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.

Paul Hindemith, Mathis der Maler (1938)

Not a high point in German history, 1938.  I think we can all agree on that.  But, for better or worse, it WAS when this opera came into the world.  I'd previously seen one of Hindemith's previous operas, Cardillac (the only other one available in video form, I think), and I seem to remember thinking it was pretty good, though I never wrote about it here and forget almost everything about it.  I should rewatch.  Well, this is no doubt his best-known.

This opera is rather hard to summarize, but I will do my best.  So it's the German Peasants' War.  Ol' Mathis is a painter who doesn't really want to get involved with the conflict and also is (quelle surprise) having trouble finding inspiration to paint.  When the peasant leader Schwalb and his daughter Regina show up, on the run from the nobles, he gives them shelter and helps them escape.  Their pursuers find out what he did and are pissed off, but Mathis is untouchable because of his patron, the archbishop Albrecht von Brandenburg.  Later, this self-same Albrecht is having money troubles; he gets a letter from Martin Luther suggesting that he convert to Protestantism and then solve his money problems by marrying Ursula, a rich guy's daughter.  But ultimately he decides, no!  I will embrace extreme asceticism instead (this subplot goes nowhere, but it plays such a large role in the narrative that I had to mention it).  Did I mention that Mathis is in love with Ursula?  Well, he is, although the libretto does almost nothing with this.   Anyway, when the peasants kill a count, he yells at them and prevents them from raping the countess.  Schwalb is killed and Mathis goes off with Regina.  He has a long temptation sequence, where various figures out of his past appear, but it's not at all clear what he's being tempted to do or not do.  He's not a martyr or part of a religious order, so it can't be a temptation in the sense of Jesus or Saint Anthony.  Weird.  Anyway, at the end, Albrecht appears and tells him he's gotta paint!  Regina is dying, alas, seemingly from that oft-fatal condition of Being In An Opera.  Mathis rejects the world and goes off to live the remainder of his life in solitude (Ursula just disappears--I cannot overstate how minimal her relationship with Mathis is).  The ending of this production has him dying, but that doesn't look like it's specified by the libretto.

Jeez.  As you may have gathered, it's not the most orderly plot.  Hindemith wrote his own libretto; it is possible that he could have used some assistance.  You must notice heavy similarities between this and Palestrina: largely plotless German operas from more or less the same time period about Renaissance religious artists who are unable to create.  And my reaction was pretty similar, too: they both have good romantic music, but they're also both the operatic equivalent of eating your vegetables: They say you should do it, and you think it's probably good for you in some intangible way, but they're pretty bland and you kind of don't want to.  I will allow that this has a little more going on than Pfitzner's opera, but still...Kurt Streit does stand out as Albrecht, making him a surprisingly sympathetic, human character.  But otherwise, eh.  In spite of all the five-star reviews on amazon, I'm not overly impressed.

Erkki-Sven Tüür, Wallenberg (2001)

It's weird that when you look up Raoul Wallenberg on google, the two-word summary is "Swedish architect."  I mean...that's accurate as far as it goes, but when you look up John Wayne Gacy, it doesn't say "American clown."  It should say "Swedish hero;" as you know or ought to know, during World War II he was an attaché to Nazi-occupied Hungary who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews by the expedient of loudly and fearlessly lying to Nazis--and for his troubles was imprisoned by the Soviets on suspicion of being a spy and almost certainly died a few years later in a Russian prison camp.  The gruesome unfairness of the world can be a bit much to take.

Anyway, he's the subject of the piece currently under consideration.  Obviously.  You'd think it would be in German or Swedish, most likely, but no, this is my second Estonian opera.  As you might expect, it's not plot-focused, taking a fragmentary, postmodernist view of its subject's life.  The music is perfectly pleasant, very, how do I say? shimmery and sometimes boisterous.

It's really good, actually, with some very arresting moments.  The main antagonist here is Adolf Eichmann, as sung by Priit Volmer looking like a sinister (well, more sinister) Billy Idol; there's nothing banal about this depiction, and him haranguing Wallenberg with three glitzy nightclub singers as backup is...something, I'll tell you that.  However, only the first half deals with Wallenberg's actual exploits in the war; the second spends a perhaps excessive amount of time with him as a prisoner, and then everything collapses into postmodern chaos.  Wallenberg's singer is replaced by an Elvis impersonator (seriously), and then there's an ecstatic rave featuring, among others, Santa Claus, an astronaut, and several giant Matryoshka dolls.  Granted, the chorus, with everyone just chanting "Wall-en-berg," is pretty great, but you do have to wonder...come on.  What are we doing here?  It's not that it's disrespectful to the man or his legacy, but, visually striking as it is, you sometimes wonder...why is this?  For what reason?  This review calls it "a stinging satire" but never specifies what they think is being satirized, probably because they don't have any better idea than I do.  Just figure it's GOTTA be satirizing SOMETHING.

Still, there's a lot to be said for it.  One of these things that I put off watching a long time because I was vaguely skeptical of it, and then that skepticism turned out to be more or less unwarranted.

John Gay, The Beggar's Opera (1728)

I think I had actually seen this, but that was well before I became interested in opera, and I mainly just remember being bored.  So I thought it necessary that I revisit it; per wikipedia, it "is the only example of the once thriving genre of satirical ballad opera to remain popular today."  One will immediately note that, unlike every other opera ever, it's attributed to the librettist.  WS Sullivan and Bertolt Brecht may often get co-billing, but Gay seems to be unique.  The actual composer, insofar as the word applies, is Johann Christoph Pepusch, though most of the music is adaptations of popular numbers of the time.  You will no doubt recognize "Lillibulero" and "Greensleeves."  

Anyway, the idea is that there's Mr. Peachum who oversees a criminal syndicate of thieves and prostitutes, jettisoning them when they've outlived their earning potential.  His daughter Polly is in love with Macheath the highwayman; he goes along with this, but he makes the Duke in Rigoletto look like a model of constancy, carrying on with every woman in sight, one of whom, Lucy Lockit (daughter of the corrupt gaoler) he has gotten pregnant.  After some debate, Polly's parents decide to let the two of them marry, but in the end he's imprisoned, and after escaping and being recaptured, he's going to be executed.  But the audience doesn't like the idea of a less-than-happy ending, so instead he marries Polly to general merriment.

I've got to tell you, the libretto here is really, really successful in its quest to be as scuzzy and disreputable as possible.  Everyone's a thief and/or hooker, and not with a heart of gold either.  They are all one hundred percent venal and mercenary.  I went with the BBC telefilm from 1983, and it seems to me to represent them at their best.  Sure, it's a bit cheap-looking, as expected, but the acting is all top-notch, and I found myself absolutely mesmerized by the accents.  Roger Daltrey as Macheath may seem like an odd choice, but he acquits himself very well.  The musical numbers here do not call for trained opera singers (for the record, his singing here sounds nothing like it does in The Who; it's a different musical idiom and anyway he's effecting an accent).  You may, in fact, be surprised by how little music there actually is: there are plenty of musical interludes, but they're all very short: I'd be surprised if any of them topped three minutes, and some of them, no exaggeration, aren't more than thirty seconds.  They're fine, they help to give the piece its character, but, unusually if not uniquely for an opera, they're not really the most important thing.

The only thing I didn't one hundred percent care for here is the ending: so the piece is bookended with the composer and producer in conversation.  Very metafictional.  And at the end, Macheath is going to be hanged, but then, no, we've got to change it, and there's a very insincere happy ending.  But the way it's done here, before they can stop the execution, he's shoved off the gallows and hanged, freeze frame, the end.  It's all very jokey, but I really feel like the uncompromisingly ironic spirit of the opera demands that you play the happiness of the ending to the absolute hilt.  It's much funnier that way.

Oh well!  I'm glad to have seen it, and now I guess I'm ready for "The Threepenny Opera," which, again, I HAVE seen, but a long time ago, and I remember very little of it.

Giedrius Kuprevičius, The Prussians (1995)

I'm psyched, because I was finally able to find a Lithuanian opera to watch.  It always felt unbalanced: I've got Estonia, Latvia, WHERE'S THE OTHER ONE?  Well, here it is.  Unsubtitled, of course, but sometimes you've just got to grit your teeth.  I did have this extremely inadequate summary to sort of follow along with.

So it's Prussians versus Germans, which amounts to Christans versus Pagans, but here the Pagans are the good guys.  Is there any reason to capitalize "Pagan?"  Unclear.  It takes place during the Great Prussian Uprising, which is probably something that relatively few of us are familiar with.  The leader of the Prussians is Herkus Mantas, a figure whom Lithuania under Soviet rule used as a symbol for their own drive to freedom.  That is an interesting fact that I didn't know 'til now!  So that's nice.  In the recent battle, some of the soldiers found a German woman who demands to see Mantas; this turns out to be Kristina, his fiancée, and the weirdest thing about this opera is that we get zero explanation of how it is that he's betrothed to a German woman.  Both sides seem opposed to this, but I just don't get how it happened in the first place or what everyone else is supposed to know about it.  It's possible that this is addressed in one of the many, many parts I wasn't able to follow, but I kind of doubt it.  Anyway, they're going to attack the German headquarters, so they're feeling psyched about that.  Unfortunately, there is a traitor in their ranks, Samilis.  He goes to Sachse, the German leader, and tells him about the Prussian plans.  Kristina is also there, and he's pissed off about her Prussian fiancé, and again, I have NO idea how this is meant to be working.  Long story short, Mantas is captured but escaped, the Germans suspect Kristina of Paganism and kill her, and as the Germans close in, the Prussians sing about their woeful fate.  Fates DO tend to be more woeful than not, when you think about it.

I should emphasize again just how much of this is not at all touched on in that summary.  There are quite long scenes where I  couldn't even begin to guess what was going on, so that may be partly to blame for any complaints I have about the drama.  But the music, I thought was pretty darn good, actually.  Would it be horrendously déclassé of me to compare it to videogame music?  Like, a sixteen-bit Squaresoft RPG?  Because that is what I thought about a lot of the time, somehow.  That's meant as praise.  Just THINK about all those great soundtracks.  

Anyway, there you go.  I liked this, but I definitely would've liked it more with subtitles.  And my quest to see operas from every former Soviet state continues apace.  Right now I'm looking for Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.  Also, maybe, Moldova, but that's a bit of an awkward and uncertain case.  Moldovan is just another name for Romanian.  I HAVE seen a Romanian opera, but obviously it would be cheating to count that as Moldovan.  And yet, if I DO see an opera by a Moldovan composer, am I going to count it as being from a separate language?  I doubt it.  So maybe this quest was doomed from the beginning.  So it goes.