Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, The Noblewoman Vera Sheloga (1898) and The Maid of Pskov (1872)

Well, since I was on an NRK kick, I figured it would make sense for me to see this too, which has been available for some time but which I had for whatever reason put off.  Actually, it's been available for longer than that, but never with subtitles.  A version of The Maid of Pskov first appeared with subs on the vanished M T's channel.  BUT THEN!  Grange Park Opera put a version up--I think as some sort of comment on the war--with significantly less insane subtitling (it's delisted now, but they didn't take it down or make it private, so you can still check it out).  Both of these are based on a play by Lev Mei.  Vera Shebolga is a belated prequel based on the prologue, which I guess is a rewritten version of a prologue to Pskov, which he removed in revisions of the opera.  Confusing.

So: in The Noblewoman Vera Shebolga, Vera's living alone with her sister Nadezhda, her husband being off at The Wars.  She's had a child, and she confesses to her sister that it's not her husband's; she was seduced by a mysterious man.  When her husband come back, Nadezhda covers for her by claiming that it's actually her baby.

In The Maid of Pskov, we fast-forward some number of years, and the baby from the prologue, Olga, has grown up.  Things are difficult, with Ivan the Terrible running around terrorizing cities (Ivan the Terrible is in fact an alternate title of the opera).  She's in love with Tucha, a leader of the resistance against Ivan's guys, but her dad wants her to marry this creepy dude Matuta instead.  When the tsar shows up, both he and Olga act surprised, and we learn that--surprise!--he's her real father.  He decides to be merciful to the city because of this (not a good basis for governance, but hey, he WAS terrible).  Olga is captured during an assignation with Tucha; Ivan still wants to be merciful, and amazingly even agrees that Tucha will just be imprisoned rather than executed, but the rebels come in and accidentally kill Olga, and then he's sad.  The end.

The music's really good.  What a surprise!  It's NRK we're talking about here!  It might not seem that this would be a good story to include a bunch of folk music, but he works in lots of off-stage choruses that do just that.  The plot is a little anemic, but what the hey.  The Maid of Pskov was his first opera; if I were a musicologist, perhaps I could analyze his development of his style by comparing it to The Noblewoman Vera Sheboga.  Alas, I am not and cannot.  But speaking of Vera Sheboga, I cannot fathom the purpose of its existence.  It doesn't broaden our understanding of the main drama, and performed alone, it would be absolutely useless.  It's usually combined with the longer opera, but either way: guh?  I mean, I'm not going to complain about having the chance to listen to more Rimsky-Korsakov, but I'm also at a bit of a loss.

This production is interesting.  It's mostly a traditional affair, but it deviates from that in a few places.  We don't see Ivan until midway through the second act, and you can't help but think, boy, with all this build-up, he'd better be hella memorable.  And here he actually is: when you first see him, he's standing in the shadows and wearing a large cloak; when he throws if off and comes forward, you can see that he's done up as Stalin, in a period Soviet uniform.  I was NOT expecting that, but it works.  

So as you may know, one of the many things that made Ivan so terrible was that he killed his firstborn son in a fit of rage (but afterward he apparently felt super bad about it, and hey, who among us...?).  At the beginning of the third act, we see him contemplating a silent film of this event, to show that these things are on his mind because of his newly-discovered daughter.  The actual depiction of the character by the libretto isn't much, so this helps--though regardless, how much are we meant to think we cares about this daughter he JUST learned exists?  

I dunno; notwithstanding the sometimes-shaky words, I enjoyed this!  No question!  Now I've seen all of NRK's operas but Servillia and Pan Voyevoda, and these two are REALLY rarely performed, so who knows when or if I'll ever get the chance.  Still, I'll keep an eye out!

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Christmas Eve (1895)

This year, Operavision and Oper Frankfurt bring us the greatest gift of all: rarely-performed seasonal NRK!  How can you say no?  'Tis impossible.

This has the same plot as Tchaikovsky's Cherevichki, as both are based on the same Gogol story.  So: Vakula, the blacksmith, is hopelessly in love with Oksana, but she keeps rebuffing him, and says she'll only marry him if he can bring her the tsarina's slippers.  So Vakula catches the Devil—who had come to the village because he was annoyed that Vakula had made an unflattering caricature of him—and makes him take him to Saint Petersburg, where the tsarina kindly gives him the desired slippers.  Then, it's back home, and Vakula and Oksana are going to be married.

There are very small differences from the Tchaikovsky: this one features Patsyuk, a sorcerer, adding to the supernatural elements.  Also, Vakula's mother, Solokha, comes across as more mercenary—she wants to marry Oksana's father, and doesn't want the kids to get married because then she wouldn't get his fortune.  There's a scene (here and in the other) where the Devil and three men come in turn to her house to try to seduce her and then are hidden in sacks when the other ones show up; it's very amusing, but in this one, there's a scene after where they all decide that they were being played and reject her.  It could well come across as misogynistic (and it's one thing I definitely like less), but in this production, at least, we see her again in the last scene and all seems to have been forgiven, so that's all right.  Finally, I believe this one makes it clearer that Oksana was just teasing Vakula; that she was going to accept him eventually anyway, and the slippers were unnecessary.  So that's a small improvement, I think.

So hey, swings and roundabouts.  But they're both fantastic operas by fantastic composers.  I saw a video introduction to the Operavision production which said that Rimsky-Korsakov waited until after Tchaikovsky's death to do his own opera on the theme, so as not to step on the other man's toes.  Which seems a bit morbid, and there was certainly no guarantee that Tchaikovsky would go first, given that he was only four years older than NRK.  But there you go!  Doesn't seem like a worthwhile tradeoff, but it IS a great piece of work.

The Operavision production is by Christof Loy, who I'm still slightly wary about, but he does good work here, though obviously less lavish than the Royal Opera House Cherevichki.  It makes extensive use of geometric grids, which seems characteristic of his work.  Seems odd, but I feel it mostly captures the spirit of the piece.  I was also psyched to see that the Devil is played by Andrei Popov, my low-key fave.  And with this performance, my record of only seeing him as unnamed character remains unbroken: the Devil, the Astrologer, the Holy Fool, the Police Inspector, the Left-Hander.  Zany stuff, man.  Zany stuff.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, The Tsar's Bride (1899)

So I just saw this at the National Opera (on my second try—I was originally supposed to see it like a month ago, but I came down with covid), and I thought, you know, I know I already wrote about this the first time I saw it, but I kind of have more I want to say about it, so let's just do another entry here.  And then I looked and realized, hey, I actually didn't write about it the first time!  So, perfect.

So there's this oprichnik named Grigory who's in love with a woman named Marfa.  But alas, she has a fiancé, Ivan, so he gets this creepy apothecary to make him a love potion he can give her.  But his mistress Lyubasha (in whom he's lost interest) overhears him and, jealous, prevails upon the same apothecary, in exchange for an assignation, to make her a potion that will wither Marfa's beauty (all of this is very vaguely based on real events).  Marfa and Ivan are all ready to get married, but then—as you might guess—the Tsar (Ivan the Terrible, who never appears on-stage) decides that he's going to marry her, so what can you do?  Well, things go from bad to worst, and all the principals end up dead.

The main issue with this opera, I feel, is that the tragedy feels overdetermined: you could make a perfectly sturdy drama with the potion stuff, or with Marfa being forced to marry the Tsar, but when you put them both together, the result is something of a jumble, and neither receive quite the attention I think they deserve.  Another problem (if you think it's a problem) is that this—like Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina--feels oddly centerless.  Who's the main character here?  You would think it would be Marfa, but she really feels more like object than subject here.  The largest role is Grigory, but he still doesn't exactly feel like the protagonist.  I don't know; I'm not wholly convinced by the libretto.

Nevertheless, there's always something satisfying about a really grim opera, and this certainly delivers in that regard, and with Rimsky-Korsakov's kickass music, you can't go wrong (seriously, you should at least listen to the awesome overture).  The cast was really good: Rauno Elp, a very prolific artist whom I recently saw as Jack Rance in La fanciulla del west, was a memorable, conflicted Grigory, but I think the MVP was the mezzo singing Lyubasha, whose name I can't provide because I didn't recognize her and the website doesn't list the cast.  Sorry about that; it's really not fair.  But whoever she is, she smashed a few really mesmerizing arias (she's a brunette while Marfa is a blonde—of course!).

So I'm pretty sure that the company's decision to produce this was as a commentary on current events, although Ivan the Terrible's brand of tyranny seems pretty distinct from Putin's.  Nevertheless, this is the first opera I've seen here with any sort of unconventional production: it seems at first to be set in the 1940s, judging by the costuming.  Film reels of Stalinist propaganda are projected on the back of the stage.  And yet, characters also appear dressed in more conventional, Boris-Godunov-esque dress, so I dunno.  The projection is also used for other things: to indicate seasons or—again--for big images of Stalin.  There's one memorable moment when—after Grigory relates how he killed Ivan—there's a sudden huge spatter of blood up there.  In general, though, I found the production a bit overstuffed, not that it really interfered with my enjoyment.

Vasif Adigozalov, Natavan (2003)

Boy, it's a shame that this is the only opera blog, seeing how moribund it is right now.  There's just nowhere else you can read about opera on the whole dang internet!  But seriously, no lie, people, I am BUSY AS HECK lately.  Haven't been seeing too much opera.  I did see both Die lustige Witwe and Der Graf von Luxemburg at the National Opera.  They were both fun as heck—really, you're just left grinning dopily at the end—but I don't necessarily have a lot to say about them.  They were both performed in Estonian, though.  Good luck seeing THAT anywhere else!

Well, at any rate, I DID watch this Azerbaijani opera (my third) on a whim.  Apparently Adigozalov was a big deal in his time.  He wrote an operetta called Let's Get Divorced and Married Later, per wikipedia.  Alas, to know that such things exist but I will almost certainly never get to experience them!  Such is the way of the world. 

But hey, I saw this.  The title character lived in the nineteenth century, the daughter of a khan, and is considered one of the greatest Azerbaijani poets.  None of her work has been translated into English, so I can neither confirm nor deny.  Not that I'd be able to anyway.  Nor can I say much else about the plot here.  If you check the opera's Azerbaijani wikipedia page, you will see a fairly lengthy plot summary—well, you would THINK it would be a plot summary, but the autotranslation just says “content,” which may be the problem.  This thing goes ON and ON and ON, rambly as anything, only occasionally deigning to touch on the plot.  For what it's worth, I don't think the opera is actually very plot-heavy.  It's one of those operas that has more of the feel of an oratorio, a medium that Adigozalov also composed in.

Look, she gets married, there's some sort of conflict with her husband and/or her father, there are singing festivals, one of her sons unfortunately dies, and then she too dies, either of grief or for completely unrelated reasons, and people are sad in the epilogue.  That's about the best I can do.

Well, it's pretty good musically.  Some of the music is in the mugham form that we saw in Leyli and Majnun, whereas some of it is in more familiar musical idioms.  The second act opens with a good ol' waltz.  Generally pretty pleasant to sit through; you could definitely do worse, even though as a big ol' outsider, I'm probably missing like ninety-five percent of its cultural import.

Don Pasquale at the Estonian National Opera

As you may have gathered, I haven't had a chance to watch a lot of opera lately.  Well, I suppose technically if I'd really, really tried, I could have.  Definitely.  But I was busy over the summer and now I'm kinda busy (although becoming a bit less so as I get into the swing of things) with my teaching here in Tallinn.  But, of course, one of the coolest things about living here is the opera house.  Since I really got into opera, I hadn't 'til now lived anywhere with such a venue.  Long ago, I saw college productions of The Mikado and The Threepenny Opera, but that's not really quite the same thing, is it?  

I always felt sort of self-conscious about not having seen live opera.  Am I not a TRUFAN?  Before the Met Live in HD broadcasts, the hosts always give the exact same spiel about how watching live in HD is great.  But nothing can compare to the experience of being in the house.  So give us money.  Man, Bloomburg is giving you, like, hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.  Why you gotta hit me up?  Still, on some level I wondered: oh no, am I missing something fundamental about the form by not being there in person?  Well...now I'm part of the club.  Maybe.  

Unsurprisingly for such a small country, the opera house is a rather small affair.  I mean, it's still kind of fancy, with a balcony and box seats and, outside the auditorium, busts of—one supposes—famous Estonian artists or producers past, and an adjoining bar area.  One can't complain.  Well, one can always complain.  There were duel Estonian/English supertitles, but I was sitting in the third row, which was a great view of the stage, but which required one to habitually glance upward to see them, and you might not think it, but that kind of tiny, repetitive motion can get a little painful.  I think the optimal viewing arrangement might be the front row of the first balcony.

(I must report, in fairness, that the supertitles were on the fritz for the first ten minutes or so of the third act, after the intermission—at one point you could see a Mac menu bar up there.  But then they were fixed, and by the end, you probably wouldn't even remember that there had been a problem, or at least register it as anything important)

Regardless!  It's Don Pasquale!  How you gonna fuck that up?  Well, I suppose apart from doing it as some kind of hideous regietheater thing, you could do an excessively mean version, in which the tricks played on Pasquale just feel gratuitously sadistic.  But THIS WAS NOT THAT.  It was a sturdy, traditional production with handsome wooden sets.  It was done with an all-Estonian cast, as is generally the case (notwithstanding the occasional foreign guest artist), all of whom are extremely capable.  I was a little unnerved to realize that the guy singing the title role, Pavlo Balakin, is younger than I am (he was apparently a last-minute replacement; previously there was another guy listed, who was slightly older than me, but the principle is the same).  I quickly realized how meaningless that really is, though: sure, if you're playing King Lear or summit, you want some miles on you, but Pasquale is a cartoon character, so it doesn't really matter; anyone can be aged up well enough via makeup and costume, and he was fine, albeit very typical.  Tamar Nugis was a suave Malatesta, Kristel Pärnta a firecracker-y Norina, and Mehis Tiits as Ernesto...well, he did the best he could with a fairly uninteresting part—albeit one that DOES have a few genuine musical highlights, which I think I didn't fully appreciate the first time I saw the opera, which was early in my opera-appreciation career.

So do I now appreciate opera, or at least this opera, on a much deeper level?  Well, not really.  Don't get me wrong; it was hella awesome, I recommend it to all and sundry, and I'm going to frequent the house as often as I can while I'm living here.  But I wouldn't say my understanding of the form has been changed, and I definitely don't think that seeing an opera on video means you somehow haven't “really” seen it.  Is that a self-serving conclusion?  I don't care!

Carmen Jones (1954)

I figured, if I say I like Carmen so much, I should probably see this movie, which is the opera re-set in the US during World War II with an all-black cast.  So, I did.  Neat! 

One thing I'll say for it: Dorothy Dandridge in the title role is electric.  She kills it.  You can't stop watching her.  The REST of the movie though...well, I'm just gonna say it: it kind of sucks.  And I realize that me saying that opens a big ol' can o' worms, because am I just saying that because I'm overly attached to the original?  Am I being closed-minded?  Well, I don't think so.  What else can I say?

I truly do not object to the change in setting, or alterations to the plot, but the problem is, it sort of feels like it's performing contortions to try to make things work so that the appropriate songs can be sung in spite of lacking the context.  So, for a fairly contorted example: obviously, it would make no sense to have a bullfighter in this milieu, so instead we have Husky Miller, a boxer (and I will concede that his name is a reasonably clever analogue for Escamillo).  And look, bullfighting is inhumane and should be banned everywhere it hasn't been, but the problem is, it's flashy and dramatic in a way that boxing simply...isn't.  And therefore, his song about boxing heroics doesn't make much impact (also, it's weird that they don't include the opening part where he compares his work to soldiers', given how easily it could've worked in the setting).  But what's really noticeable about it is that it includes this whole thing about how his manager helps him to succeed, and it's sure great to have that guy around, and you think, wait, WHAT?  Escamillo crediting someone else for his success?  What kind of catastrophic misreading of the character is THAT?  But the reason it includes this guy and also this guy's superior is that there's no element of smuggling in this story, and therefore you need someone to take the place of the male smugglers, Le Dancaïre and Le Remendado, if you want to include a version of “Nous avons en tête une affaire,” which they do.  And yet, for all that trouble, their rendition of the song turns out to be pretty lame: instead of joking around about how you need women for criminal affairs, it's just them and her friends Frasquita/Frankie and Mercédes/Myrt trying to convince her to go to Chicago to see Husky.  It just...doesn't fit the music.  It seems like it's supposed to be funny, but it's not remotely so either in the way the original is or on its own.  It's just bad, people.

So what else?  Well, to give the film its due, I'm willing to grant that its version of the Habanera, “Dat Love,” is largely tolerable.  But even there, I dunno: it's really hard to tell how one's reaction is colored by virtue of the lyrics being in one's first language, but some of it just seems...not great.  I don't know: “You go for me and I'm taboo/but if you're hard to get I'll go for you.”  I mean, okay, on the one hand that's sort of clever...but on the other hand, it's also sort of lame, isn't it?  I don't know.  It was hard for me to really warm to it.  Still, in the interest of maximum fairness, let's stick this one in the win column, and while we're at it, let's also put “Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum” (the “Gypsy Song”) there as well.  But seriously, that is ALL.

Let me ask you: do you know Carmen's friend Lillas Pastia?  If you do, it's certainly because he's mentioned and identified as such several times in the sublime “Près des remparts de Séville,” and seriously, how nuts is it that a song that good is only like the tenth-best-known piece in the opera?  He's the innkeeper at the tavern where the smugglers conduct business; it's a tiny role.  Well, here he's called Billy Pastor, which is fine, but what's not fine is how the film murders the song.  What's really memorable about it is its sense of melancholy; of calling on a utopian future that, Carmen must know, is going to be fleeting at best.  But there's NONE of that in the rendition here.  It's badly cut down, and it strips out all the pathos.  It is to the original as “Two Princes” is to “I Who Have Nothing.”  NOT GOOD, in other words.

As for the film's version of the Card Trio—well, at first I was all prepared to declare it a success; it seemed to be working pretty well in the new setting.  But NOT FOR LONG, I'll tell you that much.  What's the dumbest fucking thing you can imagine anyone doing to this song, huh?  Tell me.  I'll bet it's not as dumb as what this movie does.  So there's the “dites-nous qui nous trahira/dite-nous qui nous aimera” part, and then...the movie completely cuts out F and M's dueling romantic fantasies.  Seriously.  It skips straight to Carmen bemoaning her fate.  WHAT.  THE.  HELL.  You people DO realize that that's there for a reason, right?  I mean, aside from that it's fun?  Because, like, it's contrasting F and M's lightheartedness to C's obsession with death?  JESUS.  So, blah.

I don't know what to tell you.  There are a fair few other songs, but nothing that really stands out.  For unclear reasons, there are zero songs for Escamillo beyond the hit, and “Quant au douanier, c'est notre affaire” is absent, but I can't say I really regret any of this, given how uninspired this whole thing is.  Even the climactic duet fails to make an impression.  I really do want to like a project like this, but it's just not good enough.

Giuseppe Verdi, Ernani (1844)

An early Verdi opera, and, per wikipedia, his most popular until Il trovatore.  Also, fun fact, apparently it was the first opera to be recorded in its entirety, in 1904.  You could make a good argument that it was a significant lacuna in my opera-watching experience.  Actually, you could do that with any Verdi opera I haven't seen.  If I'm counting correctly (I might not be, considering all the revisions he made), there are eight of them.  I should buckle down and do it, probably.  They're all available in some form or another.

Well, this is Verdi.  You know what Verdi sounds like!  He wrote some pretty solid tchunes!  But one is forced to concede that he was not always as discriminating in his choice of libretti as he could have been, and here is an example of that.  Right, so Ernani is a bandit.  He and Elvira are in love, but unfortunately, she's engaged to marry Silva, an old duke.  Oh no!  So there's some conflict, the more so because Charles V (yes, the father of the king in Don Carlos) is also trying to seduce her.  It gets very confusing—and the wikipedia entry is not very well-written or helpful—but there's a bunch of scheming, and the upshot is that Silva and Ernani (who turns out to be a dispossessed noble) team up to try to take out Charles, who is felt to be treasonous in some way I didn't really understand.  And—here's the real “uh?” moment—Ernani swears that if Silva blows this hunting horn at any time, he, Ernani, will kill himself.  A little later, everyone's reconciled, and Charles agrees that Ernani and Elvira can marry.  But oh no, soon after they marry, Silva cashes in, and Ernani has no choice but to stab himself to death.  Cool.

A number of questions come to mind, most notably: why did he swear this oath, apropos of nothing?  Why does he seem genuinely surprised when the extremely obvious result of him doing so manifests itself?  And why does he go through with it in the end?  Obviously, this sort of self-destructive “honor”-based culture has existed all over the world; you think of samurai who were supposed to commit seppuku when their lords were killed, or Hindu widows who were meant to immolate themselves.  But in those and other situations, they're dealing with social pressure.  The people in those circumstances didn't specifically stipulate that this is what they're going to do.  This opera is just bizarre, and not in the least dramatically satisfying, great music notwithstanding.

It's based on a Victor Hugo play, which you've gotta think—I'm admittedly just guessing here—has to have been criticizing the sort of behavior that the opera wants to be in some sense heroic.  Otherwise, I have no idea what he was going for.  Not a fantastic piece of work, but this Operavision video, from Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, is a solid, traditional production that features the extremely rad Angela Meade as Elvira (a role she'd previously sang at the Met).  She is awesome.  The only issue with this production is that there are, like, two or three random extras/chorus members wearing covid masks.  I would understand and make allowances if this was the height of the pandemic and everyone had to be masked, but it's not, the result is just needless weirdness.

Car[men]talk

 So: I watched Carmen for the seven hundredth time last night. Okay okay, let's not go nuts; realistically, I believe it was the fourth time I'd seen it start to finish. I realize that this is not exactly an outré opinion, but I think this is my single favorite opera. There's just something about it that really feels like it embodies the form, at least as far as tragedy goes. More than any other opera I've seen, maybe, the protagonists just feel like they're locked by virtue of their unchangeable natures into this ineluctably grim drama. Great music is aided by a great libretto in making something...great. Okay.

Most recently I saw this version:

It's probably my favorite thusfar.  It was the first time I'd seen the original Opéra-Comique version with spoken dialogue, so I thought it might play significantly differently, but nah. There's actually very little chatting; even as a general non-fan of talking in operas, both versions are similar enough that it makes essentially no difference. I'm just going to go through it and talk about the characters a little, if you don't mind or even if you do.

Carmen (Anna Caterina Antonacci)

When you think about operatic heroines, and you think about the ideal casting from a physical perspective, you'd probably mostly tend to think, well, they should be as attractive as possible. But that's not really the case for Carmen. It's not good enough, and it might even be counterproductive: the whole thing about her (or at least one thing about her) is rejecting conventional societal ideas, and that includes standards of beauty. What she really needs to be is magnetic; to have this dangerously alien, seductive feel, along with the kind of fatal charm that would lead a dopey schmuck like José to murder, and Antonacci has that down, I can tell you.

What's interesting is that, as operas go, even the big parts here aren't that big, comparatively speaking. I think it's because the music is really spread out among even minor characters. But of course Carmen remains the biggest, and a great role. I think we sometimes take "L'amour est un oiseau rebel" for granted, just because it's so familiar, but goddamn is that an absolutely perfect aria, even if "perfect" is impossible to define in the situation and probably meaningless. It's just so sinuous, the music perfectly complementing the lyrics. And really, after hearing it, dumb ol' José has no one to blame but himself. Can't say she didn't warn him.

Don José (Jonas Kaufmann)

José is really the viewpoint character of the opera. Carmen herself is too closed-off and in many ways unknowable to serve that function. Still, I would like to hear a female perspective. 'Cause I'm not gonna lie: I was in a situation once where I felt like Don José, or would have had I been into opera at the time, though I should emphasize that this never led to murder or violence of any kind (and seriously, if he'd just given himself a day or so to cool off, he probably would've realized that not worrying about this woman was actually a huge relief, and everything would've been fine). And yet, that might be a situation that half of the population cannot identify with. I don't know!

But to me, anyway, he's very effective as a protagonist. You can feel his anguish, for sure. But the weird thing is, his actual dang music is way less interesting than any other significant character in the opera. Sure, you have "La fleur que tu m'avais jetée" (the "Flower Song"), and sure the final scene is, like, climactic, but what else? Not that much else, I feel! I get that a tenor would see this role as desirable, in that it's the male lead of one of the biggest operas ever, but is it really that terrific? It feels like putting a star of Jonas Kaufmann's caliber in the part is sort of like machine-gunning a mosquito.

Escamillo (Ildebrando D'Arcangelo)

Another role I kind of wonder about. Sure, swaggering about is fun, and you do have your big hit aria, but you really don't have much else. His knife-fight duet with José is all right, and then there's a short love duet with Carmen and that's it. And the character, of course, is incredibly shallow; there's not a lot you can really do to deepen him.

Still, D'Arcangelo does a great job with him; the best I've seen. I know him for playing Dulcamara in several productions of L'Elisir, but he neatly slots into this very different role. I feel like a lot of the time the baritone playing him just characterizes him as a cocky douchebag; D'Arcangelo doesn't play it against the grain or anything, but he makes him legit charming and suave in a way where you can see how Carmen would be into him. But ultimately, when it comes to Escamillo, all you really need is a confident motherfucker who can belt out "Votre toast, je peux vous le rendre," and we dang well get that here.

Micaëla (Norah Amsellem)

A lot of people don't like Micaëla, seeing her as the conventional "good girl" in contrast to the more colorful Carmen, which I guess she is, but guess what? I like her anyway! I wish she didn't just disappear, but aside from that!

(And, side note, but the one slightly off thing in the libretto is the way José goes off with her at the end of the third act to see his dying mother and then just reappears in the fourth, never mentioning it and seemingly having been wholly unaffected by it. Also, imagine the two of them having to be in close proximity for however many days it took to get there. Did they make small talk? Aaaaawkwaaaard!)

I just feel bad for her, being abandoned by her fiancé for a woman for whose murder he'd later be hanged. That's rough. And yet, I feel like she's gonna get through it. Her entire role but especially her great aria "Je dis que rien ne m'épouvante" make me think that she's really quite mentally strong. I'm rooting for her, and Norah Amsellem is quite good. For this role, you'd want a conventionally attractive woman to contrast with Carmen, and dammit, I think there are sexist elements in this article. So it goes.

Frasquita and Mercédès (Elena Xanthoudakis and Viktoria Vizin)

How 'bout these two, eh? They're Carmen's friends, whose names you probably wouldn't know without looking them up. But they actually get a lot to do, notably sing in the operetta-ish quintet "Nous avons en tête une affaire;" "Melons! Coupons!" (the "Card Trio"), in which they're goofing around using the cards to make up fantasy futures (Mercédès is the one who wants to be a rich widow) until Carmen comes in and predicts only the ineluctability of her own death (possibly my favorite number in the opera); and the further trio "Quant au douanier c'est notre affaire," where they try to shake off her black thoughts by singing about how they're going to flirt their way past the customs officers. I think you could argue that considered as one character, they're as important musically as Escamillo or Micaëla.

The point is, I like them, and it seems like it would be a good sneaky opportunity for a low-profile singer to get a good bit of exposure, since the roles are considered small but you're still doing quite a bit. And the singers I've seen in the roles all really seem to get that and dig into them with relish, Xanthoudakis and Vizin being no exceptions.

*********

Of course, there's still the question of why Carmen lets herself be killed. You can--and a lot of people do!--say that it's just her defiant attitude and refusal to give in, which I suppose is a conventionally feminist reading but one that really fails to consider her morbid obsession with the inevitability of her own death. I don't know if there's a good answer or if there needs to be. But one thing's for sure: we ought to be able to judge for ourselves! And on that note, check this out:

So it's "Si tu m'aimes, Carmen," the duet between her and Escamillo. And she declares her deep love for him. But what exactly does she say? Well, in this production, per the subtitle, it's "I've never loved anyone as much as you." But that sort of took me aback, because I distinctly remember that the last Met in HD version I saw had it "I'll love you 'til the day I die." In most cases this wouldn't be super-important, but dammit, there's a mystery here, and you're not helping by obscuring the text and changing what it says! Whichever one of you is wrong here really botched it.

So naturally, I went to the libretto, and, whoops! the direct English translation is actually "may I die if I've ever loved anyone as much as you." For fuck's sake, people! You both managed to screw up, only in slightly different ways! What an idiotic display! Do better.

There's one more thing I want to say, that isn't really related to the opera itself and which nobody really has any reason to care about. But! Here it is anyway! There are three Live in HD performances of Carmen available, from 2010, 2014, and 2018. They're all the same production (a very sturdy one, set in Fascist Spain), so they're all basically the same, but there are a few differences! The most prominent one being this: in both the 2010 and 2018 performances, in the final act José stabs Carmen and then supports her as she slumps to the ground so that she dies in his arms. Okay, that works. But in the 2014 one (with Anita Rachvelishvili), he stabs her and then stands back, while she sways there for a few moments and then just pitches over on her face. I suppose it's more athletically impressive than the other way, but it seems to lend a possibly-undesirable air of bathos to the proceedings. Weird choice.

Richard Strauss, Feuersnot (1901)

Regardless of anything else about this opera, it has to be said: it has "snot" in the title.  This is a grave flaw.  I suppose Deutschephones would argue that that's not the piece's fault, and indeed that it's only my provincial narrow-mindedness that's causing me to make a big deal about it, but I disagree.  Change it at once.

It takes place at a solstice festival.  There's this sorceror called Kunrad who comes to town and causes a commotion.  He inappropriately kisses Diemut, the mayor's daughter, so she plays a trick on him where he's stuck in the air in a basket.  So he summons, like, a big ol' curse, and the festival fires are all out, and the only way to bring them back is through, um, a virgin.  So all the townspeople sing a chorus where they insist that Diemut should go and take one for the team, to which she finally accedes.  This is presented as a triumphant moment, to be clear.  And that is that.

So yeah!  That ending!  It's kind of shockingly unacceptable on any level, innit?  Well, okay, not "any level"--I'm fully aware that an apologist would point out that contemporary sexual ethics are very much not the point of the piece; the characters are just playing a part in ancient fertility rituals.  But dude.  Seriously.  Come on.  How can you possibly expect that to play to a modern-day audience or--I would have hoped--even one in 1901?  Shit, dude.  You could probably make this seem a bit less repellent through the production, but this one, alas, does not.  In fact, I'd say they kind of do the opposite: look, I am not impugning Dietrich Henschel as a person, but his Kunrad is extremely smug and douchey-looking, which just makes things worse.

As for the production, it's pretty jumbled--a sort-of modern-day thing but sort of not, with a lot of abstraction and irritating background people making exaggerated, cartoony gestures, which in no case worked well.  Still, I do have to admit, the part at the end where all the people are waving ribbons to simulate the bonfire was cool.  Never let it be said that ol' GeoX refused to admit that a cool thing was cool.

It's interesting musically, though, I'll give it that.  I mean, not great, but also not like any Strauss opera I've seen before.  Broadly romantic, but you certainly wouldn't confuse it with later Strauss music.  Because it's not as good?  Well...that's certainly an aspect of it, but still!  It's not too bad!  Probably worth seeing!  On the whole, though, this is certainly the least essential Strauss I've seen, and certainly not a vital part of anyone's operatic education.

Rolf Liebermann, Leonore 40/45 (1952)

Well...it's my first opera with a slash in the title, I'll tell you that much.  This is a rare one, which possibly hadn't been performed since the fifties; the page is a bit cagey about that.  But now we can see it because of Theater Bonn and Operavision. Hurray!

So as you might guess, this takes place during World War II.  It's sung in a mixture of German and French.  Albert is a music student; he and his father are listening to Fidelio on the radio (hence the title), when word comes down that everyone's being enlisted, so he reluctantly joins up.  In occupied France, he meets Yvette, a French woman working with the Resistance.  They fall in love, obviously, but then Albert is forced to leave with his regiment and they loose contact.  Oh, did I mention the angel?  There's this guardian angel, Emile, who introduces the opera and at several points intervenes to make things turn out better.  In the second part, the War's just ended, and Albert and Yvette are looking for each other.  She learns from Emile that he's working at a music store, and so she goes to apply for a job there (it's extremely unclear what the whole job thing has to do with anything; it feels like she's engaging in this really pointless subterfuge).  At any rate, the two of them are reunited; a tribunal doesn't want them to get married because France and Germany are still considered enemies, I guess, which I don't totally understand: if the War's over it's over, innit?  You can't maintain enmity indefinitely.  Regardless, Emile tells everyone to knock it off, and the marriage can proceed.

It's not entirely clear what the message is here.  It feels like there's supposed to be some sort of darker subtext, but it doesn't come across.  The final chorus involves everyone singing about "the best of all worlds," making you expect some kind of Panglossian irony, but...who can say.  At the end of this production, a Nazi flag appears out of nowhere, which is obviously a message (and an extremely relevant one these days), but that must've just been a production decision, so who knows.

Regardless, I liked this quite a lot.  The operavision page says that it's "rooted in the 12-tone tradition of Schoenberg and Berg" (there's a part in the opera where characters are arguing about twelve-tone music), but it sounds nothing like Moses und Aron or Wozzeck.  That style may have some influence on it, but I honestly wouldn't have gone there had it not been spelled out.  It's mostly pretty melodic, I tell you.  Not my all-time favorite thing, but perfectly pleasant with some memorable moments.  

Also, the production is absolutely fantastic.  It's this sort of expressionistic thing with really cool George-Grosz-looking art and animation mixed in.  A lot of the stuff on Operavision is, sad to say, Regietheater, which is especially frustrating when you're talking about a little-seen work, but this knocks it out of the park and makes up for any deficiencies in the source material.  Theater Bonn?  More like Theater Bomb-Ass!

Karlheinz Stockhausen, Dienstag aus Licht (1993)

You don't even know how my heart sank when I checked Opera on Video and saw that another Licht opera was available to watch.  Nonetheless, I did my sacred duty and watched it!  I should get hazard pay here.

I realize the above suggests a jaundiced attitude.  But I did my best here, I can tell you!  This is at least a bit plot-heavier than Samstag...okay, that's probably not the best way to put it.  There's more borderline comprehensible action, let's say.  First, there's a little introduction which is a confrontation between Michael and his angels and Lucifer and his demons.  Eve tries to mediate between them.  Then, in the first act, the two fo them are having a competition, where Lucifer tries to stop the flow of time, visualized as group of dancers, and Michael tries to keep it going.  It's touch and go for a while, but Michael prevails, Lucifer congratulating him but warning that shit's gonna get real.  The second act is a war-war, with lots of video of planes and things.  That goes on interminably, and then at the end we have a weird creature called "Synthi-Fou" playing synthesizer music.  I don't fucking know.  But that's it.

You know, I don't actually dislike the music here, aside from some of the weird, stylized yelping that characters do.  It's ambient sort of stuff that would be perfectly fine as a videogame soundtrack.  But here, when combined with the total lack of drama, the whole thing gets excruciatingly boring, which is really the only way I can describe the piece as a whole.  I've already rehearsed my uncertainty here: am I missing something, or does this just suck?  I mean, if it does, it certainly doesn't suck in a slapdash, tossed-off way; there is clearly a great deal of artistry and consideration behind its suckiness.  But it's just very, very difficult for me to watch this and not think, GOOD GOD WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT TO WATCH THIS?!?  I must leave the possibility open that it's better in person, and maybe a fan would be able to convince me of its merit.  But come on, man.  I must be permitted to have my own opinions, and my main one right now is that I never want to see another Licht opera, although I definitely will if more become available 'cause that's how I roll.  Masochistically, apparently.

Pyotr Tchaikovsky, The Maid of Orleans (1881)

Little Catholic girl who's fallen in love...right, so Joan of Arc, or whatever you want to call her: that's what this opera is about, by way of the Schiller tragedy.  It seems to basically follow the story, albeit with a romance added to make things more opera-y.  Joan is a peasant girl who's having visions, which historically had to have been some undiagnosed and at the time undiagnosable mental illness.  Well anyway, she volunteers her military services; the idea that these were accepted is kind of unbelievable, but...well, it's what happened.  The opera also has some stuff with the French nobility which feels a bit superfluous.  Anyway, Joan has some military victories, and she meets this knight called Lionel, who was apparently a traitor to the French cause, it's not totally clear, but he and Joan fall in love kind of instantly and now he's a good guy again.  I guess.  But her dad thinks all of what she's doing comes from Satan (where did THAT come from?), and wants to stop her; also, the angels having stipulated that she can have military victory at the price of never getting laid (doesn't seem fair, but what can you do?), so they're super pissed off that she's now with this dude; it's really not made entirely clear, but the impression I got was that her ultimate burning at the state is some sort of divine punishment?  Who can say?

So yeah, the libretto is a bit questionable.  But fuckin' eh man, it's Tchaikovsky, one of my favorite composers, and he comes through as always.  This one came right after Eugene Onegin, so why wouldn't it?  There's really no good reason that this shouldn't be more performed.  The production here is very much on the chintzy side, including one very dubious moment with plastic angels descending from the "heaven."  But that's okay!  You can still enjoy it, and I'm not sure if even the worst production would be able to fuck up the power of the climactic public burning.  Please don't take that as a challenge, regietheater directors.  

Heinrich Marschner, Hans Heiling (1833)

Marschner was the most important German opera composer between Weber and Wagner, or so wikipedia asserts (though he overlapped substantially with both of them).  His work doesn't seem to have endured very well, though.  Actually, one of his other operas, Der Vampyr, currently has a production on operavision, but looking at the description and the youtube comments, it's clear that it's gonna be a tremendously irritating Regietheater thing.  Look, if you HAVE to inflict your vision on operas like that, you could at least have the courtesy to restrict it to well-known pieces, where people have other options.  I may see it eventually, but I am resigned to the fact that I'll be experiencing the opera itself through a glass darkly.

Well, I did see this, his most successful work.  Ol' Heiling (never referred to as "Hans" in the libretto, that I remember) is a prince in the Underworld, but he's in love with a human woman, Anna, so he departs, in spite of his mother the queen's protests.  He brings a magic book to let him keep his power.  Little skip forward in time, and Heiling is an established rich guy and engaged to Anna--although she's kind of ambivalent about the whole thing, especially due to his violent, childish jealousy.  He is particularly jealous of Konrad, Anna's long-time suitor.  Bad times.  Anna is alone walking home through the forest at night, knowing she loves Konrad rather than Heiling, when the spirits of the underworld appear to tell her that Heiling is not a human.  Anna freaks out and faints, but Konrad finds her and brings her home.  Heiling appears, and there is a confrontation.  He stabs Konrad and leaves, but then learns that, doh, he didn't actually kill him--the wound was superficial.  And now he's going to marry Anna.  Doggonit.  The marriage ceremony happens and everyone's happy, until Heiling appears for his revenge.  Things look bleak until the queen appears and begs her son to back down.  So she does, and they return to the underworld.

It does not get more German-romantic than this, I will tell you that much.  The improbable happy ending strongly reminded me of Der Freischütz.  So you know the sort of thing to expect, and let me tell you, as an exemplar of that sort of thing, this is really, really good.  The first act does get off to a bit of a bumpy start, not really making clear what the characters are supposed to be and what their motivations are.  Things pick up a lot thereafter, however, and there's a lot of hella dramatic music here, including a really eerie child chorus of underworld spirits.  As far as the cast goes, I especially liked Cornelia Wulkopf as Anna's mother.  A contralto, no less!  Well, wikipedia calls her a "mezzo-soprano and contralto;" I'm not sure what that means.  Is it someone whose voice moves from one type to another as they age, or someone who can just switch at will?  I didn't know that was legal.  But AT ANY RATE, a big-ish contralto role!  Yeah!  She has a really great, spooky scene at home worrying about her daughter's non-appearance.

It's true that I'm not quite watching operas at the furious rate I once did; the state of this blog is an accurate indication of that.  But!  That doesn't mean I'm not into them anymore, and an opera like this is enough to stir up the blood and remind you how much you like the genre.

Georg Frideric Handel, Jephtha (1751)

So, Jephtha: he was an Old-Testament guy who was banished by his family on account of being illegitimate.  But when they need someone to help them defeat the Ammonites, they bring him back and agree to make him their king.  

So he goes, but before that, he makes the great decision to promise that if he's able to win, he'll murder the first person he meets, as tribute to God.  Um.  But then he sees his daughter, doh!  He's not happy with it, but he goes ahead and murders her 'cause whatteryagonnado? 

Here's my question: what if it HADN'T been his daughter?  What if it had just been some stranger?  Would his reaction have been to cheerfully go, welp, better slaughter this person because I told God I would!"  That kind of behavior nets you multiple life sentences in this day and age.  To be fair, unlike with Abraham and Isaac, there's no actual indication that God really wants him to be doing this--it's just his own personal madness.  But if God objects to this, he's sure quiet about it.

I mean, I know pointing out how fucked up some Bible stories are is kind of hacky, but it's hard not to when faced with this.  But it's still a problem: they may be interesting illustrations of primitive religion, but when you're asked to take the drama seriously--well, it's hard.

So people have long been uncomfortable with this story, it seems.  If you look at the text, it seems pretty clear.  Some have argued that, no, she was just, like, secluded and dedicated to God for the rest of her life, but I really feel like you'd have to have a vested interest in the story being other than what it is to make that argument.  Not that this really makes it that much better.  But it IS what this oratorio does.  God sends an angel to tell them, no no.  Sure, better than dying, but damn, man--she has a fiance!  She's looking forward to getting married!  And now, all of a sudden, sorry, nope, we're completely derailing your entire life because of this incomprehensible cosmic wheeling and dealing that's going on around us.  They both seem quite chirpy about it--at least in this production--but you know they are just SEETHING inside.  My head-canon is that they emark on a long, secret affair, in defiance of all this arbitrary theological gibberish.

In any case, either way, it's just this cruel, ridiculous story, and you sort of wish Handel could've found a better libretto.  AND YET!  Well, it is Handel, and this is his final oratorio, meaning his final dramatic work of any kind.  I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I'm enough of a Handel expert that I can distinguish between his early and late work, so I can't say "ah ha, you can see how ideas he had been working on for many years finally come to fruition here."  But GODDAMN this is great music.  What's more, lot of the arias work dramatically in and of themselves, as long as you don't think about the larger context, and I'll go even further than that: there are parts where you're so carried away that you don't care about the dubiousness of the story; you're so swept up that you have to just go with it.  And that is my ultimate piece of praise for this piece (wha?!?).

Anthony Bolton, The Life and Death of Alexander Litvinenko (2021)

Well, the Ukrainian Opera Marathon may be over, but here's another opera that seems topical, under the circumstances.  Litvinenko, if you disremember, was a former Russian security officer who became a prominent critic of the government and defected to the UK until Putin had him murdered in 2006.  Can you believe there are right-wing Putin apologists in the US?  Yes, I can, because they're blood-thirsty, barely-incipient fascists who dearly would have loved it if T**** had been able to have his critics killed.  That's a cheerful thought.

The opera covers the last eight-ish years of his life, in non-linear fashion.  It's good that the time and place is project onto the stage; otherwise, it would be easy to get lost.  We have Litvinenko (normally known as Sasha) on his deathbed, and also before that in the UK and back in Russia; his behavior during the Chechen War and his refusal to assassinate an oligarch that leads to his flight.  There's also a  subplot involving Anna Politkovskaya, another of Putin's victims.  And yes, Putin himself is a character here, albeit never referred to by name and identified in the credits only as "Head of KGB."  He's a countertenor, which is a rather memorable choice.  Very sinister.

Bolton is a retired investment fund manager who dabbles in music.  That may not sound too promising, but hey, Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive--you never know.  And actually, I found this to be quite a good opera, both in terms of libretto and music.  There are a lot of musical highlights here, involving a lovely waltz number with Sasha and his wife Marina (I'd love to know whether the real-life Marina saw this, and if so what she thought), a pastiche of patriotic Russian music, and a chorus about polonium that really freaked me out (you may be reminded of "At the sight of this" from Doctor Atomic).  Also, after he carries out the hit, Litvinenko's assassin Andrei Lugovoy sings what I can only describe as a villain song.  Is it appropriate for a piece with such grim subject matter to feature such a devilishly fun moment?  Well, it does.  

Regardless, I got really caught up in the drama here, and even though this is probably an inappropriate comparison, the emotional effect of the ending reminded me of what you get with a good production of La bohème.  It certainly doesn't hurt that Rebecca Bottone is so wonderfully expressive as Marina.  I recommend this; the youtube video has been taken down, but, as often happens, it has been mirrored, perhaps ironically in this case, on a Russian site.  Check it out.

Dmitry Bortniansky, Alcide (1778)

Well, the Ukrainian Opera Marathon continues, sort of.  According to Wikipedia, Bortniansky is "claimed" by both Ukraine and Russia.  I cannot adjudicate this.  Let's just call him Ukrainian, eh?  There are already enough prominent Russian composers.

So, as you would probably have guessed, this isn't in Ukrainian; it has an Italian libretto--by Metastasio, no less.  It's a one-act festival opera, written for a royal wedding; hence, it's not in his typical opera seria format.  Do you know the story of Hercules at the Crossroads, sometimes known as The Choice of Hercules?  Handel wrote an oratorio of that name, not to be confused with his plain ol' Hercules.  Alcide is another name for Hercules.  What's the difference between "Alcide" and "Ercole?"  I truly could not say.  Anyway, whatever his name is, it takes place before his labor and all that razzmatazz.  He has to decide how his life is going to go; whether he wants to live an easy life of pleasure or a virtuous path of valor.  He meets Edonide and Aretea, respective goddesses of these two things, listens to them, and ultimately chooses the latter, but Edonide reforms herself and comes along with him, the message being that pleasure isn't a bad thing when it's regulated by virtue.  So there you have it.

I really liked this.  Some very nice baroque music, and it's really interesting that Edonide has actual character development, which is not something you expect from allegorical figures.  There are actually a few productions online, but I chose this one, and it's really good.  A charming maestra conducts, and the countertenor in the title role, Viktor Andriichenko, has a very interesting, distinctive voice.  Is there anything about the piece that would make me say, "that sounds characteristically Ukrainian?"  Obviously not, but what could you possibly have been expecting?  Check it out.

Mykola Lysenko, Natalka Poltavka (1889)

Hey look, after everything I've watched, here we have my first nineteenth-century Ukrainian opera!  Go.  Figure.  Almost every opera with a woman's first and last name for a title is a tragedy.  The only exceptions I can think of are obscure-ish contemporary operas: Harriet Tubman and Dolores Claiborne.  But: Adriana Lecouvreur, Anna Bolena, Anna Nicole, Beatrice Cenci, Francesca da Rimini, Kátja Kabanová, Lucrezia Borgia, Luisa Miller, and Manon Lescaut, in terms of things I've seen.  There is a clear pattern!  Let's see where this one falls.

Well, it's again a peasant thing.  Natalka is in love with Petro, but she's sad because he's been working abroad these five years.  A rich bum named Vozniy comes and asks for her hand, but she refuses.  The village elder Viborniy turns up and Vozniy asks him to intercede on his behalf.  Which he does.  Natalka's mother Terpilikha is annoyed because they're poor and their problems would be solved if her dang daughter would just go with Vozniy.  So for her mother's sake, she agrees, sadly.  But then, Petro shows up.  Natalka declares that she loves him and she is NOT marrying Vozniy.  But seeing  Terpilikha's outrage, Petro decides to nobly(?) give up his claim.  Vozniy is touched by this and decides to let him have her anyway.  All right.  That's it.

So...simple plot.  Not a tragedy, obviously.  Actually, what might not be so obvious, it's an operetta.  Lots of spoken dialogue, which isn't great for me--as you know, I'm kind of lukewarm on spoken text in any event, and if I can't even understand it, it becomes REALLY pointless.  I dunno, though--I'm not really convinced I'd be very impressed by this in any event.  The music I found pretty thin, the same as Tarus Bulba--it's possible that, like Massenet, Lysenko is shaking out to be a composer that I don't like that much for reasons I can't quite understand (I did like Koza-dereza, his short children's opera, however).  Of course, I can't say much for the story here either: in particular, Petro is pretty darned weak as a romantic hero.  He doesn't even appear until the third act, and then, this idea of him just giving up Natalka?  I mean, it would be one thing if she had fallen out of love with you; that would suck, but you would probably just have to accept it, lest you become an MRA/"nice guy" type.  But when she's explicitly telling you she only wants to be with you?  Well, I kind of get the impression you wanted out of this relationship in any case.  At least I hope so, because if you're really folding because you don't want to upset her mother, let's face it, you're too much of a chickenshit to deserve her.

In fairness, there may be intricacies to this that, for obvious reasons, I'm not getting.  I don't know, though.  I doubt there are any circumstances under which I'd love it.  Which is too bad, because it marks the end of the Ukrainian Opera Marathon, the reason being: I've seen every Ukrainian opera I can find.  Counting the three I'd previously seen, that's ten total.  I searched as thoroughly as I could, but I'm coming up empty at this point.  It's entirely possible--probably, I would almost say--that there's more that I just haven't found because it's obscure enough that there's no information on it available outside the Ukrainian or Russian internet.  If so, please let me know.  If not, that is that.

I know, I know, it doesn't really mean anything.  Me watching Ukrainian operas helps the Ukrainian people in no way.  Still, nothing wrong with highlighting the artistry of a culture currently under attack.  I wish I had something pithy to say in closing.

Yuliy Meitus, Stolen Happiness (1960)

Here's another opera based on the work of Ivan Franko.  Is he the Ukrainian Pushkin?

So we are among peasants.  Anna is married to Mykola.  She carries a torch for a guy named Mykhailo, but he has disappeared in some unspecified way, and apparently her brothers tricked her in to marrying Mykola (the nature of this trickery never being specified).  But whaddaya know: Mykhailo reappears.  And Mykola is arrested for murder.  A year passes, and rumors are flying that Anna is involved with Mykhailo (given the shape of the opera, I don't think this is meant to be the case at the time--at least not physically).  They're dancing and having a good time when Mykola is released from prison, the real killers having been found.  A week passes, and now Anna is totally inflamed for Mykhailo.  He barges into their house, and after a confrontation, Mykola goes to a tavern to drink away his troubles.  When he comes back, he and Mykhailo (who has been drinking too) have a fight, and the latter is killed, and now Mykola himself is going to die, his happiness having been stolen.  God knows what's going to happen to Anna, but probably not anything too good.

This was a very fine opera, I thought.  I got really caught up in the story, simple though it is.  In contrast to The Reluctant Matchmaker, I was able to follow the action here well enough, but I really found myself longing for subtitles so I could get a clearer idea of the precise ins and outs of it all.  The Lviv Opera website says that it's considered very subtle and psychologically probing, which is certainly believable, but naturally, my understanding is limited.

Great music, too.  There are a few really infectious folk dances, and the scene where Anna and Mykola give in to their passion is very dramatic.  One touch that worked really well in this production is that, for the first and only time in the piece, Anna removes her headscarf, an obvious but still clever metaphor for her releasing her true feelings.

Yeah, man.  There are a lot of great operas that you'll never know about unless you specifically seek them out.  More like this, please.

Vitaliy Hubarenko, The Reluctant Matchmaker (1985)

Okay, so this is a thing: usually when I watch an opera with only a summary I can nonetheless basically make sense of what's going on.  Not so much in this case.  I spent a lot of time and effort looking for information about this, but there ain't much online--and that includes the Ukrainian- and Russian-language internets.  Finally, I sort of figured it out: the video as it appears on operaonvideo is from mail.ru, and there's no summary.  But there IS a version of the same video on youtube that includes a summary in the description; the reason I didn't find it initially is because, while you can easily search for it on youtube, if you just do a google search and click on "videos," you only get the first version.  But even with that description...I had a hell of a time making head or tail of this.  It has a standard opera buffa plot: Pazinka's parents want her to marry a rich guy, but she's in love with a soldier, Skvortsov, and it's up to his clever batman Shelmenko to carry off the match.  But it took me almost the whole runtime for me to even figure out who was who, let alone the intricacies of the plot, which apparently involve mistaken identity stuff.

Well, for the record, in case anyone wants to watch it: the woman in the yellow dress is Pazinka, obviously.  The bearded and beardless soldiers are Skvortsov and Shelmenko respectively.  I don't know who the gray-haired guy who looks vaguely like Henry Winkler is, so don't ask.   Pazinka's father?  Possibly.  The woman in the red dress who punctuates her dialogue with words and short phrases in French is, I think, her sister.  The older blonde is, naturally, their mother.  And the Willy-Wonka/Mad-Hatter-looking dude in orange is Pazinka's family's preferred suitor.  I think.

Well, I definitely think a better understanding of what the heck was going on would've helped, but still, it's not bad.  Quite varied music, with some of it harkening back to the nineteenth century with elements of romanticism (also, a few patter songs), but also some more modern material with very mild elements of serialism.  Some of it just faded into the background, but overall, it's a pretty okay piece of work.  Still, without subtitles, I don't know that I'm capable of providing a really fair review, so we'll leave it at that.

Ivan Nebesnyy, Fox Mykyta (2020)

Okay, here is this, based on a series of Ukrainian folk stories as retold/collected by Ivan Franko, who also wrote the poem that Skoryk's Moses is based on.  In preparation for seeing this, I read this English version of it.  I wasn't what you'd call impressed, but let's see how the opera's gonna handle it.

The story follow very closely with the original work: this here Fox is called in by King Lion to be punished for playing mean tricks on everyone, but he manages to wriggle out of it, murders a handful of other animals, and then, for extremely unclear reasons, is lauded by everyone.  WOW did I ever not like this story.

Still, I'll give the opera credit: I liked it more than that book.  There's some pretty darned fun music here, especially at, like, the climax of tricks where it gets all carnival-sounding.  There's also a strong folk element, and the use of traditional Ukrainian instruments.  It makes for an interesting sound.  Fox is still unlikeable; I hope this isn't sexist, but I think it might've been a good idea to make it a trouser role; it seems like a woman might have a bit better luck at making the character even marginally charming or appealing.  I'm sort of on the fence about whether subtitles--me being able to understand specifically what they're saying as opposed to just generally--would've made him more likable or less, and I'm kinda guessing yes.  He is most unpleasant.

Well, what else can I say?  As contemporary operas go, it's not terrible, but I do think it's held back by the unpromising source material.  Dangit, I obviously didn't mean to end up in a place of slagging off Ukrainian culture when I started this, but this story, man.  It's not good.  I would love--and I mean this sincerely, I want to learn--to talk to a Ukrainian person and learn why they like it so much.

Mykola Lysenko, Koza-dereza (1890)

Man, imagine if Lysenkoism referred not to Soviet pseudoscience but to a compositional style based on the music of Mykola Lysenko.  That would be way better.

Anyway, here's one of two children's operas that Lysenko wrote.  When I heard "children's opera," I wasn't sure whether it was meant for children to watch or to sing, but based on this evidence, it is the latter.  That video is less than twenty minutes long.  Does that mean it's abridged?  Well...maybe, but maybe not, if it was written for kids to be equal to.

The problem is...I have no idea what this is about.  I can't find any plot information anywhere.  I initially thought it was just going to be based on "The Three Billygoats Gruff," which would be easy enough to follow, but it's really not.  There's a goat who, it appears, is extremely naughty.  All the other characters are animals, most prominently a fox, but also a dog, bear, &c.  In the end, they chase the goat off.  That's about all that I gathered about THIS story!

The music is very nice, though.  Simple, catchy stuff that, indeed, children can sing.  This is a school production.  So obviously none of the performers are professionals, but if I compare this to school plays I acted (well, "acted") in back in the day, I have to conclude that these kid are mind-bogglingly talented.  Imagine unironically watching a school play where you have no connection to any of the kids for pleasure.  THAT is not something I thought would ever happen, but now it has.

...and if it's hard with adult singers, it is absolutely fucking unbearable to watch these sweet children performing and think of them having the horrors of war shoved in their faces.  Murderous rage is the only justifiable response.

Myroslav Skoryk, Moses (2001)

This is based on a 1905 poem by Ivan Franko, which was meant to be an allegory for Ukraine: the country has great potential marred by political disunity, although I...don't think that's the main problem right now.  Franko, wikipedia tells us, is also "the author of the first detective novels in the Ukrainian language."  Dude, I want to read an early Ukrainian detective novel.

Alas, I don't think any of them have been translated to English.  But here we have an opera based on one of his works!  Which...also hasn't been translated to English, so I don't know what my point is.  Anyway, this is about Moses' tribulations.  As you'd expect, wandering around in the desert.  

You know, I have to admit, I am not super Biblically-literate, so when I saw this in the wikipedia entry about Moses, I raised an eyebrow: "Moses told the Israelites that they were not worthy to inherit the land, and would wander the wilderness for forty years until the generation who had refused to enter Canaan had died, so that it would be their children who would possess the land."  The classic image I feel like is of them wandering around looking for the promised land, but nope, it turns out that Moses was just taking passive-aggressive dickishness to new levels.  Well done, Mo.  But anyway, here--in this opera, and also the Bible--we also have some rebels, Aviron and Datan, and the people are divided.  Moses goes off into the desert and contemplates what he's doing and this and that.  A demon, Azazel, appears and tries to sew doubt.  So does the ghost of his mother, which confused me: since when was she supposed to be an antagonist?  I don't think there's any Biblical basis for that.  Unless she's meant to be another demon?  Unclear.  But anyway, Moses' doubt causes God to punish him by declaring that he'll die without setting foot in the Holy Land.  Boy, turns out they're both pretty darned dickish in this story.  But anyway, he dies, but the people are hopeful about getting where they're going, and Aviron and Datan will be executed, so...huzzah.

Another pretty good opera!  There's a heavy choral element here, and lots of arias--though one does feel, more than in many operas, that being able to follow along with the text would have been useful.  A lot of long monologuing that would be nice to be able to follow!  Oh well.  The music is romantic stuff with strong elements of what I don't know what to call but "Orientalism," an interesting choice for the milieu.  There's a really awesome ballet sequence at the end of the first act where people are worshipping the Golden Calf.

I actually didn't realize some of the emotional resonance that would come from watching Ukrainian operas at a time like this.  You look at the performers and you think, what are they experiencing right now?  Have any of them lost loved ones or been forced to go into exile?  There is no hell hot enough for anyone who initiates or supports a war of choice.  I would like it if this were a universal lesson we could learn, but I am not holding my breath.

Heorhiy Maiboroda, Yaroslav the Wise (1975)

The Ukrainian Opera Marathon starts here, with THIS.

Now pay attention, because I'm only going to say this once: it's Kiev in the eleventh century.  Mykyta is the son of Kosnyatyn, governor of Novgorod.  He's disguised as a monk, and he wants to kill the Prince of Kiev, Yaroslav, for having imprisoned his dad.  But when Yaroslav's daughter Elizaveta appears, he becomes infatuated and stays his hand.  A Norwegian knight, Harald, appears and likewise falls fro Elizaveta and she for him.  He wants to marry her, but Yaroslav says he has to prove himself first.  Next, a stonemason named Zhureyko appears.  He's pissed off because another Norwegian (why are there so many Norwegians hereabouts?), Turvald, tried to rape his fiancée Mylusha and killed her brother when he tried to stop him.  Yaroslav orders him killed, but Elizaveta, for unclear reasons, pleads on his behalf, and Yaroslav frees him after he pays a ransom.  He immediately goes after Mylusha again, so Zhureyko kills him and flees.  Learning that Kosnyatyn was panning some sort of conspiracy, he decides to have him executed.  Harald reappears having become King of Norway (as you do), and he and Elizaveta are married.  Some fellow Novgorodians appear and tell Mykyta that it's time for revenge, but he hesitates, knowing how important it is that Yaroslav build a unified state.  But then he hears that his dad has been killed and decides, yeah, let's do it.  This girl, Djemma, appears and declares her love for him.  Meanwhile, Zhureyko is back in town, in spite of having a death sentence on his head (would any court REALLY convict him, given the circumstances?).  Before he is reunited with Mylusha, he hears Yaroslav's wife Ingigerda and her co-conspirator Ulf talking about their plans to take out Yaroslav so she can rule.  Zhureyko wants to warn him, but Ulf realizes he's been overheard and captures him.  When Mylusha shouts for help, he kills her.  But a bunch of people hear what happened and the plot is undone, Ingigerda is sent to a convent, and Ulf taken away, presumably to be killed.  Zhureyko is forgiven and given a place in Yaroslav's court.  A few years later, Yaroslav is still doing ruler things, but he's sad because Elizaveta died in Norway, as Mykyta explains to him (why was he in Norway, and what is his relationship with Yaroslav at this point supposed to be?  Utterly unclear).  But now, the dastardly Pechenegs are attacking!  Oh no!  Zhureyko mustered some troops in Novgorod to fight, and this renews Mykyta's anger at his dad having been executed, so he reproaches Yaroslav, who wants to kill him, but Djemma, who I assume is supposed to be his wife at this point, intercedes for him.  Anyway, time to fight.  Mykyta dies in the battle, but the Pechenegs are repulsed.  Everyone sings about how great Yaroslav is.  The end.  Did you get all that?  There WILL be a test.

Okay, the libretto has its issues.  It's very twisty, it's hard to tell who we're really supposed to care about, and ol' Yaroslav demonstrates very little wisdom.  If it's supposed to be praising him, it does a bad job of it.  Of course, I was just following along with a summary, but I think there would've been problems even if there were English subtitles.  The wikipedia entry says that it "contains a number of perplexing coincidences and bewildering changes of character by the leading roles, and scarcely testifies overall to the hero's wisdom," which seems extremely fair.

Nevertheless, I actually liked this opera quite a bit.  In this instance, the music redeems the libretto.  There is nothing here that would make you think you weren't listening to a nineteenth-century opera.  Maybe it's partially because I haven't really watched much in that vein lately, but it has strong operatic values that a lot of contemporary or near-contemporary opera lack.  Passion!  Duets!  Arias!  And there's a symphonic break for the climactic battle that rules the flippin' roost.  Also, this is a very handsome period production.  We're rockin' in Kiev tonight, I tell you.  Does this sound like I'm trivializing the current situation?  I hope not.  That is emphatically not the goal.

Henry Mollicone, Five Operas

Who is Henry Mollicone?  Well...he's a guy who's written five operas, obviously.  More than five, actually; these are just the ones I could find video of.  I don't remember how I even heard about him, but I just decided for no reason to see as much of his operatic oeuvre as was available.  It wasn't THAT much of a commitment; four out of the five are one-act pieces.  Anyway, let's go through them in chronological order.

The Face on the Barroom Floor (1978)

This is based on a poem about a guy who, upon losing his amour, turned to drink; he visits this bar and offers to draw a picture of his lost love on the floor but dies before finishing.  That's it.  It's a weird poem with no apparent point and serious scansion issues.  The opera is an extremely free adaptation, as it would almost have to be, even at only twenty-five minutes.  Here we have two pals, Larry and Isabel, who in the present-day visit a bar, and ask the bartender about the face on the floor.  So he tells them: in the past, there was a bartender, Matt, (played by the present bartender) who was in love with a barmaid, Madeleine (played by Isabel).  A traveler (played by Larry) arrives and tells about his lost love, only when he goes to draw her face, it turns out it's Madeleine, so--naturally--the men fight and Madeleine gets shot.  A WHOLE BUNCH OF TIMES in this production--it's a bit silly.  Then we're back in the present and it turns out that the bartender was previously in love with Isabel and once again she is fatally shot.  Jeez, people.

It's all right, actually, in spite of this production being less than ideal.  It's a college production, so you can't complain too much, but boy: all the characters are just dressed in black tights and baggy t-shirts.  Also, Matt/Larry is a trouser role, and giving the singer no signifiers of masculinity lead to needless confusion.  IN SPITE OF WHICH, I want to chastise the Brown University student body for turning out to support their opera company in such pathetic numbers--granted, I wouldn't have either at that age unless I'd had a crush on one of the singers, but THAT IS NEITHER HERE NOR THERE.  Anyway, the piece itself, as far as I can judge, is pretty solid, with some cool sort of movie-Western-ish music.  It was commissioned by Central City Opera in Colorado (who also commissioned The Ballad of Baby Doe--it all comes together!), and per Mollicone's website, they've performed it every year since its debut.  You'd think there'd be a better video out there.  Oh well!  Not a terrible place to start!

Starbird (1980)

This is a children's opera.  Or so I am told.  Children like super-weird stuff, is apparently the premise.  There are a dog, a cat, and a donkey who, due to mechanization, have lost their jobs (the donkey was previously the Democratic Party's mascot--okay).  So when a spaceship lands, they decide to go to space, in spite of this...starbird who tells them its a bad idea.  But some robots emerge from the ship and try to MAKE them go.  Oh no!  But the animals use their qualities to escape.  The starbird wants to live on Earth, but she is built such that she can't survive here and has to go back to space.  Who is she?  What relationship does she have with the aliens?  What is HAPPENING here?

Seriously, I found this pretty inscrutable.  I don't know what to say about the music; I saw it a week ago, and it seems to have escaped from my mind.  Kids might like it, but I found it a bit dull.

Emperor Norton (1981)

You know Emperor Norton, that guy in nineteenth-century San Francisco who declared himself Emperor of the United States and issued his own currency and everyone was charmed by him.  You have to admit, it's a good story.  This opera starts in the present, where actors are auditioning for a play about Norton.  But then some dude--who may or may not be Norton himself; it's kind of intentionally ambiguous--who complains that the play isn't accurate and that it treats Norton as just an eccentric rather than the noble figure he was (sort of like the arguments about Don Quixote).  Then we see a few--very few--episodes from Norton's life: his death and then, moving backwards, the episode that allegedly made him go crazy, where he cornered the market on rice only to have it fall out from under him.

The thing is, I find the libretto here ineffably dumb.  We're clearly meant to come down on the "what a noble guy this was!" side, but to me either extreme is reductive and silly, and in any case, we see so little of Norton's life that it would be impossible to judge just based on the evidence of our eyes.  I dunno...also, in spite of all these reviews talking about how dang tuneful it is, I didn't find that to be the case at all.  It may be that it requires time to grow on one, or it may be that the instrumentation here wasn't that great, but either way, I found this forgettable at best.

Hotel Eden (1989)

Hey, can we get some positivity going here?  Okay, here is the best of the five by an extremely wide margin--and also the only multi-act piece, so that works out.  We have three vignettes, each of which takes place at the titular hotel at twenty-year intervals (1930, 50, and 70), and each riffing on a story from Genesis, featuring the hotel staff as angels.  In the first act, it's Adam and Eve, all lovey-dovey until Lilith shows up and causes chaos.  Eve gets mad and is going to leave, but the staff intervene, leading to an ambiguous but hopeful ending.  Next, it's a middle-aged couple, Noah and his wife, Mrs. Noah.  They're at the hotel for a vacation, but there is friction: Noah is a retired sailor and alcoholic who misses the sea.  His wife is sick of being called "Mrs. Noah" all the time, and cuts loose with the staff.  A disaster is averted, and they seem to have fixed things up.  Finally, it's Abraham and Sara, an older couple, sad that they never had a child together--there's just Abraham's son with Hagar, Ishmael.  But then some stuff happens, and Isaac is born and everyone's happy.  Apparently.

The big problem with this is that I found the final act substantially less interesting than the other two, while also being as long as the both of them put together.  Look, I know I'm not shocking anyone by suggesting that Bible stories are often kind of fucked up, but the whole Abraham/Sara/Hagar triangle is kind of fucked up, only the libretto is unwilling to really deal with that, so we just have this weird...thing.  First two acts are great, though, especially the second.  There's a lot of musical variety that I really appreciated; along with traditional romantic music, some kind of music-hall material and even disco--for the first time, Mollicone really comes alive for me, and I would gladly watch this again.

Lady Bird: First Lady of the Land (2016)

Only now is the foolishness of having decided to write about these in chronological order impressed upon me, because now I can't end on a positive note.  And it's all the libretto's fault, because actually, the music here is really good, with some great gospel and bluesy elements.  But my god, where to start with the text.  This may actually be the elusive "so bad it's good" opera I've been looking for, but I'm not quite willing to call something this dumb "good" in any sense.  

During LBJ's 1964 campaign, his wife went on a speaking tour.  That's more or less what this is about, I suppose, although that takes up less than half the run-time.  Basically, she goes to racist towns in the South and quotes "all men are created equal at them," a phrase which is well known for making racists immediately stop being racist.  Nice.  There's also a lot with LBJ himself, and deciding whether he should run for President.  Mollicone or his librettist absolutely worship the man to an embarrassing extent, and it feels pretty fundamentally dishonest to do that without even mentioning Vietnam.

However, I think that description does not give you an adequate idea of how godawful ungainly and amateurish the libretto really is.

Truly cringe-inducing stuff.  How did this happen?

Sorry!  Sorry for ending that way!  Mollicone definitely has talent, but on the evidence here presented, he's a pretty terrible judge of text.

Douglas Moore, The Ballad of Baby Doe (1958)

So here's a slightly funny thing--this is, so say people, one of the best-known of American operas.  It comes up near the beginning of the list if you google "American operas" (it used to be it was actually THE first to come up, but it's star has slightly fallen).  Everyone insists that it's super-popular; the host of the recording that I watched called it "probably the most frequently performed of all the American operas."  That seems just wildly not-true--you're probably thinking Porgy and Bess and maybe Susannah, which I'm quite sure are more popular than this, but I think the most-performed American opera is almost certainly Amahl and the Night Visitors--but he said it!  That surely means something!  And yet, for a long time, there weren't any recordings online; now there are two, both of dubious audiovisual quality, but still...seems weird.  Regardless, I'd wanted to see it for a long time, so now I did.  I watched this version, from 1976.  It was recorded from PBS, so as you can imagine it doesn't look super-great, and there's hissing in the background, but truly, I have seen worse.  It basically conveyed the story I think, though subtitles would've been just ducky.

This is based on real events, more closely than most operas.  It's the late nineteenth century, and Horace Tabor is a fantastically wealthy silver baron in the town of Leadville, Colorado.  So bully for him, but his relationship with his wife, Augusta, is on the skids, and when he meets Elizabeth "Baby" Doe, he quickly falls in love.  She' married herself (though we see hide nor hair of her husband), and, disenchanted, is looking to hook this rich guy, but her mercenary motives quickly morph into real love (or so she tells herself--and who can say if she's right or wrong or what those things even mean).  They divorce their spouses and get married, so bully for them I guess.  But things quickly go south (duh): Horace is a stout opponent of the gold standard and supports William Jennings Bryan for President (who makes an appearance and sings an aria based on his "cross of gold" speech).  When Bryan loses, this causes him to be ruined, apparently, through some unclear mechanism (the real Tabor lost his fortune through some economic panic that I'm too thick to comprehend).  He has a series of hallucinations of his past, and then dies of being in an opera.  Baby sings a final aria as the next thirty years goes by.  The real Baby--and the one here, apparently--lived the last thirty years of her life in extreme asceticism in a shed near the Tabor mine.  Seems excessive, but we all make our choices.  

I did like this a lot.  The libretto has some fairly typical operatic shortcomings--most notably that we never really gain any understanding of Horace's and Baby's relationship--but it's still a pretty good story, and you like to see a contemporary or almost-contemporary composer just including arias as a matter of course.  Baby herself gets four or five of them; as I'm told, it's considered kind of a diva role, and you can see why.  If it's true.  Nothing could be true.  I had no idea what it was about; I just had confused memories of that child murder case that was in the news some time ago.  This is better than that.  Actually, I'm going to call it: even the worst opera is superior to even the best infanticide.  Why would I say something so controversial yet so brave?  The world may never know.

Anyway, it's hard to arrange to match significant numbers with significant operas, since I've seen just about everything that most people would consider "significant," so this was probably as good a choice as any for opera number seven hundred.