Gaetano Donizetti, Il borgomastro di Saardam (1827)

The wikipedia page for Zar und Zimmermann mentions that Donizetti did an opera based on the same play, and suddenly it became extremely vital that I see as many operas as possible about Peter the Great as a carpenter.  Imperative!  Fortunately, it turned out there was a DVD of this one.  Obviously.

The plot?  Well...it's basically the same as the Lortzing.  What else would you expect?  There are a few differences, though.  Here, Marietta, the mayor's daughter in Lortzing, is his "ward," whatever background that may imply (the wikipedia entry currently claims otherwise, but it's just wrong).  The mayor does have a daughter, Carlotta, but she's a very minor character.  Also, the international intrigue is significantly toned down; where in the Lortzing there were, like, three ambassadors from different countries running around and causing confusion, here it's pared down to just the one (who also plays a much smaller role than any of them).  But regardless of any of this, it's still fun on a bun!  How could it not be?!

I realized that this is one of the earliest Donizetti operas I've seen.  I mean, he's already written like a dozen of them, but he was hella prolific.  The only earlier one I've seen is Don Gregorio.  But regardless, that Donizetti spark shines through.  The music sounds very...Donizetti-an.  What a great tautology.  I liked it a lot, and this performance makes a few really good choices which address possible issues with the text: the climax is a bit protracted, with one chorus and aria after the other, and you think okay, dude.  This isn't necessarily dramatically effective.  Here, during Marietta's final bit of singing, we see everyone else looking on, clearly impatient with the proceedings and itching just to get on with it.  That's fun.  Another, bigger thing that's fun is what they do with the character of Carlotta: as I said, it's a small role, and you sort of wonder why the opera even bothers with it.  Shouldn't she have a love interest too?  Two of those is normally the way these things go!  Especially because early on there's a thing where Pietro (Marietta's amour) is remonstrating with the Tsar: yeah, you can make fun of me, but someday you'll fall in love, and then you'll see.  And he's all, ho ho, that will never happen, and okay, that's a very obvious indication that it WILL happen, innit?  But...nope!  Granted, it would be unusual for the secondary romance to involve characters of higher social class...well, nothing to be done about the Tsar, but in this production, there's an entirely mimed romance between Carlotta and his assistant Filiberto.  In the last scene she's set to marry some random dude; that is in the libretto, a bit, but the plot thread is just sort of forgotten about, so we get an argument and Carlotta angrily remonstrating with her father in the background until finally at the last moment she breaks away and goes off with the Russians.  It's very well-done and not at all overplayed.  Normally I'm against adding extraneous plot elements to operas, but this works so well you can't complain.

Anyway!  Donizetti: in my opinion, he wrote operas, and this, I believe, is one of them.

MNiatures II: The New Batch

So we're doing more of these, from Minnesota Opera (you can also still watch the original quartet if you want to).  I quite liked the first ones, so let's see what these are like.  By the way, if you were wondering, which you definitely weren't, I'm not counting these four as another opera for my list--we're just taking it for granted that these slot in with the first four under the "Mniatures" name.

Mitchell Bercier, Sapphica

Well, most of this seems to take place at some kind of rave, with a masked DJ and a few dancers.  It sometimes cuts to an outside view of a few women, one of whom presumably is meant to be Sappho, although I would've had zero idea that this was supposed to be about the poet if the title and description did not tell me so.  The lyrics are all--I can only assume--Sappho lyrics, sung in Ancient Greek without subtitles (there is an auto-translate CC option for, of all things Vietnamese, which apparently some algorithm decided it sounded most like).  So that's not super-rewarding, and although I can't call the EDM-sounding music bad, exactly, it's definitely not my thing.  I can't say I really cared for this.

Christian Bardin, Yr God My God

This one is about being queer/non-binary and growing up in a fundamentalist church, and shifting perspectives from childhood and looking back from the vantage of adulthood.  Well...that's the theory, anyway.  It's a good idea, but even at sixteen minutes--rather long for this sort of thing--I don't feel like there's really time to develop the concept adequately.  I do enjoy moments where the child protagonist is duetting with their adult self, but there's actually much less than you'd expect from the adult perspective, and honestly, the piece as a whole doesn't make much impression on me.  Sad to say.

The third and forth pieces are paired together as something called Semblance.  Both of them are about people who have or feel like they have dual identities.  They don't share characters or plot or anything.  Anyway, keep it in mind!  Or don't.  That would be just as good.

Stephanie Henry, Leigh Opulent

This is about a drag queen, inspired by Paris Is Burning, the documentary about African American drag ballroom culture in New York--a film I have seen.  It's very good.  And tragic.  The description alleges that "Leigh Opulent is coming to terms with the fact that his successful ballroom career never translated to real life," but his "real life" is never touched on in the actual piece.  He gets a call from someone telling him he's been made den mother, to his delight.  "All this really makes me reflect on my journey," he remarks, and it's hard not to laugh at such a clumsily on-the-nose, high-school-ish line.  But reflect he does, to an extent, as the action cuts back and forth between him sitting in his room and doing a drag act.  I actually kind of liked this, though at five minutes it's not really enough to get into the subject matter in any beyond a superficial way.

Leyna Marika Papach, Mina at Night

So Mina wants to be a musician, but as a single mother she feels her potential career has been derailed.  So she goes on about that for a while.  Eventually other random people show up in her room and sing about her son and her nascent career and hey, maybe she can still have something?  Who knows.  Once again, I didn't find this very interesting.

So...unfortunately not as good as the first set.  And yet I have a soft spot for these operatic shorts, even if the finished product is only sporadically what I might wish.  They seem a good way for musicians to be creative and develop.  And you know what else?  I'm feeling a weird nostalgia for those #OperaHarmony shorts and the way they evoke in my head pre-vaccine pandemic times, which I'm aware is a perverse thing to be nostalgic for, but that's the way the dumb ol' human mind works, I think.  Maybe I'll revisit them.

János Vajda, The Imaginary Invalid; or, The Cabal of Hypocrites (2020)

Contemporary Hungarian opera: that's the sort of thing I want to see from Operavision.  The Imaginary Invalid is a Molière play; The Cabal of Hypocrites a play by Mikhail Bulgakov of The Master and Margarita fame.

The bulk of this is Molière, though, and it has the kind of plot you'd associate with him: there's a rich hypochondriac, Argan.  He wants his daughter Angélique to marry his doctor's son so that, I suppose he can get free medical care.  Naturally, she has her own lover whom she prefers.  Meanwhile, Argan's gold-digging wife schemes, and the soubrette maid Toinette helps the young lovers.

You somehow expect contemporary operas to have some sort of serious "point," or at least some degree of self-awareness, but this is just an old-school comedy.  The plot isn't anything super-special, I suppose, but it's a lot of fun, and Vadja's music is just great.  It inventively flits between classical and romantic idioms--with some baroque moments, even thrown in--occasionally getting weirdly jazzy as suits the mood, with some really funny dramatic crescendos accompanying the goofy plot twists.  There are likewise arias, duets, and the odd trio, along with a couple of what you'd almost call patter-songs.  It really is trying to be a traditional opera, and doing a great job of it.  I seriously was just sitting there eagerly waiting for what he was going to come up with next.  

So...right.  There was a period when I was watching this that I was prepared to call it one of the best contemporary operas I'd seen.  Really terrific.  But...well, you may recall that this is based not just on Molière, but also on Bulgakov, and this is where we run into problems.  Massive, opera-destroying problems, I'm sorry to say.  So in the beginning and between acts we see Molière himself: he's trying to get his troupe accepted into the court of Louis XIV, and talking with the king himself.  I found these short scenes thin and inessential, but they didn't do anything to my enjoyment of the whole.  But then you get to what seems to be the end of the story, with Argan allowing his daughter to marry her lover and his wife's machinations being exposed, and you think, boy, there's another half-hour of this?  How is that going to work?  Well...we go back to Molière, only now he is out of the king's favor due to some scandal or other in his personal life, and he's very devastated, and as he's going to go on-stage one last time, he appears to have a heart attack, and if he's not dead, he's close to it (this is based on his actual death).  Then we see characters from the play come on stage, and after this ceremony where Argan is, allegedly, made a doctor, he likewise has a heart attack and is taken away in an ambulance.  

This (the heart attack, not the ambulance) might be in the original play; wikipedia asserts that "in the translation by John Wood, Argan suffers a heart attack during the dance and dies, whereupon the dancers stop dancing and assume deaths-head masks."  I don't know how to take this; did this John Wood character just make this up?  If so, why would you mention it?  And if not, why mention him at all?  BUT REGARDLESS, whoever we want to blame, the point is the same: this is a terrible, jarringly weird way to end the story; a total mismatch with everything that had gone before.  On the "insights" section of the operavision page, there's an interview with Vajda where he asserts that "I have no problem with enjoying a performance and then suddenly being left astonished."  I have no problem with that either, but it has to be justified in some way, for God's sake.  This feels wholly arbitrary, and it kind of ruins the whole piece.  Very frustrating!  I mean, certainly more than it would be if Vajda was a less obviously talented composer.  On the one hand, I'd kind of like to see his other operas; on the other hand, if his sensibilities there lead him to conclusions like this one, it might be better to leave well enough alone.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Davide Penitente (1785)

This can in no way be considered an opera, even by the loose standards I sometimes employ.  It  has no discernible narrative or characters.  Nonetheless, I am writing about it here, even at the risk of being decertified as the only opera blog.

What's it about?  Aren't you listening?  But, I mean, you could look at the title.  It's a religious cantata with a lot of asking God's forgiveness and whatnot, featuring a tenor, a soprano, and a mezzo.  The original thing is only forty-five minutes, so this is supplemented by three instrumental pieces which fit well with the generally solemn mood.  The music is great!  It's late Mozart!  Who can complain?

Well, as I said, you couldn't stage this as an opera, so what exactly are we watching here?  Well, that cover may give you a clue, and this is where the performance falls down a bit.  Yes, we are treated--or possibly subjected--to a dressage display throughout the whole thing.  The connection between this and the music is obscure; I gather that the performance took place at some sort of former equestrian center, so that's why, but I'm not sure if that really justifies it.

The first issue isn't the performers' fault; it's that the director is obsessed with doing these constant jump-cuts that make it difficult to really follow the action (if you want to call it that).  I do like the fact that filmed opera can do close-ups, but this might've been a situation where a fixed camera angle would've worked better.  As for the second issue: well, here's the thing about dressage: it's obviously super-hard to do well, both in terms of the necessary training and the actual performance aspect.  And yet...it still looks kind of lame.  I'm not a fan.  Of course, a dressage partisan might respond, "oh YEAH?  You know what ELSE is obviously super-hard to do well but nonetheless looks [or sounds] lame?  OPERA!"  To which I have no rebuttal.  I mean, the difference is that I'm right and you're wrong, but what else can I say?  Maybe I'm prejudiced because it seems like a hobby for rich bastards, which granted is pretty rich in itself, coming from an opera fan.  But still.  This is worth watching for the music, and maybe if you like your horseplay more than I do, you'll also love the visuals.  But I'm only half-impressed.

Reynaldo Hahn, Ciboulette (1923)

First twentieth-century French operetta I've ever seen.  For whatever reason, the French permutation of the form seems more a nineteenth-century thing.  But: this exists.  And I saw it!  Obviously.

Sort of a typical kind of plot: you've got Ciboulette, an orphaned country girl who sells vegetables in the city.  Now that she's turning twenty-one, she wants to get married.  She has eight suitors, but they're all kind of doofy and obvious no-goes.  So instead, there's another dude, Antonin, whose own lover has just left him.  What will happen next?  Probably hijinx.  But also romance.  A dude named Duparquet, himself unlucky in love, helps the two get together in the end.  Phew!

Who cares if it's a stunningly original plot?  It is quite charming, and the music sparkles.  I like the fact that both Ciboulette and Antonin are kind of sweetly dopey.  They really seem made for each other, and Julien Behr as Antonin has this really strong silent-film-star look to him that really seems to fit the character.  The only thing I was slightly dubious about was the opening of the last act, a lengthy comic longeur involving an operatic director and a skirt-role diva who has an entire aria with deliberately-bad singing.  I'm HIGHLY dubious of that as on operatic conceit, and this does little to endear it to me.  

Nonetheless, it would be difficult to deny the piece's charms.  I don't know how you wouldn't like this.

Albert Lortzing, Zar und Zimmermann (1837)

According to wikipedia, this should be considered, not as you'd automatically assume a Singspiel, but rather a "Spieloper," which is like a Singspiel only comic--to me, it seems like that's just a word for an early German operetta, but it's nice to know!  I suppose.

"Zimmermann" just means "carpenter" in German.  I never knew that!  This is based on the historical thing where Peter the Great disguised himself as a carpenter to study abroad.  Meyerbeer's L'étoile du nord is based on the same incident, but that takes place in Finland, whereas this is in Holland, where the real Peter actually went.  Both of these operas present it as him being in disguise and no one knowing who he was, which is kind of an irresistible idea, but per this reddit post, not at all true: he was trying to be as anonymous as possible so as not to have to deal with all the usual pomp and circumstance, but everyone knew who he was, not least because of his huge retinue.

Well, anyway, here, in the town of Saardam, there's Peter-the-Secret-Czar and also Peter Ivanov, another Russian working in Holland after having deserted from the Russian army.  He and Marie are in love, but her pompous, bungling burgomaster uncle is getting in the way.  There's also various intrigue--that gets a bit confusing in places--with French and English ambassadors who are there to make some sort of deal with Russia, though this is very vague.  Well, hijinx occur, Peter I and Marie are united (the deserting thing is cool, it seems), and Peter t.G. reveals his identity and sails off, and bob's yer uncle.

It's a lot of fun.  The plot gets a bit slack in places--a lot of bumbling around--but hey, opera.  The Rossini-esque music is quite good.  This is a filmed version from 1969, and it starts with a disclaimer that this is one of the first filmed operas in color and we've done our best to restore it but there may still be some small issues.  But if they hadn't included that, I wouldn't have found anything to complain about; there may be a few tiny, blink-and-you'll-miss-it visual artifacts, but in general it looks and sounds quite good.  Would recommend to kids of all ages.

George Gershwin, Blue Monday (1922)

Did you know that Porgy and Bess was Gershwin's second opera?  I didn't.  But you probably did, on account of how smart you are.  And sexy.  And...say, are you doing anything later?  Wanna grab a couple of drinks?

Well, this is only a short, twenty-ish-minute piece.  It takes place in some sort of café or bar.  Joe is, I don't know, just some guy.  His sweetheart is named Vi.  There's also some other dude, Tom, trying to seduce Vi.  He tells her that Joe is seeing another woman to try to pry her away, and tells her he's expecting a telegram from another woman..  It's not true, but he hasn't seen his mother in a long time and is expecting a telegram.  You see where this is going, probably.  When the telegram comes he refuses to tell her who it's from (why?), so in a spasm of jealousy, she shoots him dead.  That's all.

At a greater length, this plot could work: if there were more time to develop the characters and make it believable.  As it is, I quite literally el oh ell'd when Joe gets shot and collapses theatrically.  It's just so comically precipitous.  Really, if she's on that much of a hair-trigger, then if it wasn't this it would've been something else soon enough.  Sheesh, people.

I mean, the music's okay, attempting--as in his more famous opera--to fuse jazz and romantic music.  (although this one was originally performed in blackface, so...not great).  It's not overly memorable, though, with no real stand-out numbers.  Wikipedia quotes a review that's a bit meaner than I would be, but is funny enough to quote: "the most dismal, stupid, and incredible blackface sketch that has probably ever been perpetrated. In it a dusky soprano finally killed her gambling man. She should have shot all her associates the moment they appeared and then turned the pistol on herself."

I think I might have a sort-of explanation for why it is the way it is: it actually has a subtitle, "Opera à la Afro-American," which is a bit cringy (especially given the blackface), but you can see it, maybe, as Gershwin saying, okay, we all know about operas with white characters, but what about one with black characters?  It might look a li'l something like this.  So then rather than presenting a full-length thing, you can--in theory--sort of get the idea of what such a thing might look like from this abbreviated sketch.  Well, maybe.  Either way, it's not of especial interest outside the historical kind.

Clint Borzoni, The Copper Queen (2017)

Here's this.  It's an opera (what?!?).  Hearing the description, you think, man, couldn't they have released it a bit earlier for Halloween?  But actually, I think it's all right this way.  It's in part a ghost story of sorts, but I don't know that it's exactly seasonal.  Whatever!

The Copper Queen Hotel in Bisbee, Arizona is a historical establishment patronized by miners, and also, it's HAUNTED!  Allegedly.  By the ghost of Julia Lowell, a prostitute who is supposed to have killed herself after a romantic disappointment.  I'm not sure to what extent this is real.  Certainly, it's embellished for operatic purposes.

So here, we have a present-day narrative: a woman named Addison, traumatized by the death of her beloved grandmother, has decided to stay in the allegedly-haunted room (the logic of this is eventually explained), looking to see the ghost in spite of the manager's skepticism.  But the bulk of it does indeed take place in the...1920s?  I'm guessing?  It's hard to find hard dates.  At any rate, Julia is an in-demand prostitute, doing okay (as far as that goes), aside from her violent pimp, who wants her to make enough money to pay off some ill-defined debt.

(Side note: is there such thing as a kind, supportive pimp?  I feel like there's no profession more universally reviled in cultural depictions; the only neutral version is the cartoon with a huge fur coat and peacock-feather hat.  Well, I don't suppose it would naturally attract a better kind of dude.)

So this is going until she has the misfortune to fall in love with a client, Theodore.  They're planning on running off together, but...well, I won't spoil it, but nor is it particularly surprising.  It is a VERY operatic sort of plot.  

So okay, two things: on the one hand, this is great.  Julia's story, as noted, has traditional operatic values (which I kind of think are...slightly different than the "traditional values" that fundamentalists like to babble about).  There's some really extravagantly romantic music during the love scenes, and it's great!  Back to basics!  Also, some piano that evokes the proper Old-West atmosphere.

On the other hand, the present-day stuff just...doesn't work.  Addison is a very murkily-drawn character; there's the vague suggestion that she's suffered romantic disappointments of some kind, but she's basically nothing, and the denouement with her and the ghost (spoiler, I guess) is unsatisfying.  I appreciate what I take to be the motivation for the opera--to restore Julia's humanity from the kind of gross roadside-attraction that she's become--but I don't feel that the frame really does that.  Honestly, you wouldn't lose much by just getting rid of it altogether and letting the Puccini-esque story stand on its own.

Still well worth watching, though, whatever criticisms I may have.

Dave Ragland, One Vote Won (2020)

When I saw, okay, here's another opera by a black composer, I felt that I had to see it, given how I was talking last time (okay, two times ago).  Was that a good idea?  Well...

So there's a woman.  Apparently her name is Gloria, though I'm not sure if she's named in the text.  It's election day but she doesn't want to vote because voting is for total squares and nothing will ever change and she'd rather just watch shows on streaming services, but then the ghosts of Juno Frankie Pierce and Diane Nash (who isn't actually dead, but whatevz--in fairness, the piece does suggest that these may not actually be real ghosts, though I have no idea what they are in that case--they certainly SEEM to have an independent existence) appear to tell her about how, in fact, voting is hell of rad and she must do it!  Go!  Vote!  So she does.  That's it.

Now, at this point, you may be thinking, dude, this sounds absolutely unbearable.  But I am here to tell you that...you ain't wrong.  This is total cringe start to finish.  Yes, obviously, you gotta vote, but these exhortations to do so that are totally drained of any actual ideology are just risible.  If Gloria knows nothing about politics and has no idea who to vote for, what is the purpose of this?  All she's going to do is add a tiny element of randomness to the proceedings.  It was released in August 2020, so maybe it's implicitly telling the audience to specifically vote against Fascist Fuckface, and if it caused someone to do that, great (although I have my doubts).  But the message here as presented is completely vacuous.

And, of course, there's also the fact that we're living in a time where the idea of telling people that they can vote to make a difference does kinda seem like a bad joke.  At one point, the opera lists black people murdered by the police, by name.  That's as political as it ever gets, but given that Biden's answer to the problem of police brutality is to give them more money, I really don't know what it thinks voting is possibly going to accomplish.  You could say it's more about local elections, but in that case, ol' Gloria's even LESS likely to know how she should vote.

I mean ferfucksake, OF COURSE you should vote in spite of everything.  But I have to say, I found this piece kind of enraging, and if anything, it makes me want to never vote again.  The music isn't bad; a kind of peppy jazzy, bluesy thing (and Tamica Nicole as Gloria does the best she can with not much), but MAN ALIVE.  I know it means well, but the result is not pretty.  Direct your talents to a libretto more worthy of them, Ragland!

Bedřich Smetana, Dalibor (1867)

Hey, here's this.  The video is region-locked, but I was able to sneakily use my VPN to make it think I was in France.  I think that's actually the first time I've had to do that for an opera video.  There are subtitles in French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, and Polish, so it seems to be intended for a wide audience.

This is my first Smetana tragedy.  Dalibor's on trial for having murder a local lord--but he only did it because his friend was executed, so COME ON!  The guy's sister, Milada, demands his execution, but then she realizes she has the hots for him.  He's sentenced to indefinite imprisonment, so she teams up with Jitka, an orphan Dalibor had taken under his wing, to free him.  Jitka gets her boyfriend Vitek to gather some troops; meanwhile, Milada, disguised as a minstrel boy, infiltrates the dungeon where Dalibor's being held, where she reveals herself and declares her love for him, which he immediately reciprocates, as one does.  She tells him about the plan to rescue him, which is supposed to happen three days later.  Unfortunately, the king decides Dalibor should be executed after all, and that screws up the plan.  The rebels attack precipitously, but Milada is killed and Dalibor commits suicide.  Jitka's okay, apparently.  Vitek's fate is unknown.  Probably dead, though.

Let me be upfront: I didn't think this was a very good opera.  The music is only intermittently rousing, and the libretto is pretty bad.  You never get a good idea of the characters, the romance between Dalibor and Milada is really half-assed and unconvincing, and there's this part where Dalibor, anticipating his freedom, is singing about how, oh boy, now he can finish taking his revenge!  He appears to want to sack the entire city of Prague, and you think, dude, what the fuck?  This is psychotic!  They were right to lock you up!  Somehow, Budivoj, the commander of the king's forces, comes across as the most sympathetic character here, and I don't think that was intentional.  There's also a non-sequitur of an aria from the king lamenting the duties of office, right before he sentences Dalibor to death, and you think, was this a drama I was supposed to be paying attention to?  What is this?  There's a certain resemblance, I can't tell if it's intentional, between him and Pontus Pilate, but that seems like a weird parallel to draw, and I don't know what the heck is going on.  One weird detail in this production: in the first act, Milada and the other ladies of the court are wearing dresses with silk-screened images of (I assume it's supposed to be) the murdered guy on them.  Weird.  As I say.

I dunno...the more Smetana I see, the more it seems like there might be good reason that The Bartered Bride is his only opera that remains popular to this day.  But!  I shall see as many as I can to make absolutely sure.

Terence Blanchard, Fire Shut Up in My Bones (2019)

Funny thing.  I said that I wouldn't be able to see this until it appears on Met in HD "barring unforeseen circumstances."  Just goes to show--you can't predict things.  Maybe you can predict the general contour of things, okay, but there are always unforeseen circumstances of SOME sort.  That's not meant to be a pollyannaish sentiment--maybe the circumstances will be unexpectedly bad--but they'll definitely be something.  In the present case, some Russian folk hero somehow pirated the stream and put in youtube.  That youtube video, predictably, was taken down, but it's still available on the more piracy-friendly mail.ru.  The only problem with this--and it IS a bit of a problem--is that, naturally, it only has Russian subs.  But will that stop me?  Ha!  HA!, I say.

The Met of course is making a big deal out of this being their first-ever opera by a black composer, which is fair enough.  It would be easy (and fun!) to say, ooh, and only a hundred forty years after you opened!  So...maybe I'll go ahead and say that.  As this article demonstrates, they had a lot to choose from, but their choice was, nope!  Sucks, but I suppose it doesn't actually suck any more than every damn segregated institution.  I should also acknowledge that most of the Met staff would probably accept this criticism as justified (well, I can believe in Yannick Nézet-Séguin's sincerity; I'm slightly more doubtful about that sinister Gelb character, but WHATEVS).  So...there it is.

This is based on Charles M. Blow's coming-of-age memoir.  The opera begins with a twenty-year-old Charles, feeling homicidal, because he's about to go home and, so he thinks, wreak vengeance on his charismatic older cousin who had sexually abused him when he was seven.  From there, the oper switches into flashback: we see the seven-year-old (as played by the scarily precocious Walter Russell III; he's not called on to deliver a very heavy singing load, and his voice itself isn't amazing, but he's still damned impressive in the role), his brothers, his strong mother and philandering father; his life after that is more or less glossed over until he gets to university (having received a full scholarship from Grambling), and eventually we catch up to the frame narrative.  There's also a female figure representing in different places "Destiny" and "Loneliness," who then in the third act plays an actual woman, his first love Greta.

Gotta love it, man.  This deserves the praise it's been getting.  Blanchard is mainly a jazz musician; he only started writing opera later in life (this is his second), but it suits him.  As expected, this is largely jazz-based, though with a strong streak of romanticism.  Quite varied, also, from gospel-ish music to a sort of strip-club vibe (in a comic scene in a bar where Ma Blow confronts her cheatin' husband), to--this is something I've never seen in an opera--honest-to-god disco in the club where Charles first meets Greta.  And real arias!  Some quite moving.  The whole thing is quite stirring; if I wanted to cavil a bit, I'd suggest that the Destiny/Loneliness thing doesn't necessarily make as much of an impact as one might have hoped (in spite of being sung by the great Angel Blue); also, when you think about it, the entire second act doesn't really do much; it could easily be cut without affecting one's understanding of the story.  Although you shouldn't, because you'd lose some great music.  So okay!

Regardless, I can't wait for it to appear on Met on Demand, because I sorely felt the lack of comprehensible subtitles.  Sure, I could follow the basic plot, but...well, English-language operas vary in their comprehensibility, but here, I don't think I was able to understand more than half of the singing, and that's probably generous, although to my subjective perception, things did improve in that regard in the second act.

So how many operas by black composers have I seen?  Along with this, Joseph Bologne's L'amant anonyme, Joplin's Treemonisha, Nkeiru Okoye's Harriet Tubman, Still's Highway 1, USA, Daniel Bernard Roumain's We Shall Not Be Moved, and a number of miscellaneous operatic shorts.  I could conceivably be forgetting something, but I think that's all.  And actually...it's more than I thought there'd be.  Still less than I'd like, though.  I hope the Met will continue to atone.  Anything from that New York Times article would be great!  Or anything else that seems appealing.  All right.