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.
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