Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, The Tale of Tsar Saltan, of His Son the Renowned and Mighty Bogatyr Prince Gvidon Saltanovich and of the Beautiful Princess-Swan (1900)

That's a mouthful of a title, innit?  This is a somewhat surreal fairy tale thing, similar to Sadko, although this one is from a story by Pushkin. We have three sisters, all of whom want to marry the tsar; he chooses the youngest, Militrisa, as you do, and the jealous older two along with their mother plot their revenge: when the tsar is away at The Wars, they devise a scheme whereby Militrisa and her young son, Gvidon, are sealed in a barrel and thrown into the sea. However, the two of them survive, washing up on an island. Gvidon saves a swan from being eaten by a kite and in gratitude it makes a city appear on the island of which he becomes prince. Ultimately the swan becomes a woman, and they're going to get married. They return to the tsar's kingdom, and there is general rejoicing; everyone's so happy that they even forgive the schemers. Hurray!

Rimsky-Korsakov's music, goddamn, man. This is the one where we get "Flight of the Bumblebee," but there's plenty more great stuff where that came from, some of it so Russian-sounding that it feels as though someone should be playing Tetris over it. I suppose Rimsky-Korsakov played a big part in creating our impression of what traditional Russian music is. Good for him. There aren't exactly any show-stopping vocal numbers, but everyone here acquitted themselves well. I especially liked Svetlana Aksenova as Militrisa. She's got plenty of vocal power and uses it well.

Still, I must talk about this production, which is definitely...polarizing. See, the idea here is that Militrisa is actually a contemporary woman with an autistic son, and she interacts with him through fairy tales, of which this opera is one. I saw some good reviews, but I was extremely skeptical about this concept going in. I must admit, though, I did start warming to it considerably, somewhat to my surprise. In the first act, we have most of the character dressed in exaggerated fairy-tale costumes, while Militrisa herself is dressed in a sober skirt/sweater combo. Her son (Bogdan Volkov, who--though I'm certainly not an expert--certainly seems to capture the mannerisms of an autistic person extremely well) just sort of hovers in the background, looking on.

But things really take off in the second act, where Gvidon is actually a character (and it comes as a bit of a shock when he first starts singing). There are very striking animated ink drawings of the fairy-tale action, as he starts to participate in the fantasy, and I have to say, I thought this was all pretty darned inspired and actually kind of moving. It's obviously not anything that Rimsky-Korsakov would have intended, but it does not, it seems to me clash with the work itself. It seems to complement it very well, and there's nothing there that makes nonsense of the libretto, as oft happens in these reinterpretations.

Well, I say that, but unfortunately, it all kind of implodes in the last act, which takes place in the "real" world, and the on-stage action just makes less and less sense in the context of the piece. Even so, though, I think this probably could have been at least somewhat acceptable, except for the ending: it's meant to be triumphant and joyful, but for whatever fucking reason, the director (Dmitri Tcherniakov, who is apparently notorious for this sort of thing) decided that we needed a downbeat conclusion, so we end with Gvidon just not being able to deal with all the noise and commotion frantically clawing at the back wall. This doesn't work with the music or libretto or really ANYTHING about the opera, and it really downgrades the whole thing.

It kind of makes me angry--I hope to see a traditional production in the future, because the opera itself rules--but my anger is as nothing compared to that of a number of irate Russians in the youtube comments section. Some of them rant at length in Russian, but there are a few comments in English, such as:

"Wonderful music and wonderful execution, what a pity that the director has destroyed everything with his madness."

and

"To a Russian person to see this and listen to this disgusting singing with disgusting diction is simply unbearable and humiliating!"

and my favorite:

"There is no Russian opera left that the bastard dog Dima Chernyakov would not have marked with the fetid urine of his talent."

"The fetid urine of his talent." Okay you don't like the production, fair enough. It is just very, very hard for me to imagine unironically making comments like these. It's definitely a nationalism thing, and obviously nationalism is real, but I just cannot conceive of being prompted to write things like this as a reaction to any sort of perceived degradation of an American culural artifact. Probably chilling out a bit would be a good thing to do.

Ivan Acher, Sternenhoch (2018)

This is based on a 1928 Czech novel by Ladislav Klíma, The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch. The story, such as it is: Sternenhoch is a German noble who marries a younger woman, Helga. She has a child, which she then murders, and the next day she's with her lover, feeling cheery, until Sternenhoch appears and kills her, sort of maybe. His mind fast disintegrating, he visits a witch for help, but she gives him a potion that makes him violently hallucinate, further fracturing his psyche, until at the end he either dies or is locked in an insane asylum and is reunited with his dead wife.

The first thing that will stand out to you upon hearing about this opera is that it's sung in Esperanto Why? According to this,it's because "the author of the libretto wanted the text to be in an incomprehensible language. He wanted his audience to listen to the melody and not decipher the words," but I'm afraid the English subtitles have somewhat undermined this goal. Still, the thing is, the language is actually not the most amazing thing about the opera. First, there's the music: it's kind of a chamber opera, with very limited orchestration: a zither, a contrabassoon, a character onstage with a violin or viola, and various electronic effects. This is NOT your typical opera music. It's not as extreme as Luci mie traditrici, but aside from that, it definitely pushes the boundaries of opera further than anything I've seen. It's also, I hasten to add, pretty great: fractured electronic Eastern European folk and dance music: it's no joke; this may not be what you'd expect, but it's very hypnotic and exciting (if that's not a contradiction). It doesn't exactly call for traditional singers, but everyone is extremely game for what must be the most bizarre roles of their career: in particular Sergey Kostov in the title role, careening back and forth between low and high registers; and Tereza Mare as the menacing violin-wielding demon girl. Then there are the visuals, which I can only describe as German expressionism gone berserk (well, berserk-er). Super-stylized costumes and sets abound, and they perfectly match the music and story.

Is this for everyone? Nope! It's violently alienating, as apparently is the novel, and it if weren't, it wouldn't be what it is. And honestly, at an hour and twenty minutes, I feel like it's about as long as it needs to be. This could get a bit numbing at greater length. Still, I'm just gonna go ahead and say it: this has taken the place as my favorite contemporary opera, and I hope to see more from Acher. Operavision should be commended for bringing us such a pioneering work. I found it thrilling, both for its aesthetics and for its bold willingnesss to take the opera form somewhere new and strange--a willingness that really pays off. This is one I'll be returning to, you can bet on it.

Also, I was accidentally arguing with some guy in the youtube comments who for reasons he was unable or unwilling to articulate, just HATED the idea of an opera in Esperanto.  It was pretty weird, but then I clicked on his profile and saw his favorited videos and realized he was a neo-nazi. Cool. So anyway, obviously being hated by nazis is about the most potent endorsement anyone could ask for.

Kaija Saariaho, L'Amour de loin (2000)

Hey, it's my second opera by a female composer! It's also, embarrassingly, only the second to be produced at the Met (the first being this, which you'd be hard-pressed to find any video of, which seems somehow symptomatic of the problem).

This is allegedly based on a true story. There's this troubadour prince, Jaufré Rudel (who was a real person), who's feeling vaguely dissatisfied with life. An unnamed Pilgrim who travels back and forth across the sea tells him about a woman named Clémence from across the sea (the Countess of Tripoli), and he falls in love with her without seeing her or meeting her or interacting with her in any way. The Pilgrim then goes back and talks to Clémence, telling her that this dude is in love with her, and after a certain amount of ambivalence she accepts this. Jaufré decides he needs to go meet this woman (which, you know, if you're going to be in love with someone, you might as wellmeet them), and the Pilgrim takes him across the sea, but then as he gets closer he gets sicker until he dies in her arms. The Pilgrim posits that this happened because his amour was no longer de loin.

Interesting, striking stuff, is this. The music is very sparkly and subdued, kind of ambient. I have to admit there were times when I felt it got a little monotonous, but I dug it overall. And huge, huge props to the Met's production, by Robert Lepage (he of the controversial Ring productions): the characters stand on one or the other side of a mobiles staircase that can tilt in either direction, and the omnipresent ocean is represented by a bunch of moving slats (the man certainly loves him some slats), which project different colored lights to represent different times of day or internal or external conditions. It's very striking, and it perfectly complements the music. Well done, all, though the bits with people sticking their heads out of the sea can look a little silly, as does a part with hand-claps emerging from the water. That's okay, though! It's not a big part of anything! I have no complaints about the cast: there are only the three characters plus the chorus, and everyone is good my favorite being mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford as the Pilgrim.

Seriously, Met, I am not kidding: more operas by women. This is a moral imperative, and I don't mean that as hyperbole. I really do think it's that important. And at least one Met in HD broadcast per season. Get on it.

Hector Berlioz, Les Troyens (1863)

Any ol' man in the street is probably going to have a pretty good idea of what this is about, but it's bifurcated to an extent that I've never seen in an opera: the first two acts take place in Troy, as the Trojans ignore Cassandra and wheel a big ol' wooden horse into the city, with hilarious results. In the last three, the Trojan survivors led my Aeneas come to Carthage, where the queen, Dido, has a thing with Aeneas until he's told by the gods that he needs to stop fucking around and go found Rome. That happens. Dido does not react well. The end.

This was Berlioz's last opera, and apparently meant to be some kind of magnum opus. It's certainly his biggest opera, clocking in at four-plus hours not counting intermissions. And yet, I am not wholly satisfied with the piece. It's glacially slow, for one (contributing to this are a lot of ballet sequences, which--combined with the fact that it's based on Roman mythology--makes me think that this is heavily indebted to baroque opera). That's fine, kind of, I guess, but you only find what I'd actually call drama in bits and blobs, among a bunch of choral pieces that are not necessarily the most interesting--though certainly, the second-act climax, in which the Trojan women commit mass suicide to avoid dishonor, is pretty darned striking. Then the third act comes, and I dunno, a lot of music in praise of, like, increased wheat production and stuff, and I think, hmm. Maybe this could have been better-edited? Still, my objections pretty much fade away by the last act, which--perhaps inevitably--really brings the drama that was only partially present in the earlier parts of the opera. Aeneas' aria of regret "Ah! Quand viendra l'instant" is utterly terrific, as is Dido's "Je vais mourir." You can't go wrong, although it really does feel like two different operas, of which the first one is substantially less interesting.

The Met production is fine. Shedloads of extras and chorus members are required and, naturally, they deliver. Bryan Hymel is good as Aeneas, but really, this is mainly about the twin diva roles of Cassandra and Dido, and Deborah Voigt and Susan Graham deliver--even if, ultimately, the latter is just a much more dramatically satisfying role than the former. La damnation de Faust is obviously more focused and probably more successful on its own terms, but you definitely have to appreciate the ambition here, and it ultimately does pay off. I think it's funny that it was difficult-to-impossible for people to stage both of these in the nineteenth century. Write a producable opera, Hector!

Jean-Philippe Rameau, Hippolyte et Aricie (1733)

This was actually Rameau's first opera, although interestingly enough, he didn't write it 'til he was fifty (okay, forty-nine--it debuted soon after his fiftieth birthday). It's based on Racine's Phèdre, more or less.

It opens with a prologue where Cupid and Diana are arguing: which is better, cool indifference or passionate desire? This is a theme that persists through the opera, though it feels somewhat arbitrary. But anyway, Theseus is supposedly dead, so Aricie, a young woman he'd made take religious orders, may, she hopes, be free to marry his son, Hyppolite. Problem is, his wife Phèdre has conceived a passion for her step-son, to his dismay. Other problem is, Theseus turns out not to be dead. He comes back and sees his wife with his son and gets the wrong idea about the latter and so has to go into exile. He seems to have been killed (and is killed in Racine, but the conventions required, for reasons I don't quite grasp, for opera to have a happy ending), but he comes back, and as punishment Theseus won't be able to see him again, but he's able to marry Aricie, so hurrah.

I had somewhat mixed feelings about this. I watched this performance,which really goes for broke on the weirdness: the first thing you'll notice is that the prologue takes place in a giant refrigerator filled with giant, realistic groceries. I don't mind; the spectacle is kind of fun. You might think it would clash with the basically serious story, but it's okay. And there's a lot to like here, two things in particular. First, you have Sarah Connolly, absolutely riveting as Phèdre, this pathos-ridden mixure of terrifying rage and vulnerability. Second, there's the entire second act, which takes place in Hades with Theseus trying to rescue his dead friend. On the one hand, this whole act is totally pointless: it's not in Racine and it doesn't have anything to do with the main plot or relate thematically drive the drama forward in any way. And yet, it's just awesome, and François Lis (who also plays other gods elsewhere in the opera) is terrific fun as Pluto. Also, there are people dressed in giant spider costumes. Also, it takes place behind the refrigerator of the prologue, around the motor. It's great, I like it, thumbs up. So the drama's cooking right along, and the third act, where Theseus becomes enraged at his son, seems to promise great things.

And yet...the back half of this is rather less compelling than the front. For one thing, Phèdre just disappears at the end of act four, apparently having committed suicide as in the play, though it's not explicit here). And then we focus more on our young lovers, who are just not that interesting, and their romance is just kind of a boring muddle. This production attempts to temper the happy ending: Hippolyte and Aricie are together thanks to Diana, so therefore there's no more passion to the relationship, and that's...sad, I guess, but I really don't think this works, and maybe you don't like the conventions of French baroque opera here, but I really, really think you need to just go with them. It would be more fun for all. The last thing you see before the curtain is Cupid danging from a rope having been hanged, which...come on. You're harshing my mellow here, guys. This was the first-ever Rameau production at Glyndebourne, and I have to call it a qualified success, though to be fair, I think the source material was at issue as well. Still, saul good; Rameau was still learning the ropes, lets say. Anyway, glad to have seen it.

Jean-Philippe Rameau, Les fêtes de l’Hymen et de l’Amour, ou Les dieux d'Egypte (1747)

This was written to celebrate the Dauphin's marriage--imagine being a big enough deal that a major baroque composer was writing an opera in your honor. It was popular in its time, apparently; according to wikipedia, "by the [sic] March 1776 it had been performed exactly 106 times," a weirdly specific statistic. Do you think they did things like those NFL promos they ran with the guys who had been to every super bowl? Difficult to say, for sure. In any case, thisis apparently the first modern-day production, which is pretty cool.

We can safely say that this has the least plot of any Rameau opera I've seen thusfar. It's structured similarly to Les Indes galantes--a prologue and then a series (there four, here three) of thematically-connected acts--but that one seemed intricately-plotted compared to this. The idea is that the gods of love and marriage have had a falling-out, but then they reconcile and--I guess--decide to watch some Egyptian-themed operatic vignettes to celebrate. The first concerns Osiris; there's an Amazon queen who thinks he's there to start a war, but then it turns out he comes in peace and they're going to marry and everyone's happy. The second is about Canopus, god of the Nile; he's courting a human woman, Memphis, in the guise of a mortal, but when his priests are going to sacrifice her, he reveals himself to save her. So that's good. Finally, we have Aruéris (Horus), who decides to have an arts festival and encourages his amour Orie to enter. She does and she wins. Huzzah!

So there you have it. Of course, in the eighteenth century people were interested in ancient Egyptian cosmology, but Egyptian hieroglyphs hadn't yet been translated, so they didn't know that much about it--just what they could get from comtempraneous accounts in Greek and Latin and whatnot (this is largely what John Crowley's Ægypt Cycle is about). So there's going to be some exoticism here, but don't expect much in the way of authentic atmosphere, if that means anything. This is fun, though, as long as you don't need too much plot. There's probably also more dancing here than in any other Rameau I've seen, which is good, especially because the music itself didn't quite engage me the way it does in his best (and honestly, the singers, while fine, didn't really have the opportunity to make that much individual impact). This production is actually from a DC-based company, Opera Lafayette, which specializes in the French baroque, and I'm certainly glad there's enough interest to support such an endeavor. The one thing I found a little bit odd--not good or bad, just...odd--is that in this production, there's no orchestra pit; the musicians are all at the back of the stage behind the other performers. I wonder how that affects the acoustics, but regardless, it sounded fine. Definitely worth seeing.

Julián Rios, Larva: Midsummer Night's Babel (1983)

Julián Rios (1941- ) is a Spanish novelist, but that is also the name of a prolific pornographic actor. I find this extremely appropriate and great, given the concerns here. One of novelist-Rios' other books is called La Vida sexual de las palabras (The Sex Life of Words),which...yup.

This is almost certainly the most abstruce novel I've ever read; it's probably fairly comparable in that regard to Finnegans Wake. The story, insofar as it's possible to make out: the protagonist is known as Milalias ("A thousand aliases"), disguised as Don Juan, at a party/orgy at a decaying mansion in London, in pursuit of a woman named Babelle (probably the wordplay is obvious) disguised as Sleeping Beauty. A lot of other characters, often from far-flung countries and cultures, flit through the text. There are sex, drugs and rock and roll in abundnace. Dreams, hallucinations, the threat of terrorism. The book is structured with the main text (if "main" means anything here) on the right-hand page and footnotes glossing the text on the left; some of these point the reader to one of a series of "Pillow Notes" after the main body of the novel; this is where you're going to find the closest thing to "normal" narrative in the novel, detailing past and current episodes in Milalias' and Babelle's life and providing more detail on the secondary characters (to the extent that such things exist). And--the main thing--the whole thing is an absolute torrent of puns and wordplay; the multiple unreliable meanings of words are reflected in the costume party--everyone wearing masks--and of course there's the inevitable thing where linguistic proliferation and sex are intertwined. Did I say "of course there's the inevitable thing?" God I'm insufferable.

I will say that there is something to be said for surrendering control in a text like this (a thematically-relevant sadomasochistic element?). We have this very strongly-ingrained idea that we need to know what's happening in a book; to feel like we're in control. You will not get very far with that attitude in a text like this, however. On a narrative level...expect very little. But there is definitely a certain pleasure to be had in the verbal drunkenness.

And yet, I'm not wholly satisfied (oh god, that's another sex thing, isn't it?), for reasons that aren't necessarily the book's fault. Reread that little stab at a plot description above, and then go to goodreads and look at any of the reviews of this, and you'll see, at most, some version of that. This is a five-hundred-fifty-page book (not counting the map and series of photographs in the back). There's a lot of here here. And that's really all we can get out of it, plotwise? Yes, yes, in a novel like this the structure is probably more important than the plot per se, but really, they're intertwined. The one doesn't go withotu the other. And I can't help feeling that there's something lazyabout just saying "wow, look how crazy and pun-laden this all is, and don't expect to parse it, just revel in the language!" Yeah, okay. But that strikes me as a very surface-level way to approach the text. You'd definitely have to give it multiple close readings to get more out of it, to really evaluate what it's doing and the extent to which it works. But I didn't give it that, and I'm not convinced that anyone has, and that's why this is the first book I've read that I haven't given a semi-arbitrary star rating to on goodreads, and I don't trust any of the people who have, whether positive or negative. The thing about Finnegans Wake is, there's a regular cottage industry devoted to readers' guides thereto, to help you figure out what the deal is. But there sure isn't anything like that for Larva,at least in English. So we're sort of stuck. Has anyanglophone reader really "gotten" this? I remain fiercely agnostic.

Well, at least the translation is a marvel. At least, as far as I can tell. I said this about Cabrera Infante's Three Trapped Tigers, and I'll say it again: this does not feel like it's been translated, like there's a certain remove from the text. It must have involved huge amounts of revision and creative thinking, but there it is. If you're gonna translate something like this, you might as well do it in style. it's by the author along with Richard Alan Francis and Suzanne Jill Levine. The latter was one of the translators of Three Trapped Tigers, so maybe I shouldn't be surprised, but I am very impressed (and slightly mystified: Levine is pretty well-known, with a wikipedia page and everything, but Francis: nothin'. A bunch of unrelated Richards Alan Francis If you search for "'richard allan francis' 'translator,'" you'll get references to this and one other Rios book that he worked on. How can someone remain so anonymous?). In one of the back-cover blurbs, no less a writer than Carlos Fuentes asserts that "this adventure in the Spanish language easily translates into English because the creative urge is the same in both, and because Rios is the most cosmopolitan of contemporary writers," a sentiment which strikes me as insane gibberish. I don't think there was anything easy about this.

I don't know if I want to read more of Rios. He has several other books featuring the same characters, which isn't as enticing a prospect as you might hope, and if they're in the same style as this, I might not find them super-edifying. The next one is called Poundemonium, and given that I bounced very hard off Ezra Pound when I had to read him in grad school, I'm not convinced that an experimental tribute to the man would do much for me. Still, never say never. In spite of my mild skepticism, I really do think it's important and valuable for writers to push the limits of narrative as far as they'll go, whether or not the results are always wholly satisfying.