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!
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