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.