Domenico Cimarosa, Le astuzie femminili

Cimarosa is mostly known for Il matrimonio segreto, but he wrote a ton more comic operas, of which this is one!  Boom.  And what's more, there's another coming out in 2024.  The Cimarosa Renaissance is upon us, and I couldn't be happier.

How to even describe the plot to this?  There's Bellina who just wants to marry her sweetheart, Filandro, but there's some hard-to-understand legal thing where she has to marry some other dude to get some inheritance or other?  Can she, with the aid of her maidservants and (very occasionally) Filandro, solve all of the problems?

Hmm.   We may never know.  The plot here is actually a bit hard to follow in any great detail.  It's standard opera buffa stuff, but the sense of it seems to be "people like this stuff; let's shovel a bunch of it fairly indiscriminately in front of them and see if they'll bite.  And that's fine!  On those terms, it works.  I can't off-hand say if the music here is better or worse than Il matrimonio, but it's certainly a lot of fun, with infectious set pieces galore.  The character of Filandro is kind of gormless, but that's not the kind of thing that bothers one too much.  And the production here is a straightforward, traditional thing; it probably won't excite anyone too much, but nor is it likely to offend, and I think there's something to be said for a neutral sort of production in opera that's being released on video for the first time.

I do want to take a moment, however, to note that libretto quality is a severely undervalued thing in opera.  Sure, this is good, but with a more coherent libretto, it could easily be transcendently great.  Le nozzi di Figaro would never not be a popular opera, what with Mozart and all, but one thing about it is that it has a really good libretto (the goofy "lost parents" stuff notwithstanding), and I'm quite sure it wouldn't have the status it does today if not for that.  Find a good libretto, composers!  It may not seem super-vital in the moment, but your legacy will thank you.

Terrence Blanchard, Champion (2013)

Well, here's Blanchard's first opera, which the Met decided to put on after Fire Shut Up in My Bones turned out to be such a hit (it's available on PBS 'til the nineteenth).  In the introduction, talking to Blanchard, Peter Gelb remarks that "I think Puccini would be feeling very pleased with his successor."  Somehow, I think that Puccini would have been totally baffled by everything about this, but who knows?

Anyway, Champion is about a boxer, Emile Griffith, who felt guilt because he killed a guy in the ring, and also was tormented by his sexuality.  That's about it; most if it takes place in the past with young-Emile as played by Ryan Speedo Green, and then we also have some present-day stuff, and some collapsing of chronology, with Eric Owens as old, dementia-riddled Emile.  And that's really it; there's not a lot of plot here.  Though if you're wondering whether to see it, I should note that this is where you'll hear Stephanie Blythe sing "well fuck me sideways," which could be a deciding factor.  In general, this is probably the most R-rated libretto I've ever heard.

There are a lot of great set pieces here; I have no problem with the music, and the colorful production is also super-fun to look at.  But when you get to the actual supposed drama of the piece, it kind of falls down.  When I first learned about this opera, I had the vague idea that the guy Emile kills was his lover, which would tie the two threads of the piece together neatly.  But he's not; he's just some random guy who as far as we know has no history with Emile and then shouts a bunch of homophobic slurs at him.  It's not that you can't feel bad about killing a guy even if you don't like him, and I may have sounded like some sort of psychopath for suggesting otherwise, but here, at any rate, it really doesn't work dramatically.

Likewise regarding Emile's sexuality; this whole thing is just really undeveloped.  There are a few scenes in a gay bar, but we never see him with a serious partner or really have any idea of how being in the closet is affecting him.  I'd say this whole thing could've used a pretty serious rewrite.

What the hell, though; it was fun to watch.  If you think that this blog's radio silence means I haven't been seeing operas, you are incorrect.  It's true that I'm not watching them at the frantic pace I once did, but it's still pretty much my favorite art form.

Francesco Corselli, Achille in Sciro (1744)

It's been a good time for baroque opera on the ol' Operavision lately: last year we had Orpheus month in October, featuring not only an excellent production of Monteverdi, but also a thing fusing Orfeo with Indian classical music, to stunning effect.  Then earlier this year there was a new production of Agrippina--very traditionally staged but still very good.  Later this month, it's rarely-staged Vivaldi--but right NOW, it's THIS guy, an opera seria by a composer I'd never heard of.  Boom!

And it's really good, man.  It has more or less the same plot as Handel's Deidamia, but a completely different libretto--yup, it's another Metastasio, recognizably so, although it lacks the typical tangled Metastasian romantic convolutions.  It's all about Achilles being disguised as a woman (careful--this'll be banned in Florida before you know it!) so as not to have to go to war, and he's in love with Deidamia, the Scyrian princess, but doggone it, he really wants to go off to murder Trojans, so when Ulysses shows up to convince him to do just that, all bets are off!  It's actually not a very edifying story when you come right down to it, is it?  I know it's not useful or meaningful to approach Greek mythology with a contemporary sensibility, but I can't help it: the Trojan War was some bullshit!  There, I said it.  Cancel me if you must, but I stand behind everything I've said.

That doesn't really matter, though, because there's some really great music here.  It starts a bit slow, I  feel, but ultimately, even minor characters get their chances to shine.  There IS one mild disappointment, which is that Franco Fagioli was originally meant to sing Achilles, but had to cancel at the last minute due to illness or some such.  So instead we get this Gabriel Diaz dude, who, you know, is fine, but I do miss Fagioli--although either way, the decision to give the character a long curly red wig when in disguise makes him look like the offspring of Weird Al Yankovic and the Wendy's girl.  Anyway, as countertenors go, I prefer Tim Mead--another guy I didn't know--as Ulysses.

Corselli spent most of his career at the Spanish court, where this opera was written.  It is above my pay-grade to say whether there's anything in it, musically, that was written specifically to cater to Spanish tastes--although it is notable that the acts all open with honest-to-god choruses.  That's not generally a thing in opera seria, the only choruses in which tend to be brief celebratory things by the protagonists at the end.  But be that as it may, it IS obvious that the libretto was somewhat modified: there's a sort of confusing thing at the end where Achilles and Deidamia getting married is equated to a union between Spain and France--I do not know the specific cultural context of the opera, but it must have been written to commemorate some wedding that was supposed to cement some sort of Spanish-French alliance.  Bit of a stretch, given that neither of these characters have anything whatsoever to do with western Europe, but there you have it.  It's kind of interesting, at any rate, and it sort of explains the confusing thing in the generally very traditional production where various figures which one can only surmise are French and Spanish nobility (one woman in particular) wander around the sets.  Hmm!