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.
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