Gaspare Spontini, La vestale (1807)

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.

Will Liverman and DJ King Rico, The Factotum (2022)

So here is this, which I saw.  The video used to be available online, but I don't think it is now.  Maybe I'll upload it if you ask nicely.  At any rate.

Right, so the title is clearly in reference to Rossini.  Stories about the opera all say it.  But aside from the fact that some of the characters are, uh, barbers, the resemblance to Barbiere seems non-existent.   Why would you claim that when it's not true?  What purpose does this weirdly arcane lie serve?  Bah! 

So look: all I need to say about the music--a great mix of opera, jazz, gospel, soul, r&b, and I don't know what all--is that it fucking owns throughout.  Purely on the basis of the music, no one should pass this up.

The plot, however, is something of a mixed bag.  It takes place in a Chicago barbershop, co-owned by two brothers, Mike and Garby.  Mike is all serious and straight-laced about the business, while Garby is a hustler, selling bootleg merchandise and, though the opera never mentions it, almost certainly drugs, given that he seems to be loaded.  So, obviously, the two of them clash.  There's also a thing concerning Mike and Garby's nieces Cece (their sister her mother having died young).  Cece doesn't speak since her mother's death, but if this is supposed to be because of trauma, the piece really doesn't sell it: she's always smiling and sashaying around the stage, and she clearly hears and understands people, sometimes even responding with gestures.  What IS this?  And also, she's going away to college the next day, we are told many times, and, I mean, okay, but shouldn't her current muteness be, I don't know, part of the conversation at least?  This is weird.  

But ANYWAY, the other plot thing here is the relationship between Garby and his girlfriend Rose.  This dude CJ appears, recently back from a military tour; he and Rose had apparently had some sort of thing in the past, and he's still in love with her, even though he knows she and Garby are serious.  But Garby ALSO seems to be behaving irresponsibly and treating her poorly, so maybe...?  Well, you'll find out!

The libretto is mostly good on a textual level, but it has it DOES have it's clunky moments, as well as larger structural issues.  As an example of the former, in the first song, a chorus exhorts you to go to the barber shop, which is all well and good, except then the last lines, repeated many times, is "but don't forget to pay," and it's just such a bizarre emphasis.  It would only work if "paying" as a concept played a role in the opera--like, the barber shop SEEMS all great and stuff, but then there's the dark side: you must pay.  But no, nothing like that.  Instead, you just get the impression that it's there to fill space, and it's sort of embarrassing.  Oh well.

As for the latter, the story just has a REALLY jarring transition between the tones of the first and second acts.  The first is this super-fun, colorful, hyper-real sort of thing, and then in the second, with no warning, bam, police brutality.  Obviously, I think this is a valid subject for an African American opera (or any opera), but I really think there needs to be some indication that that's the direction you're going in.  Otherwise...gads.

Anyway, what happens is, Cece is beaten and detained, and, naturally, everyone is righteously enraged over this.  But, I mean, ARGH, I don't think this was the best direction to take the piece in, but if you're GOING to, then DO it.  But this...doesn't, because after a little while Cece reappears, seemingly none the worse for wear, and also, now she can talk, or at least sing.  Okay.  That ended anti-climactically.  Seriously, the whole racism angle just kind of fizzles out (though all due credit to Nissi Shalome, who is radiant in the duel singing/dancing role).  What are you even trying to say?

I will say, though, that I was both surprised and edified by the conclusion of the love triangle plotline: we're clearly set up to want CJ to get Rose, but in my book, it's pretty darned unsatisfying if he just gets her because her current boyfriend is bad.  That has sorta incel-y vibes.  Doesn't happen, though; it turns out Garby isn't actually a bad guy, and he and Rose reaffirm their love, and, well, CJ is wistful but accepting.  Much better than I'd expected!

So, yup.  There we are.  As I said, killer music, and I actually did find the conclusion satisfying, in spite of some bumpiness in getting there.  Highly recommended.

Anthony Davis, X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X (1986)

I'd been wanting to see this for a long time, though that may have been mainly because I wanted an "X" opera for my list. Actually, recently I accomplished that one with Cavalli's Xerse, and yes, unlike Handel's version, this one was Latinized with an X. Why didn't I write about it? It's actually really good, as you'd expect from Cavalli; it uses the same libretto that Handel later did with revisions. Of course I don't have the Handel libretto memorized or anything, but you may be interested to know that "Ombra mai fu" actually includes a lot of lyrics that Handel eliminated. I suppose I can see the "more is less" argument, but it's still really interesting to hear them.

Anyway, as for this particular X opera, which was a Met Live in HD broadcast back in the fall. The first thing I do have to note is that that subtitle is a big ol' fail. So clunky. Why not just a minimalistic "X?" I suppose it wouldn't be considered descriptive enough; not good for marketing. But even if you HAD to use a subtitle, I feel like you could come up with something better than that. Probably.

Well, it's sort of what you'd expect. It covers X's life in a slightly impressionistic way, from his dissipated younger life, doing jail time, meeting Elijah Muhammed and joining the Nation of Islam, preaching to the people, falling out with Muhammed, doing the Haj and changing his name to El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, and of course being assassinated. It's really good, I have to say. The music is highly varied, drawing on classical and jazz and...you know, an AI could write this sentence. But trust me, it's good. I enjoyed the first act the most; it somehow seemed to lost a little momentum after that.

Seriously, this is super-good. People complain about affirmative action, but to that I say: yes, the Met is clearly looking to diversify, and that's why they did this and Fire Shut Up in My Bones and Champion. So...affirmative action resulted in productions of three great operas. Tell me how this is a problem (okay, calling Champion "great" would be overstating it, but you know). This is nice and colorful, and I think I might have independently hit on the word "Afrofuturism" to describe the production even if the Met on Demand description didn't use it, BUT WE'LL NEVER KNOW NOW, WILL WE? Some real set-pieces, and a great cast, particularly Will Liverman in the title role and Victor Ryan Robertson in a dual role as a pimp called "Street" and Elijah Muhammed (I assume this is in the libretto, but even if not, it's appropriate, as the two characters represent two opposing forces vying for X's soul). If you look up Muhummed, you'll see that he DOES look uncannily similar to Robertson. Also, I want to highlight a small role that nonetheless blew me away, and that's Raehann Bryce-Davis as X's sister Ella. She only gets one significant scene, but man, what a huge, awesome voice. I initially thought she was a contralto; actually a mezzo, but definitely a low one. I'd love to see her in classical repertoire.

You'd think an opera about Malcolm X would be subversive, but I don't know, can something be subversive while accruing the cultural cachet of being performed at the Met? We're talking some postmodern simulacra shit here. I suppose the closest an opera may come is The Death of Klinghoffer, inasmuch as the Live in HD transmission was canceled due to protests by idiots, but they still performed it, so I dunno. Hey Met, how 'bout doing a live in HD of that NOW, in the current political context? That, even I have to admit, would be genuinely subversive.

Jules Massenet, Le Cid (1885)

 So Rodrigue (Le Cid) and his sweetheart Chimène want to get married, and given that their fathers both approve and Rodrigue's just been knighted, things seem to be going pret-ty darned well (there's a scene where the Infanta declares to Chimène her love for Rodrigue, suggesting a love triangle, but no, she just acknowledges that she can't have him and the idea is completely dropped--weird).  But at the same time this is happening, the King is planning to name a new governor for the Infanta, and Chimène's father, Le comte le Gormas, really wants the position.  But what's this?  The position is awarded to Rodrigue's father, Don Diègue (it's hard to keep all these French versions of Spanish names straight)!  Diègue tries to be conciliatory to Gormas, but the latter insults him and storms off, leaving him shaking with rage.  So, naturally, he prevails upon his son to seek revenge for him.  Rodrigue does briefly consider whether murdering his girlfriend's dad for rudeness might be a bad idea, but ultimately decides, hey, filial piety; what can you do.  So he, does (in a duel, so you can decide whether that technically constitutes murder).  His dad is super-psyched about this (he really is coming across as a bit of a psychopath, isn't he?), but Rodrigue is gloomy because he knows this is gonna fuck up his relationship.  And indeed, Chimène demands before the King that justice be done.  But what's this?  The Moors are attacking!  So judgment on Rodrigue is suspended as he's let off to lead the Spanish forces.  Before the battle, he meets with Chimène and sorta-kinda reconcile, though a resumption of their romance seems questionable.  But then he goes and wins the battle and earns the name "El Cid" (this is wildly at odds with the actual history, but it would be weirder if it weren't), and she decides, oh you scamp, I can't stay mad at you!  So that is that, though I dunno--I feel like even if she can forgive him, having his creepy dad looming over them all the time is still going to be an issue.

(And I do NOT know what that thing is about the Infanta's governor being such a peach position.  I mean, I get that it must have a lot of prestige attached to it, but what does it even entail?  And, let's face it, can old guys get away with jockeying to be the guardian, I guess, of young girls without it seeming pervy as hell?  I submit that it cannot.)

You really, really expect this to be a tragedy, don't you?  I mean, a knight killing his girlfriend's father out of a warped sense of honor?  This is Verdi stuff.  There are commonalities with La forza del destino.  I suppose you could argue that it's in line with some of Rossini's romances (like La donna del lago or Guillaume Tell), but I dunno, man.  Of course, if you happen to know the history, you'd know that this couple got married and did not die at this time, but come on, who would know that but a super-big nerd?

STILL.  I know I'm on record as being lukewarm about Massenet, for reasons that I can't explain or even really conceptualize--his work is square in the same wheelhouse as tons of opera that I love, so that's the deal?  Well...as it turns out, I may or may not have had a breakthrough, because I thought this was kinda good.  I dunno; maybe my sensibilities have changed or maybe it's just that I hadn't seen an opera of this sort for so long I was happy to accept anything--but I thought it was pretty all right, and in spite of the goofiness, I enjoyed the drama.  Maybe I should go back and rewatch some Massenet, or maybe not.  It is a mystery!

Le Cid was at one point available on youtube, in a mediocre-quality video taken from a 2000-ish TV broadcast from the Washington Opera starring Placido Domingo.  It's since been taken down.  I sure hope nobody had already downloaded it, because then they might reupload it.  I shudder to think.

Henry Purcell (more or less), Masque of Might (2023)

I simply MUST draw your attention to this awesome piece.

What I didn't know about Purcell, but now that I've examined his wikipedia page I do, is that the man was fantastically prolific in his short life.  But you don't necessarily hear a lot of his music, because a lot of it was written for miscellaneous celebrations or for semioperas that are never staged because they have no interest other than the music.  It's a sad state of affairs, so we have THIS, which highlights some lesser-known Purcell.

The idea is a little like the Met's Enchanted Island only Purcellsclusive, but with an important difference, also: The Enchanted Island used a completely new libretto, whereas this here uses the authentic seventeenth century texts, only slightly tweaking a few of them to match the plot better.

That story is an environmental fable about a dictator who comes to power who hates the environment and doesn't care about climate change and my god it is absolutely impossible to describe this without making it sound like the most dopey, heavy-handed thing imaginable.  I assure you, in practice it's much better than that.  Obviously, the words only sort of relate the putative story (there are also little pre-scene captions that help you follow along), but it's actually kind of amazing how much the story does, actually, work, albeit in a somewhat impressionistic way.  And no, really, I swear, it doesn't come across as overly dogmatic or heavy-handed.  All due credit to the creator, David Pountney.  You cannot deny the artistry.  Still not quite sure what the title means, though.

Is there any need to mention the music?  It's great, obvz.  I'm sure I've lamented his early death before, but man alive.  Since there's still a huge amount of rarely-performed Purcell out there, so if Pountney or someone else wanted to make a couple three more like this, well, I can't see myself objecting too strenuously.

Francesco Provenzale, La Stellidaura Vendicante (1674)

 

Steeeeelllaaaaa!

Right, now that we've gotten that out of our system...This one had been on my radar for a long time, but I just got to it.  The idea here is we've got this king, Orismondo, who's head over heels for Stellidaura, but she already has a lover, Armidoro--or Armadillo, as I preferred to think of him.  Orismondo is hella jealous, leading him to shoot and wound Armadillo, causing Stellidaura to vow revenge--there's a lot more of the heroine waving swords around than you usually see in these things.  There are misunderstandings caused by people getting the wrong letters and leaping to conclusions.  Armadillo protects Orismondo when Stellidaura, in disguise, is about to run him through ('cause he's just so gosh-darned chivalrous); she's sent to the dungeon, and Orismondo sends one of the comic-relief servants, Giampetro, to make her drink poison to kill her (still not knowing who she is).  Soon after, he learns who she is, but it's TOO LATE, she's already taken the poison...but since this is a baroque opera, it's NBD; it turns out Giampetro accidentally just gave her a sleeping potion ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .  Finally, Orismondo reads in an, uh, book (visualized here as a letter in a bottle, which somehow makes even less sense) that Stellidaura is actually secretly his sister, so that...solves the problem?  I guess?  It seems like the sudden revelation that the person you really, really want to fuck is a blood relative would do odd things to your libido.  Or at the very least, make for a super-awkward time at family get-togethers.  Also, it's kind of surprising that there's not an alternate love interest for Orismondo.  But there you go.

I was a bit surprised by the voice types on display: only Armillo (the other servant) is sung by a countertenor; Orismondo and Armadillo are both tenors, which seems quite atypical--for all that the tenor eventually became the default hero role, it didn't play much of a part in Italian baroque opera (French is another story).  Still, there's quite a contrast between them, the one super-low and the other high, that it's easy to imagine that they were originally baritone and castrato roles, which would certainly have been more typical.  Still, it's fine.  Also, allegedly Giampetro is singing in dialect, which is supposed to be another innovation of the piece that, naturally, was lost on me.

I mean, this is a perfectly acceptable example of the thing that it is, so if you like that thing, as I do, you're sure to like it.  I have to admit, though, all the hype surrounding this, heralding it as a long-lost classic and all that, made me like it perhaps a bit less: because it's really not all that special.  The libretto is slight, and there are no musical moments that I found really transcendent.  Know what I'm sayin'?  

Still, I really want to see as many seventeenth-century operas as I can; according to my all-knowing list, I'm currently at an even forty, which seems like kind of a lot, and yet I still don't feel I really have a clear grasp of the development of opera in the seventeenth century, whereas I feel like I sort of do for the eighteenth and beyond.  It looks like I will have no choice but to watch more.  Darn!

Antonio Vivaldi, Il Giustino (1724)

A new-to-me Vivaldi opera!  Hooray!  

So here we have Anastasio, a Byzantine emperor, and Giustino, a peasant who became captain of the imperial guard and later an emperor in his own right (though not through murder, surprisingly--anyway, the opera doesn't get that far).  There's also the queen and a woman in love with Giustino and cross-dressing and romantic misunderstanding and an enemy king--all very typical opera seria stuff.

Musically, this is...well, it's not as though I have THAT clear a recollection of the specifics of the music in all the Vivaldi operas I've seen, but I had the subjective impression here that this may be the best.  It's just an absolute cavalcade of one musical delight after another.  It's staggering, really.  Great cast, as well; I was especially excited to see Raffaele Pe, who is rapidly becoming one of my favorite countertenors, as Anastasio.

The production, however...hmm.  So it definitely looks like a very traditional thing, and in some ways it is.  But in some ways, it's not, and I think it mainly just makes a the plot harder to follow.  It's unclear to me how much of the confusion stems from the libretto itself and how much from how it's presented.  It is very strange to me how many of the insufferable traditionalists who moan about any opera being placed in a new setting are praising this to the stars for being, well, traditional.  Really?  So the baffling business where Anastasio is presented as an opera composer and several scenes are presented as being from his work and it's just generally kind of baffling and presents the emperor as an extremely modern, non-baroque sort of character?  Or the fact that it ends with a possible assassin or something pointing a gun at him?  I mean, DAMN, is your criticism of non-traditional productions REALLY so surface-level that nothing beyond the costuming even registers with you?  Sheesh.  And this is one instance where, if you DID criticize the production, I'd actually be on your side.  You've lost a powerful ally in me!

Well, never mind.  Still an incredible piece of work.  GOD, I love baroque opera.  Why isn't Vivaldi more commonly staged?  He's brilliant.

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!

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, The Noblewoman Vera Sheloga (1898) and The Maid of Pskov (1872)

Well, since I was on an NRK kick, I figured it would make sense for me to see this too, which has been available for some time but which I had for whatever reason put off.  Actually, it's been available for longer than that, but never with subtitles.  A version of The Maid of Pskov first appeared with subs on the vanished M T's channel.  BUT THEN!  Grange Park Opera put a version up--I think as some sort of comment on the war--with significantly less insane subtitling (it's delisted now, but they didn't take it down or make it private, so you can still check it out).  Both of these are based on a play by Lev Mei.  Vera Shebolga is a belated prequel based on the prologue, which I guess is a rewritten version of a prologue to Pskov, which he removed in revisions of the opera.  Confusing.

So: in The Noblewoman Vera Shebolga, Vera's living alone with her sister Nadezhda, her husband being off at The Wars.  She's had a child, and she confesses to her sister that it's not her husband's; she was seduced by a mysterious man.  When her husband come back, Nadezhda covers for her by claiming that it's actually her baby.

In The Maid of Pskov, we fast-forward some number of years, and the baby from the prologue, Olga, has grown up.  Things are difficult, with Ivan the Terrible running around terrorizing cities (Ivan the Terrible is in fact an alternate title of the opera).  She's in love with Tucha, a leader of the resistance against Ivan's guys, but her dad wants her to marry this creepy dude Matuta instead.  When the tsar shows up, both he and Olga act surprised, and we learn that--surprise!--he's her real father.  He decides to be merciful to the city because of this (not a good basis for governance, but hey, he WAS terrible).  Olga is captured during an assignation with Tucha; Ivan still wants to be merciful, and amazingly even agrees that Tucha will just be imprisoned rather than executed, but the rebels come in and accidentally kill Olga, and then he's sad.  The end.

The music's really good.  What a surprise!  It's NRK we're talking about here!  It might not seem that this would be a good story to include a bunch of folk music, but he works in lots of off-stage choruses that do just that.  The plot is a little anemic, but what the hey.  The Maid of Pskov was his first opera; if I were a musicologist, perhaps I could analyze his development of his style by comparing it to The Noblewoman Vera Sheboga.  Alas, I am not and cannot.  But speaking of Vera Sheboga, I cannot fathom the purpose of its existence.  It doesn't broaden our understanding of the main drama, and performed alone, it would be absolutely useless.  It's usually combined with the longer opera, but either way: guh?  I mean, I'm not going to complain about having the chance to listen to more Rimsky-Korsakov, but I'm also at a bit of a loss.

This production is interesting.  It's mostly a traditional affair, but it deviates from that in a few places.  We don't see Ivan until midway through the second act, and you can't help but think, boy, with all this build-up, he'd better be hella memorable.  And here he actually is: when you first see him, he's standing in the shadows and wearing a large cloak; when he throws if off and comes forward, you can see that he's done up as Stalin, in a period Soviet uniform.  I was NOT expecting that, but it works.  

So as you may know, one of the many things that made Ivan so terrible was that he killed his firstborn son in a fit of rage (but afterward he apparently felt super bad about it, and hey, who among us...?).  At the beginning of the third act, we see him contemplating a silent film of this event, to show that these things are on his mind because of his newly-discovered daughter.  The actual depiction of the character by the libretto isn't much, so this helps--though regardless, how much are we meant to think we cares about this daughter he JUST learned exists?  

I dunno; notwithstanding the sometimes-shaky words, I enjoyed this!  No question!  Now I've seen all of NRK's operas but Servillia and Pan Voyevoda, and these two are REALLY rarely performed, so who knows when or if I'll ever get the chance.  Still, I'll keep an eye out!

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Christmas Eve (1895)

This year, Operavision and Oper Frankfurt bring us the greatest gift of all: rarely-performed seasonal NRK!  How can you say no?  'Tis impossible.

This has the same plot as Tchaikovsky's Cherevichki, as both are based on the same Gogol story.  So: Vakula, the blacksmith, is hopelessly in love with Oksana, but she keeps rebuffing him, and says she'll only marry him if he can bring her the tsarina's slippers.  So Vakula catches the Devil—who had come to the village because he was annoyed that Vakula had made an unflattering caricature of him—and makes him take him to Saint Petersburg, where the tsarina kindly gives him the desired slippers.  Then, it's back home, and Vakula and Oksana are going to be married.

There are very small differences from the Tchaikovsky: this one features Patsyuk, a sorcerer, adding to the supernatural elements.  Also, Vakula's mother, Solokha, comes across as more mercenary—she wants to marry Oksana's father, and doesn't want the kids to get married because then she wouldn't get his fortune.  There's a scene (here and in the other) where the Devil and three men come in turn to her house to try to seduce her and then are hidden in sacks when the other ones show up; it's very amusing, but in this one, there's a scene after where they all decide that they were being played and reject her.  It could well come across as misogynistic (and it's one thing I definitely like less), but in this production, at least, we see her again in the last scene and all seems to have been forgiven, so that's all right.  Finally, I believe this one makes it clearer that Oksana was just teasing Vakula; that she was going to accept him eventually anyway, and the slippers were unnecessary.  So that's a small improvement, I think.

So hey, swings and roundabouts.  But they're both fantastic operas by fantastic composers.  I saw a video introduction to the Operavision production which said that Rimsky-Korsakov waited until after Tchaikovsky's death to do his own opera on the theme, so as not to step on the other man's toes.  Which seems a bit morbid, and there was certainly no guarantee that Tchaikovsky would go first, given that he was only four years older than NRK.  But there you go!  Doesn't seem like a worthwhile tradeoff, but it IS a great piece of work.

The Operavision production is by Christof Loy, who I'm still slightly wary about, but he does good work here, though obviously less lavish than the Royal Opera House Cherevichki.  It makes extensive use of geometric grids, which seems characteristic of his work.  Seems odd, but I feel it mostly captures the spirit of the piece.  I was also psyched to see that the Devil is played by Andrei Popov, my low-key fave.  And with this performance, my record of only seeing him as unnamed character remains unbroken: the Devil, the Astrologer, the Holy Fool, the Police Inspector, the Left-Hander.  Zany stuff, man.  Zany stuff.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, The Tsar's Bride (1899)

So I just saw this at the National Opera (on my second try—I was originally supposed to see it like a month ago, but I came down with covid), and I thought, you know, I know I already wrote about this the first time I saw it, but I kind of have more I want to say about it, so let's just do another entry here.  And then I looked and realized, hey, I actually didn't write about it the first time!  So, perfect.

So there's this oprichnik named Grigory who's in love with a woman named Marfa.  But alas, she has a fiancé, Ivan, so he gets this creepy apothecary to make him a love potion he can give her.  But his mistress Lyubasha (in whom he's lost interest) overhears him and, jealous, prevails upon the same apothecary, in exchange for an assignation, to make her a potion that will wither Marfa's beauty (all of this is very vaguely based on real events).  Marfa and Ivan are all ready to get married, but then—as you might guess—the Tsar (Ivan the Terrible, who never appears on-stage) decides that he's going to marry her, so what can you do?  Well, things go from bad to worst, and all the principals end up dead.

The main issue with this opera, I feel, is that the tragedy feels overdetermined: you could make a perfectly sturdy drama with the potion stuff, or with Marfa being forced to marry the Tsar, but when you put them both together, the result is something of a jumble, and neither receive quite the attention I think they deserve.  Another problem (if you think it's a problem) is that this—like Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina--feels oddly centerless.  Who's the main character here?  You would think it would be Marfa, but she really feels more like object than subject here.  The largest role is Grigory, but he still doesn't exactly feel like the protagonist.  I don't know; I'm not wholly convinced by the libretto.

Nevertheless, there's always something satisfying about a really grim opera, and this certainly delivers in that regard, and with Rimsky-Korsakov's kickass music, you can't go wrong (seriously, you should at least listen to the awesome overture).  The cast was really good: Rauno Elp, a very prolific artist whom I recently saw as Jack Rance in La fanciulla del west, was a memorable, conflicted Grigory, but I think the MVP was the mezzo singing Lyubasha, whose name I can't provide because I didn't recognize her and the website doesn't list the cast.  Sorry about that; it's really not fair.  But whoever she is, she smashed a few really mesmerizing arias (she's a brunette while Marfa is a blonde—of course!).

So I'm pretty sure that the company's decision to produce this was as a commentary on current events, although Ivan the Terrible's brand of tyranny seems pretty distinct from Putin's.  Nevertheless, this is the first opera I've seen here with any sort of unconventional production: it seems at first to be set in the 1940s, judging by the costuming.  Film reels of Stalinist propaganda are projected on the back of the stage.  And yet, characters also appear dressed in more conventional, Boris-Godunov-esque dress, so I dunno.  The projection is also used for other things: to indicate seasons or—again--for big images of Stalin.  There's one memorable moment when—after Grigory relates how he killed Ivan—there's a sudden huge spatter of blood up there.  In general, though, I found the production a bit overstuffed, not that it really interfered with my enjoyment.

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.

Don Pasquale at the Estonian National Opera

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!

Carmen Jones (1954)

I figured, if I say I like Carmen so much, I should probably see this movie, which is the opera re-set in the US during World War II with an all-black cast.  So, I did.  Neat! 

One thing I'll say for it: Dorothy Dandridge in the title role is electric.  She kills it.  You can't stop watching her.  The REST of the movie though...well, I'm just gonna say it: it kind of sucks.  And I realize that me saying that opens a big ol' can o' worms, because am I just saying that because I'm overly attached to the original?  Am I being closed-minded?  Well, I don't think so.  What else can I say?

I truly do not object to the change in setting, or alterations to the plot, but the problem is, it sort of feels like it's performing contortions to try to make things work so that the appropriate songs can be sung in spite of lacking the context.  So, for a fairly contorted example: obviously, it would make no sense to have a bullfighter in this milieu, so instead we have Husky Miller, a boxer (and I will concede that his name is a reasonably clever analogue for Escamillo).  And look, bullfighting is inhumane and should be banned everywhere it hasn't been, but the problem is, it's flashy and dramatic in a way that boxing simply...isn't.  And therefore, his song about boxing heroics doesn't make much impact (also, it's weird that they don't include the opening part where he compares his work to soldiers', given how easily it could've worked in the setting).  But what's really noticeable about it is that it includes this whole thing about how his manager helps him to succeed, and it's sure great to have that guy around, and you think, wait, WHAT?  Escamillo crediting someone else for his success?  What kind of catastrophic misreading of the character is THAT?  But the reason it includes this guy and also this guy's superior is that there's no element of smuggling in this story, and therefore you need someone to take the place of the male smugglers, Le Dancaïre and Le Remendado, if you want to include a version of “Nous avons en tête une affaire,” which they do.  And yet, for all that trouble, their rendition of the song turns out to be pretty lame: instead of joking around about how you need women for criminal affairs, it's just them and her friends Frasquita/Frankie and Mercédes/Myrt trying to convince her to go to Chicago to see Husky.  It just...doesn't fit the music.  It seems like it's supposed to be funny, but it's not remotely so either in the way the original is or on its own.  It's just bad, people.

So what else?  Well, to give the film its due, I'm willing to grant that its version of the Habanera, “Dat Love,” is largely tolerable.  But even there, I dunno: it's really hard to tell how one's reaction is colored by virtue of the lyrics being in one's first language, but some of it just seems...not great.  I don't know: “You go for me and I'm taboo/but if you're hard to get I'll go for you.”  I mean, okay, on the one hand that's sort of clever...but on the other hand, it's also sort of lame, isn't it?  I don't know.  It was hard for me to really warm to it.  Still, in the interest of maximum fairness, let's stick this one in the win column, and while we're at it, let's also put “Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum” (the “Gypsy Song”) there as well.  But seriously, that is ALL.

Let me ask you: do you know Carmen's friend Lillas Pastia?  If you do, it's certainly because he's mentioned and identified as such several times in the sublime “Près des remparts de Séville,” and seriously, how nuts is it that a song that good is only like the tenth-best-known piece in the opera?  He's the innkeeper at the tavern where the smugglers conduct business; it's a tiny role.  Well, here he's called Billy Pastor, which is fine, but what's not fine is how the film murders the song.  What's really memorable about it is its sense of melancholy; of calling on a utopian future that, Carmen must know, is going to be fleeting at best.  But there's NONE of that in the rendition here.  It's badly cut down, and it strips out all the pathos.  It is to the original as “Two Princes” is to “I Who Have Nothing.”  NOT GOOD, in other words.

As for the film's version of the Card Trio—well, at first I was all prepared to declare it a success; it seemed to be working pretty well in the new setting.  But NOT FOR LONG, I'll tell you that much.  What's the dumbest fucking thing you can imagine anyone doing to this song, huh?  Tell me.  I'll bet it's not as dumb as what this movie does.  So there's the “dites-nous qui nous trahira/dite-nous qui nous aimera” part, and then...the movie completely cuts out F and M's dueling romantic fantasies.  Seriously.  It skips straight to Carmen bemoaning her fate.  WHAT.  THE.  HELL.  You people DO realize that that's there for a reason, right?  I mean, aside from that it's fun?  Because, like, it's contrasting F and M's lightheartedness to C's obsession with death?  JESUS.  So, blah.

I don't know what to tell you.  There are a fair few other songs, but nothing that really stands out.  For unclear reasons, there are zero songs for Escamillo beyond the hit, and “Quant au douanier, c'est notre affaire” is absent, but I can't say I really regret any of this, given how uninspired this whole thing is.  Even the climactic duet fails to make an impression.  I really do want to like a project like this, but it's just not good enough.

Giuseppe Verdi, Ernani (1844)

An early Verdi opera, and, per wikipedia, his most popular until Il trovatore.  Also, fun fact, apparently it was the first opera to be recorded in its entirety, in 1904.  You could make a good argument that it was a significant lacuna in my opera-watching experience.  Actually, you could do that with any Verdi opera I haven't seen.  If I'm counting correctly (I might not be, considering all the revisions he made), there are eight of them.  I should buckle down and do it, probably.  They're all available in some form or another.

Well, this is Verdi.  You know what Verdi sounds like!  He wrote some pretty solid tchunes!  But one is forced to concede that he was not always as discriminating in his choice of libretti as he could have been, and here is an example of that.  Right, so Ernani is a bandit.  He and Elvira are in love, but unfortunately, she's engaged to marry Silva, an old duke.  Oh no!  So there's some conflict, the more so because Charles V (yes, the father of the king in Don Carlos) is also trying to seduce her.  It gets very confusing—and the wikipedia entry is not very well-written or helpful—but there's a bunch of scheming, and the upshot is that Silva and Ernani (who turns out to be a dispossessed noble) team up to try to take out Charles, who is felt to be treasonous in some way I didn't really understand.  And—here's the real “uh?” moment—Ernani swears that if Silva blows this hunting horn at any time, he, Ernani, will kill himself.  A little later, everyone's reconciled, and Charles agrees that Ernani and Elvira can marry.  But oh no, soon after they marry, Silva cashes in, and Ernani has no choice but to stab himself to death.  Cool.

A number of questions come to mind, most notably: why did he swear this oath, apropos of nothing?  Why does he seem genuinely surprised when the extremely obvious result of him doing so manifests itself?  And why does he go through with it in the end?  Obviously, this sort of self-destructive “honor”-based culture has existed all over the world; you think of samurai who were supposed to commit seppuku when their lords were killed, or Hindu widows who were meant to immolate themselves.  But in those and other situations, they're dealing with social pressure.  The people in those circumstances didn't specifically stipulate that this is what they're going to do.  This opera is just bizarre, and not in the least dramatically satisfying, great music notwithstanding.

It's based on a Victor Hugo play, which you've gotta think—I'm admittedly just guessing here—has to have been criticizing the sort of behavior that the opera wants to be in some sense heroic.  Otherwise, I have no idea what he was going for.  Not a fantastic piece of work, but this Operavision video, from Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, is a solid, traditional production that features the extremely rad Angela Meade as Elvira (a role she'd previously sang at the Met).  She is awesome.  The only issue with this production is that there are, like, two or three random extras/chorus members wearing covid masks.  I would understand and make allowances if this was the height of the pandemic and everyone had to be masked, but it's not, the result is just needless weirdness.

Car[men]talk

 So: I watched Carmen for the seven hundredth time last night. Okay okay, let's not go nuts; realistically, I believe it was the fourth time I'd seen it start to finish. I realize that this is not exactly an outré opinion, but I think this is my single favorite opera. There's just something about it that really feels like it embodies the form, at least as far as tragedy goes. More than any other opera I've seen, maybe, the protagonists just feel like they're locked by virtue of their unchangeable natures into this ineluctably grim drama. Great music is aided by a great libretto in making something...great. Okay.

Most recently I saw this version:

It's probably my favorite thusfar.  It was the first time I'd seen the original Opéra-Comique version with spoken dialogue, so I thought it might play significantly differently, but nah. There's actually very little chatting; even as a general non-fan of talking in operas, both versions are similar enough that it makes essentially no difference. I'm just going to go through it and talk about the characters a little, if you don't mind or even if you do.

Carmen (Anna Caterina Antonacci)

When you think about operatic heroines, and you think about the ideal casting from a physical perspective, you'd probably mostly tend to think, well, they should be as attractive as possible. But that's not really the case for Carmen. It's not good enough, and it might even be counterproductive: the whole thing about her (or at least one thing about her) is rejecting conventional societal ideas, and that includes standards of beauty. What she really needs to be is magnetic; to have this dangerously alien, seductive feel, along with the kind of fatal charm that would lead a dopey schmuck like José to murder, and Antonacci has that down, I can tell you.

What's interesting is that, as operas go, even the big parts here aren't that big, comparatively speaking. I think it's because the music is really spread out among even minor characters. But of course Carmen remains the biggest, and a great role. I think we sometimes take "L'amour est un oiseau rebel" for granted, just because it's so familiar, but goddamn is that an absolutely perfect aria, even if "perfect" is impossible to define in the situation and probably meaningless. It's just so sinuous, the music perfectly complementing the lyrics. And really, after hearing it, dumb ol' José has no one to blame but himself. Can't say she didn't warn him.

Don José (Jonas Kaufmann)

José is really the viewpoint character of the opera. Carmen herself is too closed-off and in many ways unknowable to serve that function. Still, I would like to hear a female perspective. 'Cause I'm not gonna lie: I was in a situation once where I felt like Don José, or would have had I been into opera at the time, though I should emphasize that this never led to murder or violence of any kind (and seriously, if he'd just given himself a day or so to cool off, he probably would've realized that not worrying about this woman was actually a huge relief, and everything would've been fine). And yet, that might be a situation that half of the population cannot identify with. I don't know!

But to me, anyway, he's very effective as a protagonist. You can feel his anguish, for sure. But the weird thing is, his actual dang music is way less interesting than any other significant character in the opera. Sure, you have "La fleur que tu m'avais jetée" (the "Flower Song"), and sure the final scene is, like, climactic, but what else? Not that much else, I feel! I get that a tenor would see this role as desirable, in that it's the male lead of one of the biggest operas ever, but is it really that terrific? It feels like putting a star of Jonas Kaufmann's caliber in the part is sort of like machine-gunning a mosquito.

Escamillo (Ildebrando D'Arcangelo)

Another role I kind of wonder about. Sure, swaggering about is fun, and you do have your big hit aria, but you really don't have much else. His knife-fight duet with José is all right, and then there's a short love duet with Carmen and that's it. And the character, of course, is incredibly shallow; there's not a lot you can really do to deepen him.

Still, D'Arcangelo does a great job with him; the best I've seen. I know him for playing Dulcamara in several productions of L'Elisir, but he neatly slots into this very different role. I feel like a lot of the time the baritone playing him just characterizes him as a cocky douchebag; D'Arcangelo doesn't play it against the grain or anything, but he makes him legit charming and suave in a way where you can see how Carmen would be into him. But ultimately, when it comes to Escamillo, all you really need is a confident motherfucker who can belt out "Votre toast, je peux vous le rendre," and we dang well get that here.

Micaëla (Norah Amsellem)

A lot of people don't like Micaëla, seeing her as the conventional "good girl" in contrast to the more colorful Carmen, which I guess she is, but guess what? I like her anyway! I wish she didn't just disappear, but aside from that!

(And, side note, but the one slightly off thing in the libretto is the way José goes off with her at the end of the third act to see his dying mother and then just reappears in the fourth, never mentioning it and seemingly having been wholly unaffected by it. Also, imagine the two of them having to be in close proximity for however many days it took to get there. Did they make small talk? Aaaaawkwaaaard!)

I just feel bad for her, being abandoned by her fiancé for a woman for whose murder he'd later be hanged. That's rough. And yet, I feel like she's gonna get through it. Her entire role but especially her great aria "Je dis que rien ne m'épouvante" make me think that she's really quite mentally strong. I'm rooting for her, and Norah Amsellem is quite good. For this role, you'd want a conventionally attractive woman to contrast with Carmen, and dammit, I think there are sexist elements in this article. So it goes.

Frasquita and Mercédès (Elena Xanthoudakis and Viktoria Vizin)

How 'bout these two, eh? They're Carmen's friends, whose names you probably wouldn't know without looking them up. But they actually get a lot to do, notably sing in the operetta-ish quintet "Nous avons en tête une affaire;" "Melons! Coupons!" (the "Card Trio"), in which they're goofing around using the cards to make up fantasy futures (Mercédès is the one who wants to be a rich widow) until Carmen comes in and predicts only the ineluctability of her own death (possibly my favorite number in the opera); and the further trio "Quant au douanier c'est notre affaire," where they try to shake off her black thoughts by singing about how they're going to flirt their way past the customs officers. I think you could argue that considered as one character, they're as important musically as Escamillo or Micaëla.

The point is, I like them, and it seems like it would be a good sneaky opportunity for a low-profile singer to get a good bit of exposure, since the roles are considered small but you're still doing quite a bit. And the singers I've seen in the roles all really seem to get that and dig into them with relish, Xanthoudakis and Vizin being no exceptions.

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Of course, there's still the question of why Carmen lets herself be killed. You can--and a lot of people do!--say that it's just her defiant attitude and refusal to give in, which I suppose is a conventionally feminist reading but one that really fails to consider her morbid obsession with the inevitability of her own death. I don't know if there's a good answer or if there needs to be. But one thing's for sure: we ought to be able to judge for ourselves! And on that note, check this out:

So it's "Si tu m'aimes, Carmen," the duet between her and Escamillo. And she declares her deep love for him. But what exactly does she say? Well, in this production, per the subtitle, it's "I've never loved anyone as much as you." But that sort of took me aback, because I distinctly remember that the last Met in HD version I saw had it "I'll love you 'til the day I die." In most cases this wouldn't be super-important, but dammit, there's a mystery here, and you're not helping by obscuring the text and changing what it says! Whichever one of you is wrong here really botched it.

So naturally, I went to the libretto, and, whoops! the direct English translation is actually "may I die if I've ever loved anyone as much as you." For fuck's sake, people! You both managed to screw up, only in slightly different ways! What an idiotic display! Do better.

There's one more thing I want to say, that isn't really related to the opera itself and which nobody really has any reason to care about. But! Here it is anyway! There are three Live in HD performances of Carmen available, from 2010, 2014, and 2018. They're all the same production (a very sturdy one, set in Fascist Spain), so they're all basically the same, but there are a few differences! The most prominent one being this: in both the 2010 and 2018 performances, in the final act José stabs Carmen and then supports her as she slumps to the ground so that she dies in his arms. Okay, that works. But in the 2014 one (with Anita Rachvelishvili), he stabs her and then stands back, while she sways there for a few moments and then just pitches over on her face. I suppose it's more athletically impressive than the other way, but it seems to lend a possibly-undesirable air of bathos to the proceedings. Weird choice.

Richard Strauss, Feuersnot (1901)

Regardless of anything else about this opera, it has to be said: it has "snot" in the title.  This is a grave flaw.  I suppose Deutschephones would argue that that's not the piece's fault, and indeed that it's only my provincial narrow-mindedness that's causing me to make a big deal about it, but I disagree.  Change it at once.

It takes place at a solstice festival.  There's this sorceror called Kunrad who comes to town and causes a commotion.  He inappropriately kisses Diemut, the mayor's daughter, so she plays a trick on him where he's stuck in the air in a basket.  So he summons, like, a big ol' curse, and the festival fires are all out, and the only way to bring them back is through, um, a virgin.  So all the townspeople sing a chorus where they insist that Diemut should go and take one for the team, to which she finally accedes.  This is presented as a triumphant moment, to be clear.  And that is that.

So yeah!  That ending!  It's kind of shockingly unacceptable on any level, innit?  Well, okay, not "any level"--I'm fully aware that an apologist would point out that contemporary sexual ethics are very much not the point of the piece; the characters are just playing a part in ancient fertility rituals.  But dude.  Seriously.  Come on.  How can you possibly expect that to play to a modern-day audience or--I would have hoped--even one in 1901?  Shit, dude.  You could probably make this seem a bit less repellent through the production, but this one, alas, does not.  In fact, I'd say they kind of do the opposite: look, I am not impugning Dietrich Henschel as a person, but his Kunrad is extremely smug and douchey-looking, which just makes things worse.

As for the production, it's pretty jumbled--a sort-of modern-day thing but sort of not, with a lot of abstraction and irritating background people making exaggerated, cartoony gestures, which in no case worked well.  Still, I do have to admit, the part at the end where all the people are waving ribbons to simulate the bonfire was cool.  Never let it be said that ol' GeoX refused to admit that a cool thing was cool.

It's interesting musically, though, I'll give it that.  I mean, not great, but also not like any Strauss opera I've seen before.  Broadly romantic, but you certainly wouldn't confuse it with later Strauss music.  Because it's not as good?  Well...that's certainly an aspect of it, but still!  It's not too bad!  Probably worth seeing!  On the whole, though, this is certainly the least essential Strauss I've seen, and certainly not a vital part of anyone's operatic education.

Rolf Liebermann, Leonore 40/45 (1952)

Well...it's my first opera with a slash in the title, I'll tell you that much.  This is a rare one, which possibly hadn't been performed since the fifties; the page is a bit cagey about that.  But now we can see it because of Theater Bonn and Operavision. Hurray!

So as you might guess, this takes place during World War II.  It's sung in a mixture of German and French.  Albert is a music student; he and his father are listening to Fidelio on the radio (hence the title), when word comes down that everyone's being enlisted, so he reluctantly joins up.  In occupied France, he meets Yvette, a French woman working with the Resistance.  They fall in love, obviously, but then Albert is forced to leave with his regiment and they loose contact.  Oh, did I mention the angel?  There's this guardian angel, Emile, who introduces the opera and at several points intervenes to make things turn out better.  In the second part, the War's just ended, and Albert and Yvette are looking for each other.  She learns from Emile that he's working at a music store, and so she goes to apply for a job there (it's extremely unclear what the whole job thing has to do with anything; it feels like she's engaging in this really pointless subterfuge).  At any rate, the two of them are reunited; a tribunal doesn't want them to get married because France and Germany are still considered enemies, I guess, which I don't totally understand: if the War's over it's over, innit?  You can't maintain enmity indefinitely.  Regardless, Emile tells everyone to knock it off, and the marriage can proceed.

It's not entirely clear what the message is here.  It feels like there's supposed to be some sort of darker subtext, but it doesn't come across.  The final chorus involves everyone singing about "the best of all worlds," making you expect some kind of Panglossian irony, but...who can say.  At the end of this production, a Nazi flag appears out of nowhere, which is obviously a message (and an extremely relevant one these days), but that must've just been a production decision, so who knows.

Regardless, I liked this quite a lot.  The operavision page says that it's "rooted in the 12-tone tradition of Schoenberg and Berg" (there's a part in the opera where characters are arguing about twelve-tone music), but it sounds nothing like Moses und Aron or Wozzeck.  That style may have some influence on it, but I honestly wouldn't have gone there had it not been spelled out.  It's mostly pretty melodic, I tell you.  Not my all-time favorite thing, but perfectly pleasant with some memorable moments.  

Also, the production is absolutely fantastic.  It's this sort of expressionistic thing with really cool George-Grosz-looking art and animation mixed in.  A lot of the stuff on Operavision is, sad to say, Regietheater, which is especially frustrating when you're talking about a little-seen work, but this knocks it out of the park and makes up for any deficiencies in the source material.  Theater Bonn?  More like Theater Bomb-Ass!