't like his wife and wants another heir, his current son being sickly and degenerate.  Gomella agrees but finds a prostitute who looks sort of like his daughter to send in her place (although then Iris is also kind of into the emperor).  At a banquet, it turns out that the emperor's brother had a plan to assassinate him, which fails, but Fridolin, having prematurely celebrated this plan, is now in the doghouse and has to choose between being executed or the humiliation of having his head shaved and made Gomella's co-jester.  He chooses the latter.  The empress kills herself and her son, having learned of the emperor's infidelity.  Fridolin's father comes by and is disgusted by his son's abasement, which makes him want to make up for what he's done.  Suicide seems the only choice, and he stabs himself.  The crusaders attack.  The emperor goes off to face them, presumably to his death.  Gomella runs off.  Iris confesses her love for Fridolin.  He dies.  She loses consciousness from the smoke but is carried off by her attendants.  THE END.

Does that sound Wagnerian?  Well, there is a sort of sin-and-redemption thing that might make you think of Tannhäuser, though it would be pushing it to say that Fridolin really redeems himself.  But it definitely has that sort of feel, confused plotting included (I legit can't figure out if Wagner wrote his own libretti, like pa--the booklet doesn't seem to include any credits, but it does seem like something a Wagner would write).  But as to the central questions--how's the music and does it sound like dad?--all I can say is pretty good and kind of, probably?  You'd undoubtedly get a better answer from a Wagnerian, but it definitely did at least in places remind me of père, not least in its aria-less style.

But we have to talk about the production here, because that's where we really run into problems.  Is the drama effective?  Is it well-told?  Well, it's hard for me to judge, because either way, this does a piss-poor job of bringing it across.  It's not bad because it's regietheater or Eurotrash or anything like that; it's bad because it's bad!  A equals A!  This was recorded in August, deep in pandemic-times, and as such it has a "digital orchestra."  What's that?  Not wholly clear.  There IS a conductor, who is...well, he's waving his arms around anyway, so I assume he's doing something, but there's no physical orchestra in the house.  Kind of weird, but okay, I don't have any huge problems with that.  What I do have huge problems with is the overwhelmingly cheap feeling that pervades the entire thing.  I don't think opera productions have to be hyper-lavish, but it's all in how you work with what you have, and good lord, every penny not spent on this is very visible onstage.  You basically have an empty stage with these pink and green columns and a video screen in back projecting allegedly-relevant video footage.  The singers are dressed in an unexciting mixture of modern-day and sword-and-sandal-type stuff.  Whatever drama there is here, it's leached away by the opera's circumstances.  Rarely have I been less whelmed.  And there's really no excuse for any of this, because this is not some scrappy low-budget production from an up-and-coming company: this is flippin' Bayreuth!  They could've done better!  What chain of decisions led to this?  I ask you!

It is seriously you gee ell why, it ain't got no alibi, and what's more, the feeling of cheapness extends to the DVD.  The video recording--which seems like it should be a gimme for something recorded in 2020--is frequently really murky-looking, and the sound engineering is doubtful: the singing often seems swallowed up by the music (which is part of why I'm reluctant to judge Wagner's work).  You know me; I'm willing to put up with some lousy quality for the sake of an opera, but there's really no reason that this should be as bad as it is, given the context.  JEEZ, even the subtitles are bad: clearly very indifferently machine-translated from the German, filled with weird phrasings and obvious grammatical errors--and towards the end, there are a couple of lines that aren't even translated--the subtitles remain in German.  Just a REAL clown show, I have to say.  Frankly, everyone involved should be ashamed of having put out such a shoddy product.  DVDs put out by Naxos usually have a baseline level of quality that this fails to reach.   If Bayreuth wants to rekindle interest in Wagner fils, they're going to have to do better than this.

Bo Holten, The Visit of the Royal Physician (2009)

What's the state of modern Danish opera? is a question that is often asked.  Well, here's one exemplar, based on a popular Swedish novel about Christian VII, king of Denmark in the latter half of the eighteenth century; and the titular physician.

I cannot speak to how closely this comports with actual history, but the idea here is that the old king has died, leaving Christian in charge.  Unfortunately, he is, as his advisors repeatedly say, "insane."  That seems to be an overstatement; he's childlike and easily manipulated, but one can imagine that with sympathetic helpers acting in good faith, he could have been a decent king--you know, if we have to have a king at all.  But alas.  Well, they decide that he needs a doctor to keep him in check, so they find this reform-minded German doctor, Johann Friedrich Struensee, to look after him.  Struensee becomes close to the king and eventually the de facto ruler, issuing sweeping egalitarian reforms to the state.  He also has an affair with the queen, a teenage English princess who is definitely not getting any satisfaction from her husband.  The powers that be, notably the brutal minister Ove Høegh-Guldberg, do not appreciate Struensee's interference, and he's finally arrested for allegedly plotting against the king's life (the king himself wants to pardon him, but he is too weak and ineffectual) and executed in gruesome fashion.  A brutal conclusion of the old school, although the text tries to sort of give Struensee a final victory: the last words of the opera are the king saying how weird it is that in spite of everything, people are talking about the Age of Struensee and not the Age of Guldberg.

I found the libretto rather confusing; the specific manner of Struensee's downfall is unclear.  Still, the opera as a whole was all right.  I did not find the music--more or less tonal stuff--super-memorable, but it carried the story.  As others have noted, the sound recording is not altogether optimal, but I am not an audiophile and it didn't bother me overly.

I'd love to see some more Danish opera--particularly from the nineteenth century, which I never have--but easier said than done.  I could if I were willing to do without subtitles, but that's a heavy lift.  We will see.

Georges Bizet, La jolie fille de Perth (1867)

It seems weird to me that Bizet's operas other than the big hit are so rarely performed.  It seems like they'd be an easy sell: hey, you know how much you like Carmen?  Well, here's another one by the same guy!  Well, be that as it may, here's this one, as subtitled and uploaded by the guy known as Nervous Gentleman, who sadly just disappeared three years ago.  Maybe he just too nervous to carry on.  Some CBD oil might help.

Here's how dumb I am: as I watched this, I kept thinking, okay, but what does this have to do with Western Australia?  I'm not really feeling the Antipodean ambiance.  Then I checked and found that, okay, Perth is also the name of a town in Scotland, and the opera is based on a novel by Walter Scott, The Fair Maid of Perth.  Okay then.  I still think it would be fun to do a production with kangaroos bouncing around the stage.

Honestly, that does take a little of the wind out of my sails: I really wanted to talk about a down-under opera, not some dumb Walter Scott thing.  Sadly, looking at a summary of the book, it doesn't seem to feature anything as awesome as the hero randomly drowning in quicksand for no reason.  Basically, there's this blacksmith named Henry who wants to marry a woman, Catherine, and she rejected him before but now she's not going to, until she mistaken leaps to the conclusion that he's involved with a gypsy fortune teller, Mab.  There's a duke who wants Catherine, but Mab goes to his place instead.  Catherine realizes that really, Henry's transgression was nothing and forgives him, but he's mad because he thinks she spent the night with the duke, which idea is backed up by the fact that the duke has a jewel he had given her (which she'd thrown away and Mab picked up--you can't think too hard about these things).  Anyway, some stuff happens, Catherine goes mad, but then Henry accepts her and she goes un-mad.  Really, you have to wonder what exactly these old-time people thought madness even was, if it could be turned on and off like a light switch.  It seems like it's just the same as having strong emotions about something.

The libretto's a bit clumsy, but musically, this is quite good, really.  On the whole, I'd definitely say I prefer it to Les pêcheurs de perles, even if there's no individual moment quite as good as "Au fond du temple saint."  I dunno.  Perform more Bizet operas, durnit!  His premature death was a tragedy, so we should celebrate his life and work as much as we can.

Aulis Sallinen, Kuningas Lear (2000)

This is my ninth Finnish-language opera.  I really want to get to ten, but at present, I don't see any prospects for that.  I guess it's just another one of those situations where you gotta have faith.  This one could go either way: I really liked Sallinen's Red Line; liked his Palace much less.  So this one is the tiebreaker, apparently.

King! Lear!  You know it well!  There's probably not that much to say about that.  Verdi kicked around the idea of doing a Lear opera for a while, but never got anywhere; apparently, he was a bit overawed by the prospect.  But maybe he shouldn't have been, because this version works fine.  In fairness, I imagine Verdi probably had a more ambitious conception of it, but still.  It follows after the play fairly closely, though I did notice a few changes (in spite of not having read or seen it in many years): the character of Kent is absent, and the Fool doesn't disappear; he's present in the final scene.  Also, he presents a short prologue at the beginning.  

Hey man, it's pretty good!  Some powerful music that works well with the text, and they were fortunate enough to get Matti Salminen as the title character, which is absolutely the ideal casting.  He totally owns the role, vocally, physically, and actingwise.  Sweartagod, even though I knew exactly what was going to happen, his final speech nearly left me in tears.  You've also got Jorma Hynninen (who played the leads in The Red Line as well as Rautavaara's Aleksis Kivi) as Gloucester.  Those are the only names I was familiar with, but there are a lot of other standouts, including Taina Piira and Kirsi Tiihonen, toe-curlingly vicious as Goneril and Regan; and Jorma Silvasti as a very psychopathic Edmund.

All that and also a really effective minimalistic production, with just a few pieces of furniture or stumps of trees on the stage, and ya got yerself a winner.  I hope that more of Sallinen's operas will be recorded in the near future, and not just so I can hit my Finnish quota. 

Richard Strauss, Die Liebe der Danae (1940)

Strauss's penultimate opera has a slightly complicated performance history: he didn't want it to be performed until after the war was over, but then it was going to be done in 1944 until, after the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler, theaters were closed.  It was allowed to be performed, once, in a dress rehearsal, so Strauss could see it (what swell guys those nazis were!), but the public debut didn't take place until after Strauss's death, in 1952.  That's neither here nor there, but I thought I should mention it.

The plot is really something.  Regarding Phaëton, I noted that some of it seemed to be completely fabricated, non-mythological stuff, but there was nothing there of a sort that you <i>wouldn't</i> find in mythology.  Nothing that contradicted anything.  But this is completely different: it takes mythological figures and puts them in situations totally unlike anything the Greeks and Romance did.

So: Danae was the princess whose father receive a prophesy that his grandson would kill him, so he locked her in a tower to prevent her from ever having kids (was she really supposed to stay there until she was past child-bearing age?  That is fucked).  But Jupiter visited her in a shower of gold, and the result was Perseus. 

Well, forget all that.  It's not relevant here, except the "shower of gold" thing as a kind of metaphor.  Danae is the son of King Pollux (not mythological); he wants to marry her off to a rich dude to resolve his financial woes.  She thinks about this in terms of the aforementioned shower of gold, which I absolutely cannot refer to as a "golden shower" for obvious reasons.  Word comes that Midas, who can turn things to gold (but is here not a king and has nothing else in common with the source), is up for marrying her.  The idea is that he was a humble donkey-cart driver, until Jupiter showed up and gave him this power, with the proviso that he could take Midas' place whenever he wanted, seemingly just to pick up girls.  Not sure he really need the help, but whatevz.  So anyway, Midas' servant shows up to bring Danae back (back where? Not sure) for the marriage, only it's actually Midas himself, with Jupiter disguised as Midas so HE  can marry her (which seems a very needlessly baroque scheme).  There are also three former conquests of Jupiter--Leda, Alcmene, Europa, and Semele--just kind of hanging around and teasing him.  Anyway, the problem with Big J's scheme is that Danae and Midas fall in love.  She turns to gold when they kiss, but then turns back, I guess because of her love.  Jupiter, in anger, takes away the golden touch, but this does not deter them, because they're so in love.  Realizing that his feelings for Danae run deeper than wanting to make another quick conquest, makes a last-ditch appeal to her, but when he sees that it's hopeless, is forced to renounce her.  He's definitely a better loser than you'd likely expect from the mythological Jupiter.

So that's that.  It's nuts, but in a really good way.  I will level with you: this opera is incredible.  Was Strauss the greatest composer of the twentieth century?  All signs point to yes.  Impossibly gorgeous music, and--everybody points to this, but there's a reason for that--Jupiter's renunciation of Danae at the end HOLY GOD.  I did not know that music could be this good.  My gast is flabbered.  It's not performed often...or so people say, but there ARE two separate productions on DVD, plus the Fisher Center performance that I saw.  But if it's not, it SHOULD be.  This is a good production, but there is one very big problem, which is that the subtitles are badly mistimed.  FUCK, people.  Do you not realize what a big problem that is?!?  Well, that's neither here nor there.  I think I'll watch one of the other versions one of these days.  This well merits multiple viewings.

Jean-Baptiste Lully, Phaëton (1683)

I know the box styles it "Phaéton," but that's just wrong, as you can see from the original score:

It's a diaeresis, indicating that the "a" and "e" are pronounced as separate sounds.  You kind of look overly pedantic if you use them in English, but they remain part of The New Yorker's style guide.  "Coöperate;" "Deëmphasize."

Here's all I knew about Phaëton before seeing this: son of Apollo who goes to see his dad, who promises him a wish; he demands to be able to drive his dad's chariot.  Dad thinks this is an extremely bad idea but has no choice but to let him, having sworn; kid horribly fucks up and scorches the Earth and then dies.  Seems like a thin plot for an opera!  But clearly, there will be more to it.

We start with a prologue in praise of...hmm, who could it be?  I suppose you do have to give Lully or his regular librettist, Philippe Quinault, credit for being subtle enough not to mention Louis XIV by name in these things, but...hmm.  For a while I thought, jeez, wouldn't he get bored with all this fulsome praise?  But then, I thought of that guy who, you may dimly recall, was our last President: of course, he hates art, but if he DID somehow watch stuff like this, he'd totally be into it.  In fact, he'd get bored and lose interest as soon as the actual story started.  So...yup, I just compared yer Sun King to fuckin' T****.  Come at me.

Okay, right.  Anyway.  So as far as I can tell, a lot of this has no mythological source.  It takes place in Egypt: who is going to marry Libie, the king's daughter, and be the next king?  Well, the king chooses Phaëton, which naturally upsets his lover Théone, as well as Libie and her lover Épaphus.  The latter denigrates him, being all, hey, Jupiter acknowledges me as his son, whereas who says you're really the son of Apollo?  Your mom told you?  Psh, yeah, that's convincing.  So he goes to see Apollo to prove his claim, Apollo foolishly grants him a wish, and so he doesn't end up destroying the whole world, Jupiter kills him.  And that is that.  Presumably Épaphus and Libie can get back together now, so that's nice.  

Phaëton's not exactly a likable character; even beyond the way he eagerly leaves his lover when there's power at stake, he just comes across as whiny and petulant.  I'm not sure if him insisting on driving the chariot even though he knows he'll likely die is meant to me in some way noble, but yeesh.  That's not a criticism of the opera.  It's just interesting; not something you generally see in pieces like this.  Is this a tragedy?  Gotta be, but not one you feel too bad about.

Not a great production, I wouldn't say.  I mean, good enough; it didn't impede my enjoyment, but it's a big jumble of modern and period elements that gives me the impression the producers didn't have any strong controlling idea.  I suppose we must be glad it's available at all, however.

Me?  I liked this pretty well.  Of the Lully I've seen, I'd put it right smack in the middle quality-wise, ahead of Cadmus et Hermione and Atys (though honestly, if I went back and rewatched those, I suspect I'd appreciate them a lot more) but behind Armide and well behind Persée.  We definitely need more Lully on video; I'll readily agree that he's not as good as Rameau, but he's plenty good enough, as well as playing an important role in musical history.