Hey, I absolutely get the many, many reasons that facebook sucks. It's no exaggeration to say that if it didn't exist we wouldn't have gotten fucking T****. And I'm totes cognizant of the privacy concerns, and they are real concerns. AND YET...well, it knows very well that I like opera, and sometimes it recommends me things like this that are extremely time-sensitive and that I never would've known about otherwise. And hey, if one side effect of the literal destruction of the world is that I get to watch a few more operas...well, you can decide if that's a price worth paying. But here we are!
Yes. So obviously, this is based on Hawthorne's short story--one of five such operas, per wikipedia (meanwhile, there are no fewer than eighteen Scarlet Letters, but is a one of them available anywhere? To ask is to answer). It's set in Padua, where a student, Giovanni, has come to study. His boarding house is next to the house and garden of a doctor named--wait for it--Rappaccini. A professor acquaintance of Giovanni's warns him that Rappaccini is bad news--he's obsessed with knowledge even if it means killing off patients.
Rappaccini has a daughter, Beatrice, but doesn't let anyone get close to her. Giovanni sees her and naturally becomes obsessed. His weird landlady tells him a secret path into the garden. They're in love, but he gets pricked by a thorn tree that she warns is poisonous. His wound starts to fester. Baglioni warns him that Beatrice is bad news, being made of poison, and gives him an antidote with which perhaps to save her. In the garden, the doctor comes in and rants about how now Giovanni and Beatrice can mate and breed a race of supermen. Giovanni gives Beatrice the antidote which she drinks and--so it seems--they die together.
It's unsettling stuff; give it credit. I suspect that high school students might like it more than The Scarlet Letter. As for myself, I can't really say whether it's a good novel; all I can say is that it's definitely not a good novel to make fifteen-year-olds read.
At any rate, this is a really good opera. The music is very cool: a kind of sparkly, shimmering, minimalistic-ish thing that perfectly fits the macabre story. Sort of reminds me of Saariaho in places. I seem to recall the other Catán opera I've seen, Florencia en el Amazonas, as having a more conventional neo-romantic sound. But I like them both! And the Chicago production here is very cool, especially the garden with all its beautiful yet (we know) deadly plant life. I recommend it; tomorrow is your last opportunity, at least for now.
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