Huh. It's not that I haven't been seeing operas lately, albeit at a less furious pace than in the past, but...I don't know why I haven't been writing about them. Is it just that I feel on some level I've proven my point? Hard to say. Regardless, here's this.
Right, okay, so the story here is, we're in Ancient Rome times. Licinius is a victorious general, but he has a problem: he's in love with Julia, but she's been made to become a priestess of Vesta and so they can't be together. But he decides, fuck it, I'm gonna take her away and we'll get married anyway. So he breaks into the temple and they're reunited, but oh no! During their little tryst, they let the eternal flame expire. Doh! Now Julia is going to be executed for this transgression, and Licinius vows to stop the execution even if it means dying in her place.
Okay, pause for a moment. I didn't actually know how the opera was going to end while I was watching it; I immediately assumed it would be a tragedy, but I also thought it might turn out to be a romance like Rossini sometimes wrote: not a comedy, but with a happy ending. It was kind of fun to be watching an opera legitimately wondering how it would turn out.
So this production is transplanted to some sort of twentieth-century fascist state. It's been done. And it's actually, at least in parts, somewhat effective in that regard, although the sacred flame being visualized as a pile of burning books is a bit too dumb for me to suspend disbelief. So anyway, in the end, the goddess Vesta appears and is all, hey cut this shit out; also, let them get married, dammit. But then! Licinius' friend, who doesn't really do all that much in the opera, has been sort of conferring silently with various characters, and the upside is, everyone else gets massacred off-stage, with the sound of machine-gun fire.
Huh! Which part of that do you think is NOT in the libretto? A real poser! I don't know if Slylock Fox and suss this one out, for god's sake OF COURSE nobody dies in the end, how stupid are you? It has a happy ending, a la Idomeneo. When I wasn't sure of that--when I thought it might actually end tragically--the setting seemed like it might be sort of appropriate, but in retrospect, I was clearly fooling myself there: 1807 is pretty early for a standard tragic opera, and it's unlikely that Rome would be portrayed in such a universally negative light. So yeah. The production requires the characters to be distorted--there aren't really any villains in the actual thing per se, just somewhat misguided priests--and of course, the whole thing is wildly contrary to the spirit of the piece. It's just so grotesquely disrespectful to the opera itself, and if it thinks it's making some sort of ideological point, it's totally unclear what that might be. It's just fucking garbage, and whoever's responsible for the production ought to be ashamed.
And it's a really good opera, in fact! Lots of heartfelt and dramatic moments (also, a big name--Michael Spyres--as Licinius; are even star singers so hard-up they have to appear in dreck like this? Though granted, he might feel that the material he gets to sing make up for that, or he might have terrible taste; I don't know!)! Makes me want to see more of Spontini, but that might be hard; there's a production on disc of Fernand Cortez ou la Conquete du Mexique, but I'm not gonna lie, that sounds kinda gross. Well, as ever, we'll see.
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