Behzad Abdi, Rumi (2009)

It had been a while since I'd seen an opera in a new language, so how about Farsi?  "But wait," you might say, "your habit is to refer to the English-language names of languages.  Unless you're going to start talking about Française and Italiano, shouldn't you call it 'Persian?'"  Well...perhaps.  But you know what they say about consistency.  To be, "Persian" sounds vaguely nineteenth-century-colonialist, whether that's fair or not.  Besides, there are a lot of non-Indo-European languages that don't have distinct English names, so if I should see an opera in Urdu or Pashto--if such things exist--then it would feel inconsistent.  Look, the point is, I'm calling it "Farsi," and neither you nor the gods of heaven and earth can stop me.  However--because, as I say, consistency sucks--I will continue calling the Indonesian lingua franca "Indonesian."  No, it's actually not that impressive that you know that "Bahasa" means "language."  Knock it off.

Yup, so this opera is about Rumi.  Boy, who could've seen that one coming?  It does presuppose a certain amount of foreknowledge about his life, so you should probably at least look through his wikipedia page before watching.  The libretto is largely (entirely? I'm not sure) from his poetry, so you shouldn't expect much plot.  It starts with the Mongols invading Iran, which seems completely oddly disconnected from anything else that happens, until you read that this invasion led to his family moving.  It still feels odd in the context, though.  Then, in a series of short scenes, we see Rumi in conversation with his father, his wife, and his mentor Shams Tabrizi.  He lives.  He gets old.  And that's about it as far as plot goes.

It uses an Iranian musical system called Dastgah, I'm told.  I don't really know what that is, but given the opportunity, I would love to take a class about non-Western music.  It sounds in the same general area as a lot of Asian music I've heard.  I hope, but not very hopefully, that that's not racist.  There are some Western elements, but in general this isn't what you probably think of when you think of opera.  I'd place it with those Azerbaijani operas I watched.  Sometimes a little dull, but sometimes it gets into a groove and becomes really mesmerizing.

This production is done with puppets; there's nothing in the libretto that would compel you to go in that direction, but the librettist is a puppet theatre director, so you'd expect it to be.  And it's really well-done, with a lot of puppets on stage at once moving in very lifelike manners.  You've got your dervishes whirling and everything.  I do wish the subtitles had maybe been proofread by a native English speaker--a lot of this material is inevitably going to be pretty foreign to doofy Westerners like me, so we need all the help we can get--but generally, I found this educational and entertaining.

Hans Pfitzner, Palestrina (1917)

Here's an opera about Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, a sixteenth-century composer of note.  The idea is that Palestrina is bummed, due to his wife having died and he having been dismissed from his position.  His servant Silla wants to stretch the bounds of music, but his son Ighino thinks it's better to be more traditional.  They have a long discussion about this.  A cardinal, Borromeo, shows up: he's a patron of the arts, and he's distressed because the Pope wants to eliminate polyphonic music from the Church and have Gregorian chants be the only legit religious music.  So he asks Palestrina to compose a banging new mass that'll, I guess (it's not wholly clear), be such a huge hit that this new-fangled polyphony will be saved.  Palestrina sort of hems and haws but ultimately refuses.  After the cardinal leaves in a rage, he further hems and haws and is talked to by spirits, and ultimately writes something, but in the morning, he's arrested for his deplorable refusal (this is not a historical thing, or at least not mentioned on Palestrina's wikipedia page).  Then there's a long act taking place at the Council of Trent, as various Church higher-ups bicker.  They talk a bit about Palestrina, but there's a lot of the ever-popular Church Politics Porn.  At any rate, Palestrina has been released.  Everyone is bopping to his new mass, and Borromeo begs his forgiveness for having had him locked up.  Silla goes to Florence to seek his fortune, but Ighino remains.  The end.

Pfitzner considered himself an anti-modernist, and you can tell: the music is all intensely romantic stuff, and quite good.  But there is an issue: I don't know if you can tell from that description, but this opera is extremely talky, with almost no actual action on stage.  And as a result, long stretches of it are pretty dang boring.  That second act in particular: MY GOD, it goes ON and ON and ON, and you think, what possible relevance does ninety percent of this have to the story putatively being told?  And there are all these minor characters who only get a few lines each who appear to be there for comic relief, which feels very tonally weird.  The only thing that makes this act at all watchable is Peter Rose's fey, sinister Pius IV (another operatic Pope!).  Very possibly the least dynamic opera I've ever seen.

(Tangent: I once watched an interview with Rose, which is kind of weird, since I think this is the first time I've actually seen him perform.  The interviewers spent an excessive amount of time talking about the extremely non-weird of coincidence of him sharing a name with a disgraced baseball player, when what I really wanted was for them to get to the question of whether he's related to fellow British bass Matthew Rose.  But they did not, and it must remain mysterious.)

The production is also pretty strange.  If you can't tell, that picture on the cover is of Our Saviour on the Cross.  Why he is in day-glo colors is unclear, as is his presence period.  These big pictures and bobbleheads don't dominate the opera, they're on stage a minority of the time, but why are they there period?  Otherwise, it's an ungainly mixture of period and modern-day costumes.  At one point there's a limousine on stage.  None of this bothered me too much, but it's not the direction I would've gone in.  OH WELL.

Georg Frideric Handel and Leonardo Leo, Rinaldo (1718)

I've seen Rinaldo before, in a surreal production with sexual predator David Daniels, but this is the Neapolitan version: as you know, in the baroque era people thought nothing of futzing around with operas to make them match local tastes or to highlight particular singers or whatever.  So there are substantial differences here.  Actually, I say it's the Neapolitan version, but really, it's a recreation of the opera as it debuted in Naples, the original having been lost.  They had the complete libretto and they knew which versions featured new music from Leo, and I guess that was enough to create a more or less accurate version.  Maybe purists will quibble, but I think they did FINE.

So what are the differences?  Well, as far as music is concerned, it's hard to say, aside from the voice types being a bit scrambled.  Can I tell which parts are from Leo?  Do they stand out like a sore thumb?  Nope!  The most noticeable change, probably, is the introduction of two comic servant roles, Nesso and Lesbina.  They're barely even musical roles; each character gets a line or two of recitative, but their meet-cute story mostly plays out in spoken dialogue between acts (which, it must be said, DOES go on a bit).  Even if you didn't know, you could probably guess that these two were added after the fact.  Their stuff almost feels more like an intermezzo than anything to do with the actual plot.  

Another difference you'll notice is that this version is much more bloodthirsty; the original does the usual baroque thing of forgiving and redeeming the villains, but here Argante and Armida are sentenced to death, which they face with defiance--although then they do join in on the final chorus, so I dunno.  I don't see this as an improvement; baroque opera's typical emphasis on forgiveness is one of its more endearing qualities.

OH WELL.  The music is still great, as you'd expect, so I can't complain too much.  But I DO have to complain about the production, which has its issues.  It is rock-star-themed, basically.  As you can see on the cover there, Rinaldo himself is done up as Freddy Mercury.  Goffredo and Eustazio are dressed like Elton John and David Bowie respectively, and Argante is wearing KISS makeup.  I have no problem with this; I think it's fun.  But the problem is, these guys aren't just known for looking a certain way; there's a flamboyance that goes along with it which is almost completely absent here.  I know Rinaldo looks like he's jumping around on that cover, and that image was clearly chosen to suggest dynamism, but that is not the norm: mostly the characters just stand there, clearly not having been given any direction to do otherwise.  It seems like the producer didn't really have any vision beyond "this is how they look," and  It really does feel like a missed opportunity.  The production could've been great; it's not.  Also--and this isn't necessarily a complaint--all the castrato roles are played by women, depriving me of my countertenor fix.  Well, in that production with Daniels they were all countertenors, so I suppose it evens out.

Still, you know, Handel.  Watching it will not fill you with bitter regret.

Jonathan Dove, Mansfield Park (2011)

Dove is a very prominent and prolific opera composer, and yet this is the first I've seen from him.  Go figure!

Well, that's neither here nor there.  More interesting is the fact that there are very few Jane Austen operas.  I made a search and found a few, but they all seem to be written in the past twenty years, and none are very prominent.  Mansfield Park is one of the first and by far the best-known.  Of course, well you might say, wry social comedy isn't a typically operatic subject, but I dunno.  I suppose Austen is a bit less boisterous than your average comic opera, but I certainly don't think they're incompatible.  And Austen--being surely the most popular nineteenth-century novelist these days--seems like she oughta get some operatic love, probably.

I read Mansfield Park back in university, half a lifetime ago (actually, almost exactly half a lifetime), and I know I liked it, but I remembered little of it.  That combined with the irksome lack of subtitles here mean that there was some of it I had a little difficulty following.  But it's clear enough in broad strokes.

So young Fanny Price, humble, mousy, is sent from her poor family to live with their aristocratic relations, the Bertrams, and already I have questions: so these people are super-rich but they're just leaving their relatives to rot in poverty?  Except that for some reason there's an arrangement where they take one of their daughters?  What is going ON?  Well, anyway, Fanny has grown up as a poor relation, with the Bertrams being snotty to her except her eventual love interest Edmund.  Things are thrown into chaos when a vaguely disreputable but sexy pair of siblings, Henry and Mary Crawford, come to visit, and Henry tries to seduce Fanny and Mary Edmund, but ultimately they fail, the social order is upheld, and the two somewhat boring characters get together.  There's a famous part--here and in the novel--where the Bertram patriarch is away so they decide to put on a play, which is an extremely sinful thing to do, apparently, and only Fanny and Edmund object to this debauchery, and really, I don't remember having this problem when I read the novel, maybe my sensibilities were just dumber, but here they REALLY seem like the most priggish people in the world.  Sheesh.

Well, this does seem to follow the novel pretty faithfully, though it leaves out the section where Fanny visits her working-class family.  I can certainly see how it would be felt to disrupt the flow.  I don't know that the plot necessarily works all that well as operatic material, and there are parts that seem a bit odd, as especially when the Crawfords are written out very abruptly.  Oh well.  I saw this version (there are actually at least two productions available online), which is good, although there's a somewhat confusing thing where the characters are frequently standing on the chairs and tables.

The music here actually does make one sit up and take notice.  Dove likes doing these complicated harmonies based on a repeated refrain that go on for a long time over the course of a scene (the opera as a whole is divided into "chapters" which don't correspond to the novel's chapters, but which create a novelistic feel).  They're quite memorable: "I like Julia best" and "in Sotherton" keep going through my head.  Dove is definitely one to watch; I think he did the best he could with this source material, but I'd really like to hear him less constrained by, let's face it, a rather un-operatic source.

Mieczysław Weinberg, Die Passagierin (1968)

This is an opera you hear talked about sometimes, so I was glad to get to see it.  It wasn't actually performed in 1968; it was scheduled to be, but was cancelled for being too "controversial" (though the DVD does include an introduction from 1974 written for the publication of the score by none other than Dmitri Shostakovich).  Of course: the fact that "the Holocaust was bad" was apparently a controversial statement.  It was going to be performed in Russia, where you'd think that wouldn't have been the case, but what do I know?

The "present-day" of the piece is the early sixties.  A woman named Liza is on a ship headed for South America, where her husband Valter has a diplomatic posting.  She freaks out when she sees a woman who, she becomes convinced, is actually Marta, a Polish woman who was a prisoner when she was a concentration camp guard.  Most of the story takes place at Auschwitz in flashback.  Marta was known as the "Madonna of the camp," always doing her best to help other prisoners.  She also had a fiancé there, Tadeusz.  We see the prisoners--there are quite a few of them, very vividly depicted--and  Tadeusz, a violinist, commits a small act of rebellion when, ordered to play the Commandant's favorite waltz, he plays something else, and is taken away and killed.  We never learn exactly what happens with Marta, even whether she's really the woman on the ship, but in the final scene, we do see her alone on stage in civilian clothes, her hair grown back out, singing about the importance of remembering the dead, and that she'll always keep Tadeusz in her heart.

One definitely should not feel any sympathy for Liza, who is a real piece of shit.  I'm not saying that people who do horrible things can't be redeemed, but it's pretty obvious that what she feels is closer to social embarrassment than actual guilt.  She tries to justify herself by claiming that she was nice to the prisoners, but as we see, she really just wanted them to like her and feel gratitude towards her, and was off-put when they didn't appear sufficiently grateful.  And, of course, she passively let Tadeusz die so, you know.  If she's not in the worst ten percent of the Nazis, it's only because the competition was so fierce.  Even her douchebag husband--who, it is very clear, is only upset about her past (which he hadn't known about) because he thinks it will negatively impact his career--is less unpleasant than she is (which, however, is not a knock on Michelle Breedt, who acts the hell out of the role).

The music is very dramatic, occasionally discordant, in a way that might indeed recall Shostakovich.  I liked it very much, in spite of the harrowing subject matter.  Weinberg seems like a composer who deserves more recognition (this was the first of seven operas he wrote).

I know there's some argument about whether it's even possible to create art about the Holocaust that isn't in some way exploitative.  But even if you can, it might further be argued that a highly aestheticized art form like opera is the wrong way to do it.  And really, what can you even SAY about it at this point?

Well, be that as may, I thought this worked extraordinarily well.  Marta is a really impressive character, and the everyday horror of the Holocaust is certainly brought home, in scenes with prisoners speculating on their probably deaths and forlorn hopes for the future.  Just thinking about it is chilling.  But somehow, what really got to me more than anything else was a scene in which a cart of confiscated violins is wheeled in (the Commandant, as noted above, being a music buff).  Violins.  Could anything emphasize more clearly the dignity and humanity of the people you're setting out to murder?  Treated totally casually by the Nazis, of course. 

You should see this opera.

Philippe Hersant, Les Éclairs (2021)

Another from Operavision.  It's based on a novel about Nikola Tesla.  You know, Tesla seems like an interesting guy, but it's very hard to really consider him, what with his image having been coöpted and fetishized by those insufferable "fuck yeah science" people, not to mention world-renowned asshat Elon Musk.  Dangit.

Well, not his fault.  The opera (and novel, one presumes) redubs Tesla "Gregor," "to offer [the writer] a greater freedom of tone and direction."  Opera librettists have never been overly scrupulous about biographical fidelity, but fine, do whatever.  Also, in spite of his name being changed, the story seems to follow his life more closely than many an opera.  Gregor comes to New York, works for a while for Edison, but eventually has a falling out with him and is employed by some tycoon, where his innovations make him super-successful.  But Edison gets mad over their conflict over direct versus alternating current,  prompting him to use the latter to electrocute sundry animals to try to discredit the latter (yes, that sounds extremely stupid and nonsensical, but my impression is that it's based on real history, so I'll give it a pass, I guess).  Gregor's ideas win out, but he's stressed, so he goes off to Colorado, and when he comes back, he's more eccentric.  He has this idea for producing unlimited free energy, but his employer hates it due to lack of opportunity to profit.  As you'll recall, that was also Scarsdale Vibe's reason for wanting Tesla crushed.  I don't think there's any such thing as unlimited free energy, but if there is, you can be one hundred percent certain that any and everyone with a financial motive would try to crush it.  It's really difficult to overstate just how horrible our overlords are.  But anyway.  Now, Gregor is being supported by a philanthropist and unspecified businessman named Norman Axelrod and his wife Ethel.  But his ideas are becoming arbitrary and impractical; it seems he's losing his touch; he wants to spend all his time hanging out with birds (the real Tesla did indeed have a strong bird affinity).  Ethel conceives a passion for him (there's also a Girl Reporter™ with whom it seems there might be a love triangle, but that never goes anywhere).  She eventually summons the wherewithal to tell her husband that she's leaving him for Gregor (which made me feel bad for Norman, who is portrayed as a real mensch).  But Gregor is having a meltdown, and in the end, he either loses his mind or transcends human concerns, if there's a difference, and she is left alone.

So there you have it!  The music here is kind of eerie, incorporating sounds meant to evoke electricity (which IS kind of magic, when you think about it), and also the sounds of birds.  That last detail might make you think of Olivier Messiaen, and indeed, he seems to be a strong influence on Hersant, and not just for that reason.  There's one particularly magical Christmas scene (maybe I should've seen this a month earlier), incredibly atmospheric, and also featuring an excerpt of "Go Tell it on the Mountain."

Yeah, this was a pretty good opera, I thought.  At first I wasn't sure about it; a lot of the Edison stuff seemed kind of goofy, and it was hard to know what we were meant to think of the protagonist.  But then I got into it.  What can I say?

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1782)

No I haven't stopped watching operas!  Don't be absurd!  It's just the demands of the season &c.

I wanted to see another version of this, and the highest-rated one seemed to be this, with a production by Christof Loy.  I'd previously only seen David McVicar's excellent Glyndebourne version.  As I have mentioned, I'm still slightly on the fence about Loy, but this had all good amazon reviews; it seemed like if there were anything egregiously Regietheater-ish, someone would've mentioned it.

Right, so: both McVicar and Loy choose to face head-on what could be considered the opera's problematic aspects, re depictions of Christian versus Muslim cultures (in addition, they both include the spoken text uncut or nearly so, which I am told is unusual).  From my perspective, this isn't super-necessary, but there's nothing wrong with it.  In his basically traditional production, McVicar does this mostly by emphasizing the Muslim social life and in particular the Pasha's family--his wives and children.  The message is, this may or may not be a culture you actually want to live in, but you have to admit that it has its appeal, and people involved in it, men or women, aren't automatically abusers or victims.

Loy's minimalistic, modern-dress work takes a rather different approach.  Have you noticed that the title seems slightly odd, what with this abduction?  "Entführung" does indeed directly translate as abduction, kidnapping, or hijacking, and, whether or not it was the librettist's intent, that does seem to suggest that this thing might not be an unmixed blessing.  So basically, Loy runs with that: the idea that, in fact, the Muslim men aren't so bad, and the captured women might in fact like them as much or more as their would-be rescuers.  This actually works quite well; the drab-looking surroundings fade into the background as you get involved with the drama.  The idea that Konstanze would have feelings for the Pasha is very easy to read into the text.  McVicar does it also, to an extent, and it seems perfectly in line with the spirit of the thing.  I have no problems with that, and this production does it well.  Christoph Quest, as a bald, Yul-Brynner-esque Pasha, is very good, and, credit where due, Diana Damrau is pretty all right as Konstanze.  She only does her goofy-acting thing a few times.  

Possibly better than that, really, is the way Osmin is depicted.  It seems like this would be the hardest dude to humanize, since he's such a broad, cartoony villain, but this does so much more effectively than I would have thought possible.  Here, we get the impression that his bloodthirstiness is part performative, part bluster.  I doubt he would actually torture anyone as he enumerates.  It feels like it shouldn't work, but it sure does.

So this is all good, but there's one in my opinion very critical error: it's fine to the women kind of be into their captors, but it is, I think, less fine to suggest that they don't actually like their rescuers all that much.  Blonde and Pedrillo are a border case, but it's really, hugely prominent with Konstanze and Belmonte.  They're almost always far apart on the stage; when they first meet and Belmonte starts singing about his great love, she just backs off and looks conflicted, only embracing him gingerly and without any passion.  Now, granted, Belmonte IS kind of gormless, but still, this simply will not do.  It makes him look unfairly dumb, and this passionate music cannot be supported by such halfhearted dithering.  The only time they seem to have any connection is when they're embracing after they've been condemned to death; I still think it wouldn't be ideal, but if the idea was that Konstanze's initial uncertainty gradually disappeared until she rediscovered her passion, I'd say, okay, that kinda works.  But then after they learn they won't be killed, their persistence does not seem to last, so hell if I know.  It is not a wholly satisfactory ending.

I mean, it's not terrible.  It's not even bad, really, and as I noted, it had some really successes.  And the main point is, Mozart's music would be enough to redeem quite a lot, anyway.  I keep thinking that this is the least-known of his seven "mature" operas, but maybe that's just because it's the only one that--inexplicably--has never been on Met in HD.  Regardless, it's totally rad; I would easily call it my third-favorite from the composer (just LISTEN to the opening of the overture!  How is it not more iconic?). And yet, if you're just going to see one production, I'd have to go with McVicar.  I'm more positive towards Loy than I've been in the past, but still--I've got my eye on you!  No funny moves!