Armen Tigranian, Anoush (1912)

Our tour of former Soviet Republics now takes us to Armenia for this, which is considered--or so I am told--if not the first Armenian opera, at least the first one that really reveals the Armenian character.  I will leave that for the experts to decide.

So we're in an Armenian village.  Anoush and a shepherd named Saro are in love.  She's momentarily freaked out by a prediction that her lover will be shot and killed, but ha ha, that won't happen.  At a wedding party, the village elder insists that Saro and his friend (and Anoush's brother) Mossy (Mossy?) wrestle.  They don't want to, but he insists.  Now, there's something you should know about this village: they have a rule, or maybe more a guideline, that you're not allowed to win at wrestling.  It sounds weird when I put it like that, but I'm not sure there would be any way to make it sound not-weird.  So they're just funnin' around, but then Saro sees Anoush in the crowd, wants to impress her, and impulsively pins Mossy (Mossy?).  This is taken as the blackest of insults, and now Mossy (Mossy?) is his implacable enemy forever.  Anoush and Saro try to run away, but Mossy (Mossy?) finds Saro and shoots him dead.  After a mad scene, Anoush jumps in a precipice.  What happens to Mossy (Mossy?)?  We may never know.  Personally, I was waiting for the scene where Saro, driven made by grief and hatred, transforms into the monstrous Necrosaro and terrorizes the world, but that scene must've been cut from the version I saw.

I mean, it would definitely have been a cool visual.

Anyway, there's definitely something to be said for this: I won't say the music knocked my socks off, but the Armenian folk stuff was fun.  It reminded me a little of the music in Leyli and Majnun, but closer to the more usual operatic tradition.  Furthermore, some of the scenes--of the girls telling each other fortunes, of the wedding party--seemed to do a good job of depicting this culture.  And yet...BOY is it hard to get over the absurdity of the central conflict.  I know that overreaction is more common in opera than the reverse, but even so, embarking on this huge, fatal vendetta over a friendly wrestling match seems excessive.  You can say, well, you just don't understand how vital the idea of "honor" was in cultures like this, and that may be true, but...well, it's hard to imagine much of anyone really feeling this.  And beyond that, even by operatic standards, the relationship between Anoush and Saro is not well-developed.

There's a video of a film version from 1983  online, but I wasn't sure how well it was actually following the plot, and there was sententious narration in Armenian from Some Guy, which I didn't care for.  So I got the DVD.  It lacks subtitles, which is lame but which I anticipated; there's an English-language libretto here.  What's more relevant is that the video quality is just okay, and that there's a box in the bottom right that says "PARSEGHIAN VIDEO" onscreen at all times, which is a real amateur move.