How about a double bill of Greek operas? Why indeed not? Both from the Greek National Opera, which so far is the only place to see such things. Here's Despo, performed on a double bill with what are known as Greek Dances, composed in the 1930s by Nikos Skalkottas. I found them a bit of a mixed bag (though no complaints about the choreography), but then again, they weren't my main purpose for being here, were they? Although they do make up the bulk of the bill, Despo only being a half hour long.
So we have Greek refugees living in this town of Souli. But dammit, the Ottomans attack. There's a woman named Despo (if she was a real person, I've been totally unable to find any evidence to that effect), whose husband has been killed. So, she holes herself up in a tower with other Greek patriots, and they hold out against the invaders as long as they can, and after that she sets off gunpowder and kills everyone. It's a standard sort of nationalist plot, albeit boiled down for a shorter work. It reminded me of Ivan Zajc's Nikola Šubić Zrinski (which, hey, debuted just a year after this). Short but enjoyable for sure, with lots of rousing choruses. As I said, I don't need to have any particular investment in a country to have fun with its evocations of national pride. Admittedly there's not room to provide much of an idea of anyone's character, but what the hey.
And now, from the sublime(?) to the...something, how about Anthony's Death, which I feel like would be better translated as The Death of Anthony, but I merely follow GNO's conventions. So there's this seventies shojo manga and anime called Candy Candy (which title somehow seems overdetermined). I mean, in real life; you can look it up. And the twenty-fourth episode was apparently kind of traumatic for people who saw it at an impressionable age, as the protagonist's boyfriend Anthony gets thrown from a horse and dies (just like Albertine in Proust). So this is about that, sort of. There are two hunters in an indeterminate Godot-like space, talking about this incident (in the opera, we see the fatal moment many times on an on-stage TV) and various other things. I'm afraid I can't be more specific than that. Per the description:
Two men, stuck in a clearing out of Dante or Heidegger, smugly indulge in the pleasures of speech and are faced with trauma, fantasy, the death drive, repetition compulsion, their fear of woman and their omnipresent narcissism – with intermediate stops at the Epistles of St Paul, the Seminars of Jacques Lacan and the hit songs by Ruslana and Eleni Dimou. Their obsessional, unstoppable discourse is shot through with insistent questions: Does Woman exist, or not? Why is “fox” written with a lowercase initial in Greek, though with an uppercase initial in German? And most of all: Why did we cry so hard when Anthony Brown, Candy’s blond boyfriend, fell from his horse at the end of that fatal, twenty-fourth episode in the mid-’80s? [actually, the episode was from 1977, but maybe it wasn't exported until later].
That...sounds interesting, but I have to admit, I got a little bored. Really, nothing happens throughout the whole run time. The music is inoffensively tonal, but that's about all I can say. Maybe I should watch it again, huh? I really do want to like it. Question: was the death in question a particularly big thing in Greece? Is it or was it ever a big thing in the US? Should I watch it? I dunno...I find the art style kind of hideous, not that it would probably be my thing in any case. I do find it funny that amazon has a listing for what is obviously a bootleg DVD set. Boy, bootleg anime DVDs. That brings me back, although I'm not necessarily interested in revisiting the actual material.
Anyway, Greek operas: I've seen 'em! ALL of 'em! I am unstoppable!
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