Jacques Offenbach, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867)

I thought I would expand my operetta game.  Offenbach <i>is</i> known as the father of the genre, after all (so is Hervé.  Reports vary.  But Offenbach is important, at any rate).  Right!  Let's get right into it!

Fritz is an ordinary private in the army who just wants to marry his sweetheart Wanda, but the titular Grand Duchess is upset because she's supposed to marry this Prince Paul guy whom she doesn't like, so her chamberlain, Baron Puck, decides to start a war to cheer her up.  Inspecting the troops, she conceives an infatuation for Fritz, and repeatedly promotes him until he's the head of the whole armed forces, much to the chagrin of the previous head honcho, General Boum.  But Fritz goes out and wins the war (by making the enemy drunk--it's explicitly noted that nobody was killed, which seems a nice humanitarian touch).  So that's great, but he doesn't respond to the Duchess' barely-veiled advances, so she decides to go along with Paul, Boum, and Puck's plan to have him assassinated.  But she immediately calls off the plan and forgets about Fritz when she sees how hot Paul's chamberlain is, and she agrees to marry Paul so she can try to seduce him.  However, it turns out said chamberlain is married with children, so she resigns herself, okay okay, MAYBE this marriage can be okay.  And that is that.

(Interesting to note that this was banned in France after the Franco-Prussian War, 'cause I guess making fun of militarism--which this certainly doesn't do in any very biting way--is unpatriotic.)

Hella fun music.  A helephant of fun.  Here, I uploaded one of the highlights, but there are many, even if the plot meanders a little in the back half.  And the cast is really terrific, notably Dame Felicity Lott in the title role.  I was surprised to look at the wikipedia entry and see that the Duchess is meant to be twenty-ish.  It does make immediate sense; it explains her impulsiveness and general immaturity.  And yet, Lott playing her as a Woman of a Certain Age also feels entirely natural, and Lott is a great physical comedienne (is using the archaic female version of "comedian" sexist?  Well, I'm using it because it suggests a sort of old-timey Hollywood type that Lott embodies very well), and she just kills the whole durn thing.  I also want to give credit to Sandrine Piau as Wanda; even though it's a much smaller role, she has a similar physical expressiveness and is a lot of fun.

I'm going to see every Offenbach operetta available!  End of story!

Joseph Parry, Blodwen (1878)

This one came out of nowhere.  Somehow it had never occurred to me to wonder if there were Welsh-language operas, but now...well, now I know.  This was the first and still, as far as I can tell, the only.  But it is that thing!  No question!  This video is unsubtitled, which at first drove me nuts--YOU'RE PERFORMING IT IN FLIPPING BILLINGS MONTANA HOW MANY WELSH-SPEAKERS DO YOU THINK WILL BE IN THE AUDIENCE?--but then I realized that it's filmed at a fixed angle with the supertitle screen showing the English translation clearly visible.  So that's all right.

So it's the fourteenth century, and Elen and Arthur, two nobles of some stripe, are going to be married and everyone's stoked.  Blodwen shows up with her guardian, Hywel (her mother being dead and her father being MIA in battle) to congratulate them.  But there are dark clouds on the horizon: a representative of the English King Henry comes to demand that they surrender the castle.  They respond with stuff about the stoutness of Welsh hearts--you know the drill.  

Well, it turns out that Hywel is in love with Blodwen, and she returns his affections, and yeah, it's kind of creepy, although you could at least minimize the creep factor by not having him be as visibly older than her as he is here.  But there's no time for love, Sir Hywel--we got company.  Specifically, the English are attacking, and the menfolk, including Arthur and Hywel, have to ride to the defense.  Arthur is mortally wounded, and his death scene here is rendered unintentionally comedic by his insistence on making "blargh!" sounds.  Things are going badly in general for the Welsh, with lots of them being killed or captured.  But what has become of Hywel?!?  Well, he's in the "captured" category.  So Blodwen and some of the others go to visit him in prison (...you can just do that?).  Farewell songs are sung etc.  But then a mysterious stranger shows up to reveal that the English king is dead and that therefore all the Welsh people are being released.  Also, said stranger is Blodwen's dad, who is also free.  So now everyone is happy!  The end.

You might say that this is so rarely performed because it's in Welsh, but I think it would be more accurate to say that the only reason it's ever performed is because it's in Welsh.  That makes it stand out and gives it some cultural significance.  Because I don't think this is a very good opera.  The music struck me as pretty thin.  You expect a lot of rousing patriotic choruses in this sort of piece, but they mostly seemed pretty limp--although in fairness, the performances here aren't very high-caliber.  I can certainly appreciate the logistical difficulties of performing a Welsh opera in Montana (some of the cast are themselves from Wales; some not), but it is what it is.  Maybe better singing would improve my opinion.

But I dunno; the libretto here leaves a lot to be desired, especially the denouement.  This seems like the Welsh equivalent of those nationalistic Eastern European operas that are all about Hungarian or Croatian or Polish pride, which, okay, fine.  But then in the end...what are we meant to take from it?  The king dies and therefore England is just completely changing its colonialist policies with regard to Wales?  What?  In addition to making no sense, how is that meant to evoke Welsh pride?  And if you think, well, it's supposed to be about reconciliation between the two countries, the opera does nothing to make that apparent.  It's not like they sing a chorus of praise to English generosity at the end.

I dunno.  I can't see this being done at the Met anytime in the near or far future.

Franz Lehár, Der Graf von Luxemburg (1909) and Johann Strauss, Eine Nacht in Venedig (1883)

Der Graf von Luxemburg takes place in Paris.  Réne, the titular count, is flat broke, having spent all his money on wine women and song (and wasted the rest, presumably).  Then there's an older Russian prince who wants to marry Angèle, an opera singer, but he can't because he can only marry someone with a rank.  So he plots to get René to marry her for a few months, conferring his title on her, and then they'll get divorced and Bob's yer uncle.  You will NEVER GUESS what complication arises.  There's also another couple, René's artist friend who fancies himself a Bohemian and his girlfriend who's annoyed because he won't marry her.

Eine Nacht in Venedig, by contrast, takes place in Venice, and the city don't know what the city is getting.  Honestly, I don't know about these fetishizations of specific cities--ya seen one crowded, polluted, stinking town--well, anyway, the night in question is Carnival (naturally), and there are a bewildering number of couples whirling around trying to get laid (this is definitely the horniest operetta I've seen).  There's also a Don-Giovanni-esque Duke looking to cuckold as many senators as he can.  But things do not go according to plan, and we truly learn that one night in Venice makes a hard man humble.  When you think about it, there's not much between despair and ecstasy.  It's not a complicated plot per se, but it IS a bit hard to tell everyone apart.  Truly, this is a show with everything but Yul Brynner.  You like this?  I can keep it up all day.  If you want me to stop, send one thousand bitcoins to my account.

All right all right.  So the thing is, operetta is light, but there are degrees of lightness, and it can be a fine balance.  Here I think we can see a real contrast: both of these pieces have some great music, why wouldn't they?, but Der Graf von Luxemburg has a fun plot with appealing characters, whereas Eine Nacht in Venedig is almost alienating in its total indifference to anyone caring even a tiny bit about anyone involved.  Composers, do not undervalue your librettists!  They can make or break your work, and this is a very good example of that.

Elliott Carter, What Next? (1999)

I've seen four operas with exclamation points in the titles.  It's sort of harder to determine with other punctuation marks, because it's so often just a matter of how you want to stylize the title.  But one thing we can say for sure is that this is the first dang opera I've seen with a question mark in there.  So...there you go.

So there are these people standing around after a car crash, five adults and a kid.  They're dazed and can't remember what happened or what they were doing (it would obviously occur to you that they're meant to be dead or at least that this is meant to be ambiguous, but I truly can't tell whether that's supposed to be the case).  They stagger around and argue about where they were going and what they were doing in a kind of absurdist way.  This goes on for forty-five minutes.  They wander off.  And that's about all you have.

Carter was, says wikipedia, "one of the most respected composers of the second half of the 20th century," and this was his only opera.  This cachet is presumably why this performance is conducted by James Goddamn Levine.  And yet, I have to say, I was extremely underwhelmed.  I like a lot of contemporary opera, but you have to admit, there's this image of it as consisting of this sort of subdued music with mild stabs at atonalism but mostly tonal that doesn't really do much, with no arias or duets or any operatic things like that, that completely exits your brain as soon as the performance is over.  And as far as I'm concerned, that's this to a T.  And combine that with a very unengaging libretto and...you're not left with much.  Was conducting this really an edifying experience for Levine?  Maybe I lack discernment, but I knows what I knows.  Carter was ninety when he wrote this, which is certainly impressive regardless of anything else, but I say, BLAH.

Emmerich Kálmán, Gräfin Mariza (1924)

Kálmán was one of Hitler's favorite composers.  We don't like to think of Hitler as having, like, aesthetic tastes that don't involve genocide, because it brings home the fact that he was a human being, whereas it's more comfortable just to think of him as a monster outside of normal human experience.  I hesitated to use the word "humanize" there because that has connotations of making him sympathetic, which it doesn't at all--but it's something to ponder.  Hitler offered to make Kálmán an "honorary Aryan," though he wisely fled to the US instead.  Just goes to show: nazis don't even have the courage of their fucked-up convictions.  What stupid, worthless losers, regardless of their taste in musical theater.  Not that I'm telling you anything you didn't know.

ANYWAY, here we have this.  There's a bailiff Béla Törek, come to work on the titular Countess Mariza's estate.  Only he's actually secretly a count fallen on hard times.  As a single hot noblewoman, Mariza is sick of the constant barrage of marriage proposals, so she invents a dude whom she claims she's going to marry.  Seems like that would only work out for her in the extremely short-term, but what the hey.  Her fake suitor is named Koloman Zsupán, after the pig farmer in Strauss' Zigeunerbaron, but then an actual baron by that name shows up.  Helluva coincidence, that.  Anyway, there are some misunderstandings, blah blah, operetta, you know the score, and ultimately, Törek (real name: Tassilo) marries Mariza and his sister Lisa marries Zsupán.

I'm tempted to suggest that Kálmán might be the most talented of these pre-War German operetta composers (well, technically he was Hungarian, but obviously he worked in the same milieu).  The story is extremely serviceable, but the music is fucking fantastic.  Lots of folk elements.  The only mild complaint I have is that the action sort of screeches to a halt near the end when some of Törek's relatives show up for allegedly comic hijinx.  I could have lived with that part being substantially abridged.  Otherwise--terrific stuff.  I wish more of Kálmán were available.

Great production, too.  I mean, it's Seefestspiele Mörbische, what do you expect, but even by their standards: great.  The overture is accompanied by a delightful ballet sequence of dancers dressed in bird suits, which kicks things off to a good start, and it goes from there.  I also have to give credit to Dagmar Schellenberger, who absolutely kills in the title role.  Nothing much to not like here!

Oh yeah, also, with this, I've now seen every opera on this list.  Hurray for arbitrary goals!  Now I'll have to seek out another.

Franz Lehár, Das Land des Lächelns (1929)

This is only my second Lehár, but I probably should rewatch Die lustige Witwe--I remember not liking it much, but it might've just been the production--also, towards the end, after the titular widow is going to get married, her love interest remarks (paraphrasing) "we'll be very rich--but we'll be happy," which enraged my inner Marxist (who's kind of the same as my outer Marxist, come to think of it), and I snarled "fuck you" at the screen--not a useful or productive reaction, I will readily grant, but there you are.

Anyway!  This one is very different from that.  The first act is set in Vienna, where there's a Chinese delegation.  Count Gustave wants to marry Lisa, but she's not into it.  She and the Chinese prince, Sou-Chong, fall in love instead and determine to go back to China together, which moving is fast-tracked when he receives news that he's been appointed President of China (?!?).  They go back, but the Chinese ways are very different from the European, and Lisa isn't feeling it.  Gustave comes in pursuit, and himself falls in love with Sou-Chong's sister, Mi.  But ultimately, it is determined that the cultural differences are insurmountable, and Gustave and Lisa leave sou-Chong and Mi heartbroken--though he reminds her that their tradition is to always smile ("Lächeln"="smile"), though your heart is breaking.

An interesting thing, this: obviously any piece of this vintage centering on China is going to be rife with Orientalism, to one degree of cringiness or other.  And yeah, there's some of that here.  Sou-Chong and Mi are treated as sympathetically as the European characters, but there's the very clear implication that China, overall, is kinda barbaric compared to the Occident, and BOY are there a lot of references to the alleged teachings of Confucius (it's been a long time since I've read The Analects, but I'm pretty sure I'd remember if he'd said anything about interracial marriage).  The librettists clearly knew very little about the culture in question.  Still, given the time and place, I don't really hold that against them.  The question is...are we supposed to see the two couples breaking up as the operetta itself believing that these things just can't work out, or is it rather an indictment of cultural closed-mindedness?  It might be some combination.  I don't know.  One data point that may or may not be helpful is that in Jaromír Weinberger's operetta Frühlingsstürme, there are (as usual) also two romances, one between a Japanese man and a European woman, and one between two Europeans, and guess which of these ultimately fails?  Two examples certainly doesn't establish a pattern--for all I know, there could be counterexamples that I haven't encountered--but it makes you wonder.

Regardless, though, for all that some of this may run counter to our contemporary sensibilities, it's easy to see why it's so popular: Lehár's music is fantastic, occasional inevitable "Oriental" flourishes and all, and I ultimately found the story emotionally effective.  Whatever it has to say about intercultural communication, it's still a human story.  As usual from Seefestspiel Mörbisch, an effective production; very colorful.  And hey, they even got actual Asians to play most of the Chinese characters (although they're all Japanese except for one Korean--should I be offended by that?), and a real Chinese dance troupe to bring some color and kinetic energy to the proceedings.

Very good stuff.  I'll definitely pursue Lehár futher.

Johann Strauss II, Wiener Blut (1899)

Look, I don't want to alarm anyone, but the plain fact of the matter is, that title is very close to "wiener butt," making it perhaps the most appropriate operetta for twelve-year-old boys.  Of course, that just means "Viennese Blood" in German, which is less childish but much more sinister.  I don't know!

Well, this is a Strauss pastiche rather than an original work; Strauss himself authorized it and left it at that (it also includes some tunes by his bro Josef).  It wasn't performed until after his death.  An unhappy story: at its first production it wasn't a big success, and the impresario who first staged it, Jann Jauner, ended up shooting himself when it failed to recoup costs.  He might've waited a little, as it caught on quickly enough and became one of Strauss' most popular stage works, original or not.  There are a bunch of different performance available.

This is closer to Die Fledermaus than Der Zigeunerbaron in tone--ie, more on the frivolous side.  You know, operetta is generally lighter, but there's light and light--Zigeunerbaron has more of an actual story.  It's 1814 or 15, and this Congress of Vienna is going on.  That is the backdrop.  There's this Count Zedlau who has a wife, Gabriele, and also a mistress, Franziska, and he's trying for another mistress, Pepi.   Franziska knows he's married but draws the line at having to compete with a second mistress.  Gabriele, naturally, is against the whole thing, and Pepi is, I suppose, undecided.  There's also Zedlau's servant Josef and a Prince Ypsheim-Gindelbach.  The main thing about him is that he's not from Vienna so he speaks a different dialect of German and there are linguistic hijinx totally lost on the non-Deutschophones in the audience ("Deutschophone" is a word now).  You might be able to get some of the idea across via some more sophisticated subtitles, but that is not a thing that is happening here!  Anyway, there are complications and misunderstandings and blah, and finally the Count ends up back with his wife, the Prince ends up with Franziska, and Pepi ends up with Josef.  Given the general tenor of the thing, it's pretty hard to imagine these pairings being stable, but...take it!  You must!

If I had to cavil, I'd say that all this stuff about "Viennese blood," even though more or less meant figuratively, is a bit uncomfortable in light of what was coming in thirty-ish years (a film version of this was one of the most popular movies of Nazi Germany).  But, obviously, that's not its fault.  Given that the arrangers had their pick of Strauss' music to rummage through for this, it's no surprise that it's gonna be pretty fun.  There are definitely places where this will sound familiar to you even if you don't know you know it.  That's just the way it goes!  Obviously worth seeing, though not, in my opinion, a stone-cold classic--I liked all three of the operettas I saw in that last triptych more than I did this.

Georg Philipp Tellemann, Pimpinone (1725)

Tellemann was a prolific and long-lived composer, but this is the only one of his operas to be regularly performed these days.  It's a comic intermezzo, originally performed between acts in Handel's Tamerlano.  This isn't actually the first time this libretto was used, just the best-known.  I also watched a version from 1708 by Tomaso Albioni, but there's not a great deal of difference between them.

So, yeah.  As a short intermezzo, it has a short and rather predictable plot: Pimpinone is a rich yet dumb guy (wait, that's most rich guys, isn't it?), and Vespetta is a woman who schemes to become his servant and then his wife, and then reveals herself to be super-domineering.  That's it.

What it is, basically, is a much, much meaner version of La serva padrona (which, of course, it predates).  The thing about La serva is that, notwithstanding Serpina's tricks, it's obvious that there's real affection between her and Uberto, and that he's basically just looking for a pretext to marry her.  I mean, the trick is revealed before they get married, so he could back out of it if he wanted.  Very different, here though.  There is no ambiguity whatsoever: Vespetta has nothing but contempt for the title character.  She has constant asides about how stupid and ugly he is.  At one point after their marriage, Pimpinone declares that he is an abused husband, and although this concept, I suppose, was highly amusing to eighteenth-century audiences, he's not wrong and it's not pleasant to watch.  Seriously, not kidding: this is one of the most viscerally unpleasant operas I've ever seen.

The music is pretty typical baroque stuff of the era.  I didn't find it super-arresting, but, unlike the story, it's not unpleasant.  There's one scene where Pimpinone, talking to himself, takes on different roles and different vocal types to match, which I suppose is kind of fun.  But GREAT GOOGLY MOOGLY, man, that is not enough to make up for the story.  This really was very popular in its time (and still is to an extent, inexplicably), so it's undoubtedly a must-see for historians, but beyond that, I dunno.

Rodion Shchedrin, The Left-Hander (2013)

Shchedrin!  Who also wrote an opera based on Dead Souls.  Which I wasn't overly enthused about, but for whatever reason, I decided to see this one anyway.  So I did!  I'm pretty sure this is my first twenty-first-century Russian opera, so there's that.  I suppose.

The plot of this sounds Gogol-esque, but maybe that's just if you don't have a large enough frame of reference of Russian literature.  It's actually based on a nineteenth-century story by a writer named Nikolai Leskov.  The idea is that the czar goes to the UK, where, to show off English ingenuity, he is presented with a tiny clockwork flea that sings when wound up (yes, the flea is a singing role).  Ro the Russians are all, SHIT, we need something to compete with this so we can show how Russians are also rad.  They find a guy known only as the Left-Hander and he manages to, I dunno, fix up the flea to make it more Russian.  Everyone is impressed, and they take him back up the UK, where everyone likewise makes much of him.  They try to get him to marry an Englishwoman and stay, but he wants to go home.  There's a big ol' storm, and he presumably exacerbate the situation by getting shitfaced with the English captain.  At home, drunk, he's accosted by the cops and then dies.  Just of, like, general stuff, apparently.  The flea sings a requiem.  And there you have it.

I was kind of getting into this: the music is, well, all right; sort of clanking, sort of unobtrusive, more or less as I vaguely remember Dead Souls, but I certainly liked it more.  The absurdist story is fun, and the Mariinsky production is predictably great.  How they created that storm effect, I'll never know.  But man, it really bummed be out that they killed off the protagonist.  You might say, "if that's the kind of thing that upsets you, opera might not be your thing."  But it just feels unmotivated.  To me.  There's obviously some sort of political valence here, but it's pretty opaque.  It's not only from a culture I don't know super-well, but it's from a culture I don't know super-well a hundred forty years ago.  Wak!

Oh well.  Maybe part of the reason I'm bummed is that the title character is played by Andrei Popov, who brings a lot of humanity to the role.  This is only (I think) the fourth time I've seen him, but I've always liked him: as the Holy Fool in Boris, the Astrologer in The Golden Cockerel (which this reminded me of in some ways), the Police Inspector in The Nose,  and now here (funny that I've never seen him play a named character).  At any rate, this is certainly worth seeing, and not for him alone.

Saverio Mercadante, Francesca da Rimini (1831)

Well, here is another hat trick!  Zandonai, Rachmaninoff, Mercadante!  This opera was, for whatever reason, canceled before its scheduled 1831 performance.  It was considered lost for a while, but then it was rediscovered and received its world debut--this--in 2016.  Neat.

Well, you might know the story: Francesca marries this dude she doesn't love, Lanciotto, for political reasons.  In the other two operas, she's tricked by being made to think she's going to get to marry his hotter brother whom she's into, but that's not a thing here.  But she IS carrying on an affair with his younger brother Paolo.  And when Lanciotto finds out, he kills them both in a pasison.  Well...that's how it normally goes, but it's a little different here.  They're found out at about the midpoint of the opera, and you think, man, how can this possible continue another ninety minutes?  But here Lanciotto does not kill them in a passion: he makes them prisoners and sort of maunders around trying to decide what to do.  Eventually he tries to kill them by making one of them stab themselves and the other take poison (he gives Paolo the choice--great guy).  But what's this?  Francesca's father Guido (who is not a character in the other two operas) appears with some troops to rescue the lovers.  Lanciotto's troops don't like him, so they're overwhelmed.  Francesca determines that she's going to go into a convent, in spite of Paolo's protests.  But then Lanciotto shows up and she just...dies.  From shock or something.  And Paolo stabs himself.  There ya go!

This is my third Mercadate opera, but I wasn't super-keen about the first two (Il Bravo and Didone abbandonta.  Let's be honest: I mainly sought this one out because I wanted the hat trick.  I sort of thought I was going to end up classifying Mercadante with Massenet in the category of "composers I'm extremely unenthusiastic about for reasons I can't articulate."  But you know...turns out I was wrong.  I actually like this a hell of a lot.  Some really great arias and duets.  A little longer than necessary at three and a half hours?  Probably, but that's opera for you!  On the strength of this, I would definitely see more Mercadante, though that's easier said than done: he's not exactly super-commonly performed.

This is a very minimalistic production, with just a general sort of castle background and not much else, except that all the characters are wearing these flowing, billowy robes that are constantly fluttering around--there must be some kind of wind machine.  And I've gotta say, that kinda bugged me: obviously, it's an intentional artistic choice (in Dante, Francesca and Paolo are in the realm of the lustful, with endless wind blowing--interesting that he made this a relatively mild circle; I think our current Evangelicals would be much more severe), but I found it really distracting, and once you notice it you can't un-notice it.

Antonio Sartorio, L'Orfeo (1672)

I've seen plenty of pairs of different operas with the same name, but this is my first hat trick.  Also, I really like that the composers names--Monteverdi, Rossi, Sartorio--are simultaneously in chronological and alphabetical order.  This production just happened to appear on Operaonvideo, so I decided to try my chances with an auto-translated libretto.

Well, like Rossi's opera, this prominently features Aristeo as an unwelcome rival for Eurydice's love.  There's also a women, Autonoe, Aristeo's former lover whom he's abandoned (a classic opera trope), pursuing him.  Orfeo gets jealous, but then Eurydice does the usual thing where she gets bitten by a snake and dies, so he goes to Hades and yadda yadda.  Aristeo returns to Autonoe.  Also, for some reason Ercole and Achilles are involved.  Also Esculapio (Aesculapius).  Oh, and Erinda, a skirt-role nurse.  Is she a horny skirt-role nurse?  Oh you had better fucking believe she is!

Well, unfortunately, I can't give as thorough an accounting of the plot I might like, due to the limitations of auto-translate and--perhaps more to the point here--because this production, I realized, is pretty substantially chopped down, making it even harder to follow along with.  Which is all quite a shame, because musically, I thought this was pretty darned great.  There are indeed arias here, and some excellent ones at that.  I can't even begin to compare the different Orfeos I've seen, but this at least holds its own with the others.  I wasn't a huge fan of Erinda's horrendously annoying "comic" singing, but hey.  If only the whole thing didn't sort of collapse into an incoherent jumble (not the opera itself's fault...probably), it would've been a great operatic experience; as it stands, it was at least a great musical one.