Ethan Gans-Morse, The Canticle of the Black Madonna (2013)

This just appeared out of nowhere on Opera on Video.  Actually, I guess everything there appears out of nowhere.  Whatever.

It's about Adam, a soldier returning to his home in Louisiana and his wife Mara after an extended tour in Afghanistan (topical).  But he is suffering from extreme PTSD from things he'd done and seen overseas.  Mara and his friend John (a veteran of the first Gulf War who's been able to overcome his demons by this point) try to help him, but it is hard.  Obviously.  This is also the time of the horrific British Petroleum Oil Spill, so the damage caused there is implicitly compared to the damaged done to Adam.  And on another narrative level, there also two angels and the titular Black Madonna, who sing some poetic hymns and also help the humans out.  The ending is redemptive, as one would likely guess from the subtitle "A Soldier's Journey from the Desolation of War to the Healing Embrace of Love."

This is a seriously powerful piece of work.  I mean, I like plenty of contemporary opera, but when something just sort of comes out of the blue at you, you tend to be slightly skeptical.  At least I do.  But no; it's really good, and the tonal music is powerful, a sort of contrast between the oratorio-like singing of the divine beings and the more "grounded" of the humans.  Who the heck is Ethan Gans-Morse?  He's just some young guy who doesn't even have a wikipedia page, but he done good here, as did the librettist, Tiziana DellaRovere.  I do have to say, the whole "Black Madonna" thing seems a little arbitrary: you wonder how this particular spiritual vision relates to the human drama.  There's nothing in the characters' lives or contexts that would suggest it.  No biggie, though.

Part of this is definitely due to the casting.  I was super-delighted to see Michael Mayes as Adam.  I first (and last) saw Mayes as Joseph De Rocher, the title character in Dead Man Walking, where his performance was devastatingly effective.  His character here is a different flavor of fucked up, but it's still an intense role, and he really brings it.  Lindsey Cafferky as Mara also makes her character feel very real.

But everything is sort of overshadowed by Gwendolyn Brown as the Black Madonna herself.  Holy shit, dude.  The general lack of contraltos in operas is an odd thing: I get the argument that it's because not that many women develop that kind of voice, but composers have long written at least minor roles for them, suggesting that they thought appropriate singers could be found.  But nowadays, those roles are almost always taken by mezzos.  Contraltos could retaliate by taking mezzo roles, I suppose, but that never seems to happen.  But I'll tell you that THIS is one role where you goddamn well need a real contralto, and they goddamn well got one.  I don't think I've ever heard a woman with a lower singing voice than Brown.  She's a force of nature, and it would be worth seeing the opera alone just to boggle at her.

But there are other reasons, too!  Well done, everyone.  I enjoyed and was moved by your work.

Enrst Krenek, Kehraus um St. Stephan (1930)

Man, this one was just sitting there for so long waiting for me to get to it.  And now I have!  The other Krenek opera I've seen is Karl V, famous(?) as the first complete, full-length twelve-tone opera.  And one of the only?  Obviously, lots of composers have dabbled in serialism to one degree or another, but pure twelve-tone operas are very rare.  Anyway, I'd probably never have heard of this, only it came in a set with Karl V (as you can see).  It was supposed to debut in 1930, but the authorities didn't like it (for fairly obvious reasons), so it wasn't performed until 1990, a year before Krenek's death.  Nice that he got to see it.

This has a somewhat complicated plot, but there's not much information about it on the internet (at least in English), so I feel I should go over it in relative detail.  Vienna, 1918, just after Armistice Day: Ottmar Brandstetter, an army officer, is hanging himself, having been worn out by the war and convinced that his sweetheart Elisabeth doesn't love him anymore.  But he's rescued by Sebastian Kundrather, owner of a not-super-successful vineyard and wine bar.  Kundrather agrees to let him work in the vineyard.  Meanwhile, Elisabeth was still plenty in love with him, but it's been erroneously reported that his suicide attempt was successful, so she takes up with his friend, Alfred Koppreiter, a successful industrialist.  She regrets this when she sees that her former beau is still alive--and she still has feelings for him--the more so, presumably, because Koppreiter soon leaves her in favor of Kundrather's coquettish daughter Maria (who later leaves him in favor of a German investor named Kabulke--this will be relevant later).  Bradstetter is leading a sort of aimless existence meanwhile, bumping from one menial job to another.  

AT THE SAME TIME, there's a yellow journalist named Erich Atma Rosenbusch, who is posing as a labor organizer at Koppreiter's business.  He comes up with a scheme to ruin Koppreiter by making everyone think that he, Koppreiter, had bribed him, Rosenbusch, to go easy on him (or something; I must admit, I sort of missed some of the particulars here).  This ruins Koppreiter's business, and a bunch of laid-off employees beat Rosenbusch to death, not that I suppose that's much comfort.  Now Koppreiter is going to be prosecuted, so he wants to flee the country and needs somewhere to hide in the meantime.  Brandstetter is currently working as a carnival barker, and suggests that Koppreiter can disguise himself as one of the carnival freaks--no one would suspect it.  This seems to be going okay, but then Kabulke shows up with Maria, who, due to his intervention, has been named Miss Vienna.  Seeing them together is the last straw for Koppreiter.  He pulls out a gun to kill himself; Brandstetter tries to stop him and in the scuffle is himself shot and injured, and Koppreiter kills himself anyway.  Bummer.  Now everyone is calling Brandstetter a hero for trying to save his friend and they all try to channel his newfound celebrity (if such it be) for their own ends.  He demurs, saying that he's going to go back to the vineyard with Elisabeth (and to be clear she doesn't just love him again because of his alleged heroism, the opera's not that cynical; they had gotten back together before that).  Everything ends happily, albeit with a bit of sort of ominous foreshadowing, as well one might expect from a German opera written in 1930.

I have to say: what an absolutely fucking fascinating opera.  I've really never seen the like, plotwise.  The thing it most reminds me of is Berlin Alexanderplatz; even though the location is different, it feels like a very, very similar milieu, and capturing the same feeling of interwar chaos, unease, and restlessness.  Actually, I'd be willing to wager that Krenek (who wrote his own libretto) was (unconsciously, at least) influenced by Döblin's novel.  It had been a huge publishing phenomenon just the year before, so he HAD to have read it, and particularly Brandstetter haplessly bouncing from job to job is SO reminiscent of Franz Biberkopf's travails.  At one point he's illicitly selling "French postcards;" Biberkopf likewise for a while was hawking pornography.  But regardless, I've never seen anything in an opera like the social panorama that we get here.  I didn't know that operas could do that, really.

If you think the music is going to sound anything like Karl V, that is a dumb thing to think and you should stop doing it.  There are certain occasional serialist motifs, but broadly speaking, this is in the romantic tradition.  Krenek also mixes in elements of the popular music of the time, which really helps with the feeling of time and place.

I mean, I don't want to oversell this or anything, but it really does seem to me to be a groundbreaking opera, and Krenek probably deserves to be much more widely-known and performed.

Operettas Galore!

Is three "galore?"  Well, somehow these are piling up without me writing about them, so I thought I'd take the chance now.  All three of these were written within a nine-year period, so they seem to fit together.

Johann Strauss II, Der Zigeunerbaron (1885)

I'm kind of interested by the extent to which operettas often take place in historical situations that would not on the surface appear particularly operetta-y.  This is set in Hungary in the eighteenth century, over various political goings-on that I don't one hundred percent remember, but the upshot is that there's this Barinkay guy who's just returned from exile.  There's a woman he's smitten with, but she won't marry him as he's not a noble (that's just her excuse; she's actually involved with someone else).  By a mechanism which I don't think is very well-explained, a band of Gypsies acclaim him as their leader, so now he calls himself a "Gypsy Baron" (Zigeunerbaron), but in the meantime, he's fallen in love with one of the Gypsies, so his previous infatuation is no longer operative.  But when it turns out that the woman he's in love with is an ACTUALLY noble, secretly (as people are), he doesn't feel like he be with her, 'cause he's not.  But then everyone goes off to war (?), and when they come back as heroes, he becomes an actual baron--though he explicitly declares that since the Gypsies are the ones who helped him, he's really spiritually still a Gypsy Baron.  It's very sympathetic to the Gypsy characters, which is the case more often than not in opera--I think probably when we in the US think of the word as a racial slur, while we're not exactly wrong, at the same time we're trying to put an American lens on a European issue--picturing Romani people as exactly equivalent to blacks in the US, which probably obfuscates more than it clarifies.  At any rate, everyone ends up happy.  What a surprise!

Carl Zeller, Der Vogelhändler (1891)

Again in the eighteenth century, this bird-seller (Vogelhändler) wants to marry his sweetheart but hasn't the money.  But then through various contrivances he comes to labor under the misapprehension that she was having an assignation with another man and gets mad.  Obviously, things ultimately work out, though I do have to admit, even though he's obviously going to become non-jerkish in the end, his jerkishness while he's jerkish does seem perhaps a bit overly extreme.  Obviously, this is a very basic description, and there is A LOT of extra frippery.  But you know the kind of thing you're gonna get, dangit!

Carl Millöcker, Der Bettelstudent (1882)

Again in the eighteenth century!  Why is that when we always are?!  In Poland this time, under Saxon occupation.  The Saxon colonel is miffed because a Polish countess, Laura, whacked him with a fan after he "kissed her shoulder," which may be fairly mild as sexual harassment goes, but come on, a fan attack is a pretty mild punishment.  But he's mad, and wants REVENGE.  The countess's family is poor, so his dubious plan is to get some poor Polish students who are prisoners and doll them up like rich people, and one of them will marry Laura (their family has fallen on hard times and desperately needs money), and then...something.  Presumably.  So the one student pretend to be a rich guy and the other his chamberlain.  Obviously, they both fall in love, the one with Laura and the other with her sister, and it turns out one of them is a secret agent from the Polish liberation movement, yadda yadda, and ultimately, they get rid of the Saxons and everything's cool.  And Laura would be willing to marry the bettelstudent in spite of his being a bettel, but then he gets made a count for helping with the movement.  Although still poor, presumably.  Laura was still poor even though a countess.  So who knows what's gonna happen with them, but there you are.

Obviously, Strauss is by far the best known of these composers; Zeller and Millöcker are kind of one-hit wonders.  And yet, I'm not at all convinced I would be able to distinguish between the three just based on their music.  Which is good!  I like it!  Which of these did I like best?  Um...I'm pretty sure I would always just say that the one I saw most recently.  Which in this case is Der Bettelstudent, so take that for however little it's worth.  There are a few love duets here that are worthy of Puccini.  Operetta writers are unfairly disparaged.  These are all Seefestspiele Mörbisch productions (we'd actually have very few operettas on video if not for this festival), so the productions are all comparable qualitywise (and they're all performed outside and they all end with a fireworks display--how magical would it be to see that in person?).  Really, you won't be disappointed no matter which way you go.

Yevhen Stankovych, When the Fern Blooms (1979)

There hasn't been much of any great interest on Operavision lately.  You can say it's just because I've seen more at this point and am less easily interested, but they definitely used to have more revivals of obscure works and world premieres of new operas.  Well, blaming COVID seems fair.  And hey, there's THIS--a Ukrainian opera that was suppressed by the Soviet authorities before its would-have-been premiere and went unperformed until 2017 (Stankovych is still around--it's edifying that he lived to see it).  That's the thing about which I am talking.

It was obviously banned because of its nationalistic sentiments, the same as The Heiress of Vilkači.  But this one is very weird and uncategorizable, and such things seems almost beside the point.  If anything, you'd have to call it an opera-ballet.  But that's what you call many Rameau operas, and this is definitely nothing like those (also, it has nothing to do with that children's book that teaches kids the valuable life lesson that everything they've ever loved will die.  I suppose that went without saying).  It's definitely more on the ballet side: there are no named characters, and although there are a few soloists, most of the singing is choral.  You're not going to make head or tale of the "plot"--the subtitles feel almost superfluous--but in an abstract way, it's trying to evoke ancient pagan festivals, and then the onrush of Ukrainian history.  This might be a bit of a stretch, but it's a bit like Rimsky-Korsakov's Mlada, which does have a plot and characters but which for long stretches is much more about this weird mystical stuff.

Musically, the obvious touchstone is Stravinsky's Sacre du printemps, but really, that's only one part of the puzzle.  Aside from saying it's kind of frantic and primitivist, I'm really at a loss, because this just doesn't sound like any other opera (or whatever you want to call it) that I've heard.  That's a good thing, to be clear, and I'm super-glad to have had the chance to see this.  I have to admit, I kind of thought the dancing was just okay, but the sets are dazzling and the music captivating and...just an overall impressive experience.  Blam.

Michael Dellaira, The Secret Agent (2011)

Here's an opera based on Conrad's novel, which I have taught in the past, so I'm pretty familiar with, but kind of long in the past, so not as much as I could be.  But it's a great, albeit coal-black, work of literature.

Do you know the story?  Do you?  Well, there's a dude named Mr. Verloc who's working with a group of anarchists but who is actually an agent provocateur employed by the embassy of an unknown European country but probably Russia (the opera makes it explicit here that they're Germans, but that doesn't seem quite right to me, and anyway, the ambiguity is the point).  The anarchists he meets with are the benign but ineffectual Michaelis, the amoral womanizer Ossipon who's a big devotee of the racist pseudoscience of phrenology, and the frighteningly nihilistic one known only as "The Professor" who always wears a suicide vest in case the authorities try to take him (the book features a forth anarchist, Yundt).  The secretary of the embassy, Mr. Vladimir, wants him to blow up Greenwich Observatory so it can be pinned on the anarchists, the questionable logic being that everyone is so big on science that this'll REALLY inflict a psychic blow.  Verloc makes the extremely bad decision to enlist his mentally disabled brother-in-law Stevie to set the bomb.  You see, Stevie--in an obvious bit of irony--is the only one in the book with a real sense of social justice, so Verloc's able to manipulate him into thinking he's punishing the people responsible for the world's cruelties.  But on the way, Stevie stumbled and drops the bomb, causing a massive explosion that blows him to pieces.  The police eventually figure out that this has something or other to do with Verloc, and that's how his wife, Winnie, learns what happened.  Stevie was the only person in the world she loved, so she stabs her husband to death.

Now, up to now this has been pretty faithful to the novel, but in the end, it diverges in a big way.  So in the book, what happens is that Winnie freaks out over what she's done, and when Ossipon shows up he gets her to agree to run away with her.  But after she boards the ship, he takes all her money and scarpers, and she drowns herself in the ocean.  Big laughs!  But here it's...very different: she kills her husband and Ossipon shows up and it looks like it's going to be what you'd expect, but: then Chief Inspector Heat, one of the cops on the case, appears and Ossipon is arrested on suspicion of the murder.  The Professor also shows up and they have a little confrontation.  Meanwhile, Winnie is busy going mad (hey, opera), and suddenly she's the only one on stage--was all the previous post-murder stuff supposed to be taking place in her mind?  Unclear.  At any rate, then there's a tableau of the people from the party staring at her and...the end.

Seriously, man, that ending is fuckin' WEIRD.  I don't know what else to say about it.  What would you think the music in a piece like this would be like?  Would you picture some shrieking atonality?  That would be one way to play it, but this is more reminiscent of Janáček: a little bit clangy, kind of unnerving, but mostly traditionally musical.  I liked it.  A lot of reviews I've read have criticized the libretto, but I think it was basically fine, ending notwithstanding.  Tells the story well, even if there isn't much room for anything crazy like arias.

But I was REALLY impressed by the cast here; I guess I never gave that much thought to what these people would look like, but this captures them very well.  My favorites: Nicolas Rigas, vacantly handsome as the lazy, self-pitying Verloc; Jonathan Blalock as the heartbreakingly innocent Stevie; Matthew Garrett as a dimwitted Ossipon; and Nathaniel Baer, really scary as The Professor (he normally goes by Nathan Baer; you won't find much of anything if you search for Nathaniel).

I don't know; whatever weaknesses the piece itself might have, cast and production definitely elevate it, and I would check it out, were I you.

André Grétry, Richard Coeur-de-lion (1784)

I don't think much about Grétry, yet now I've seen three of his operas.  Go figure.  This--so sez wikipedia--is considered his masterpiece, so sure, fine.  Probably not the all-time best timing for a French opera about the greatness of a king, but here it is.  Grétry wasn't killed in the Revolution or anything, so it seems to have worked out.  These days, of course, it's not much produced, but here is a performance.

It's based on some old legend about Richard being held captive in Austria on his way back from The Crusades and his rescue by a troubadour named Blondel.  He's in disguise, and he's pretending to be blind, which I suppose must've been how it was in the original, but it's not clear here how his fake blindness has anything to do with anything.  I dunno.  Blondel teams up with an Englishman named Sir Williams (Blondel realizes he's English when he uses the word "goddamn"--I found that pretty funny) and his, Williams', daughter Laurette.  What can I say?  They rescue the dang ol' king.  And there's an extremely half-baked romance between Laurette and the head jailer, Florestan.  He's captured, but then everyone's so happy that he's freed and gets to be with Laurette.  Okay.

The music here is much of a muchness with Grétry's Guillaume Tell, which is no bad thing.  I thought the overture to the third act was particularly rad.  Of course, this opera is most famous nowadays for the aria "Je crains de lui parler la nuit," which was borrowed or stolen (take your pick) by Tchaikovsky for his Queen of Spades.  It's a great piece no matter where you hear it, but I have to say, I think the context that Tchaikovsky gives it hits much harder than Grétry's: here, it's just about how much Laurette love Florestan, YAWNSVILLE, whereas in Queen of Spades it's about the Countess reminiscing over her past--devastating in a way that this can't approach.  But hey, Grétry still wrote the dang thing, so let's give credit where it's due!

Edward German, Tom Jones (1907)

Here's the OTHER Tom Jones opera, following Philidor's in the eighteenth century.  When Arthur Sullivan died before completing The Emerald Isle, his follow-up to The Rose of Persia, Edward German stepped in to finish it, and went on to write a handful of other operas in a similar vein, until--I gather--that operatic style fell out of fashion.  His last work was called The Fallen Fairies, which was set to WS Gilbert's final libretto.  Kind of an interesting legacy, to be involved in the final works of both G and S.  You might think that Fielding's novel is an odd choice for this milieu--it lacks the kind of zany frivolity you generally expect--but it works well enough.

When I saw a recording on OperaonVideo, I had to check it out, if only because of my weird fetish for seeing multiple operas by the same title.  I suppose you expect me to compare it to the Philidor version?  Well, the plots start off very similarly, with Sophie's father wanting her to marry the loathsome Blifil, Tom not being considered appropriate because of the "foundling" thing.  So he runs off, and we see him at an inn where various stuff happens, including Sophie showing up (I noticed that here, when she's referred to as Sophia, everyone pronounces it "So-FIE-uh."  That sounds hella weird to me.  Can it really be authentic?).  There are more minor characters from the novel here, but that's basically what it is.  It does diverge significantly in the latter half, as Tom's lover Lady Bellaston shows up, and this causes tension before Sophie gets back with him.  Tom's extra-Sophie dalliance are more clearly acknowledged here, which may be unintuitive.

But again: WHICH IS BETTER?!?  Well, really, do you prefer classical music or G&S-style light opera?  There are some nice tunes here, including some that REALLY make me think of folk songs I've heard performed by the likes of Martin Carthy.  In that sense, it's worth watching.

The sense in which it's NOT worth watching is the sense in which you'd be watching this version: the recording is utterly atrocious and I can't say much for the performance itself.  The year and venue are unknown, but it seems to be some sort of university production, in which case I suppose I should cut it some slack, but man, the set, such as it is, is extremely rinky-dink, and it cavalierly cuts out a handful of musical numbers for no apparent reason--like Philidor, this is probably already talkier than it needs to be, and you're just making it worse by cutting out the good parts (I know that these cuts were made because, significantly more so than that recording of The Rose of Persia that I saw, you will get absolutely nowhere with this without the libretto at hand).  Also, while the sound is almost adequate, the picture quality is bad.  I get the impression that it was filmed via camcorder by the parent of one of the singers, which is sort of charming, but come on.  At one extremely inopportune moment--the climax of the second act--their battery dies, and the recording picks up in the middle of the first musical number in the third.  YEESH.

So...yeah.  I might recommend the piece itself to you, if such things are to your taste, but I definitely wouldn't recommend it to any but the most obsessive until and unless a higher-quality recording of a better performance surfaces.

Ofer Ben-Amots, The Dybbuk (2008)

The Dybbuk is a popular play by S. Ansky which debuted in 1920.  It's been made into a number of operas: one in English from 1933, one in Yiddish (!) from 1999 (the first Yiddish opera, I think--I want to see it!).  I actually confusedly thought that was what this was, until I heard it--some of the libretto is in English, but the bulk is Hebrew.  Nice.

What's the story?  Well, it's a bit loose here, more about the poetry than the actual action and not too heavy on character.  In that sense, it sometimes feels more like a staged oratorio than an opera, albeit with a fair bit of spoken text.  But in any event, there's a woman, Leah, whose lover has died, and her dad wants her to marry someone else.  But then she's possessed by a lost spirit, known as a dybbuk.  A wise rabbi, Azriel, exorcises it, but Leah dies to be with her lost love.

I did have a bit trouble following this plot; it's a bit abstruse in places.  But it's still a memorable piece of work, I'd say, with very distinctive music that you don't see in any ol' opera: a lot of it has a strong klezmer influence, with sort of minimalistic elements and effects that I can't even quite describe.  Definitely worth watching for that alone.

Well, the other reason you should watch it is for Yahli Toren, the soprano who plays Leah (there are only two singing roles, her and the rabbi).  She has a really distinctive, piercing voice that mesmerizes, and she doesn't skimp on the acting either: I was especially impressed by her work when possessed by the dybbuk; she really comes across as a person transformed (and tangentially, the fact that people can do such things should make everyone even more skeptical about the veracity of supposed exorcisms).  I've never seen her anywhere else, as far as I know, but I'd sure like to!

Bruno Skulte, The Heiress of Vilkači (1947)

This is actually my second Latvian opera.  The first was this, which I somehow never wrote about.  I think it was pretty good!  So why didn't I write about my first opera in a language?!?  It's a momentous occasion!  Well, it happens.  I didn't write either about my first Japanese opera, which was this, a goofy adaptation of the legend of Momotaro the Peach Boy.  Never mind!  The point is, now I've seen TWO Latvian operas!  Double your pleasure!  It's true that, as the box notes, its debut was in 2011, but it would have been in 1947 if not for political turmoil: Skulte fled to Germany towards the end of World War II (wait...what?) and then lived the rest of his life in exile in the US; he couldn't get it produced here, and his music was banned in Germany because of his strong Latvian nationalism.  It wasn't until independence that anyone could think about putting it on.  But they did, and I'm glad of it.

Right.  Here's what it's about: Dievlodziņi is a...farm? small town?  It's not entirely clear.  But in any event, there's Raits, the eldest son of Dievlodziņš, the head of the farm or whatever, who's engaged to be married to Ieva, who turns out not to be a very nice person.  We get some background: there's this other, richer estate called Vilkači that everyone hates for various more or less irrational reasons, and  Dievlodziņš thought he'd be able to buy it cheap when the owner died without an heir.  But...well, the title probably tells you the problem that comes up.  The heiress is a young woman named Maruta, who shows up at Dievlodziņi (why? Not specified), and meets with a hostile reaction from everyone.  But she's actually nice and also beautiful, and Raits ends up falling in love with her, Ieva's efforts to get him back via magic meeting with failure (but the spell the wise woman gives her is gruesome enough to be worth mentioning: at midnight, she has to get herself a live bad, plunge it into an anthill so the ants eat it alive, and then put its claws and bones in Raits' pocket.  It is hard to see how this could fail, and yet somehow...).  Some time passes, and Maruta ends up having a child with Raits, although he won't acknowledge that it's his.  But eventually he does, and his dad dies of a heart attack or something of that nature.  Then, both Dievlodziņi and Vilkači burn down.  Everyone loses everything.  The people blame Maruta and want to take revenge, but Raits points out that this is a dumb idea and that past enmities should be ended.  The end.

It's good stuff.  A lot of fun folk-sounding music. Rousing choruses.  Sort of made me think of Rimsky-Korsakov.  I hardly know what else to say at this point, but I definitely recommend it to the good people.

You know how I discovered this (and a few others, which I will get to some day)?  I shall tell you: I simply typed the word "opera" into amazon.  Naturally, this resulted in thousands of results, most of which were irrelevant or already familiar.  But I went through all of them, and somehow, there were a few that had previously managed to avoid the search algorithms, so it was worth it.  And really, it would have been worth it if this had been the only thing I'd found.  Fun on a bun.

Benjamin Britten, Paul Bunyan (1941)

Britten's first stage work.  I wanted to see it when I was working my way through his catalogue, but until recently, the only video of it was sung in German with German subtitles.  Not ideal.  It's never achieved the popularity of his later works, obviously, but as a completist, I had to see it, and someone recently uploaded a 1998 performance from New York City Opera (presented by Beverly Sills, no less).  It has a WH Auden libretto, and--this is kind of mind-boggling--at the time Britten and Auden were living in New York and sharing a house with Gypsy Rose Lee and Carson McCullers.  THAT. IS. NUTS.

But as for the work itself...well, it's definitely not plot-heavy.  In fact, I was very strongly put in mind of Kurt Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny: they're both in some sense "about" America (although this one lacks the overt political edge of that), both of them feature characters who, while named, are nonetheless extremely vaguely defined, and neither has a plot to speak of.  Well, at any rate, what there is is this: Paul--who only appears here as an offstage voice--grows up and gets big (and some random cowboy troubadour sings about his exploits).  He gets some lumberjacks from around the world to work for him, including a Swede named Hel Helson as the foreman.  There's a guy called Johnny Inkslinger working as Paul's, I don't know, accountant.  There's Paul's daughter Tiny (ironic name, don't you see?) who falls in love with the cook, Hot Biscuit Slim.  Helson decides to rebel against Paul, but gets smacked down; we think he's dead for a few minutes, but then he's not, and everything's fine.  In the end, all these characters leave: Hel to work for the government in Washington, Tiny and Slim to New York City (don't think it's specified as to why), and Inkslinger to Hollywood to be a...lumber consultant.  Is that a position in great demand?  Maybe.  Well, that's about all, except that there are stabs throughout at capturing some sort of mythical "Americanness."

So it's sort of hard to know how one seriously one should take all this: an opera (operetta, they call it, although even with a small amount of spoken dialogue, it doesn't really have that feel to me) about Americana written by two Englishmen?  Is this meant to be taken straight, or is it some sort of satire?  And if the former, does it actually succeed at this, or not?  I mean, it really is kind of hard to know: I think, okay, what would you think if this had been written by Americans?  But that doesn't really help!  I still feel like it could go either way!  I suppose my subjective opinion is that it reads like an homage, sometimes successful, sometimes clumsy.  The music certainly points the way to Britten's later work, and although I wouldn't call it transcendent, there are good moments throughout.  It's certainly not a chore to sit through.  But it's definitely understandable that it would be treated mainly as a curiosity.

Christoph Willibald Gluck, La corona and Il Parnasso confuso (both 1765)

Hey look, two rarely-performed one-act Gluck operas both done by Pacific Opera Project.  These are both, in fact, their staged US debuts, according to POP.  And you know what else?  They both have libretti by our ol' pal Metastasio.  That came as quite a surprise to me: I knew he'd written one libretti for a comic intermezzo, L'impressario delle Isole Canarie, but I did not know he'd written other one-act pieces.  For whatever reason, they're both listed on his wikipedia page under "other stage works," but the sense in which these are other than libretti is far from clear.  Anyway!  Here they are!  And they're seeming done as a drive-in thing; I have no idea of the mechanics of that, but after arias you hear a cacophony of honking in lieu of applause, which baffled the hell out of me until I figured out what was going on.

So first, La corona, which you HAVE to figure was chosen more for its topical name than anything else.  See, Diana is mad that the people of Calydon are not worshipping her properly, so she sends a big ol' boar to terrorize the countryside.  Atalanta wants to go out and hunt it, but her sister and friend also want to come along, which she ain't too sure about.  The prince, Meleagro, doesn't want them to go because it's too dangerous.  Also, you know, girls.  Eventually the boar is killed off-stage, and Meleagro and Atalanta have a dumb argument about who should get the credit--she having first wounded it and he having finished it off.  But eventually they just decide to give the laurel to Diana herself.  Hopefully she's not pissed that we murdered her boar.

If it sounds like sort of a slight plot, it is.  The only reason it's even able to reach an hour in length is Gluck's habit of repeating himself over and over.  You must admit, it's a very noticeable characteristic of his, even more than other composer of the time.  The music's fine, sounding, as you'd expect, more classical than baroque (though not without some baroque influence, naturally), but I have to admit...the general lack of anything happening did mean it got a bit boring in places.  Not fatally boring, but...a bit.  Fair's fair.

What's incredible about Il Parnasso confuso is that for its debut, all four roles were played by Hapsburg archduchesses.  Were they actually competent singers, or was this just a matter of being forced to indulge the nobility's whims?  Either way, dang.  Once again, we're in Greek Mythology Times.  There's going to be a royal wedding, and Apollo gets three muses, Melpomene, Erato, and Euterpe, to perform at the wedding.  But they can't decide on a song to do and in the end they miss it.  They're kind of bummed, but then they cheer up.

Even less plot than La corona, but that's okay.  It's kind of amusing.  But you can't talk about this without mentioning the production.  So...La corona is played totally straight; Il Parnasso confuso is...not.  It's set in the 1980s, with the muses as pop stars and Apollo as their manager.  I don't mind that, but the OTHER thing is that the subtitles...OOF.  They are not faithful to the text, to put it mildly, featuring a bunch of eighties slang and, most of all, namechecks of loads and loads of eighties pop songs.  Want a sample?  Here's a sample:

"What's behind that mischievous grin Major Tom?"

"You can stop livin' on a prayer, because you're about to be walking on sunshine.  It's a nice day for a white wedding.  The King has decided to marry his pop princess!"

"Oh! Totally rad!"

"Bodacious!"

[...]

"Come on! Don't stop believing.  You shine under pressure.  Chin up.  These are your glory days!  Every little thing you do is magic."

Believe me, there's A LOT more where that came from.  DO YOU GET IT?  It's funny because they mention songs you know, and if that makes it very hard to follow the actual damn plot of the opera, well, that's just the price we have to pay.  I guess.  Endless witless references whose only alleged humor comes from their familiarity.  BARF.  Seriously, this is bad.  POP's Don Procopio had the somewhat dubious "LOL RANDOM" ostrich farm stuff, but this is far worse.

Seriously, POP people: you have talent.  There's no question about it.  So just be a little more confident and do a little less straining for wackiness; it just makes you look desperate.  You'll be glad you did, as will the entire audience.