Antonín Dvořák, The Jacobin (1889)

Outside the Czech Republic, It sure isn't common to see any Dvořák operas other than Rusalka. For the opportunity to see this one, we must thank some awesome hero on youtube who uploaded a 1974 Czechoslovakian teleplay with--glory be!--English subs (I assume they were added after the fact by a fan, but it's not wholly clear to me).

Very different from Rusalka,this: as you know, that one's basically The Little Mermaid only a tragedy, but here we have a kind of romantic comedy/family drama, on subject matter that could be serious, but ultimately turns out lighthearted.

So it's round about the time of the French Revolution. Bohuš and his wife Julie return to their (Czech) hometown in disguise. Bohuš is the local count's son, but they've long been estranged, initially because the father didn't like the son's choice of wife (for reasons never explained), but then later because he's supposed to have become one of those awful Jacobins, or at least a Jacobin sympathizer (not, I should emphasize, a Jacobite; that would make for a very different and much weirder story). The count declares that his villainous nephew Adolf is his new heir (well, he doesn't declare him "villainous"--I cannot imagine that anyone named Adolf would ever do anything bad!). Oh no! Meanwhile, there's Benda, the music teacher and choirmaster. His daughter Terinka is in love with Jiří, a commoner, but he wants her to marry the officious Burgrave (some sort of administrator, only ever referred to by this title). But they're both important members on the choir, and they threaten to fuck up their roles if he doesn't let them marry and generally prevail on his good nature, so that's all right. Bohuš and Julie come to him for protection, which he grants when they tell him a woeful tale of their exile and how they're musicians who've only been able to remember their native land through song and their kids have never seen it &c (although we never actually see these alleged kids--are we sure this isn't a Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf situation?). Bohuš ends up being imprisoned by Alfred. The count is heartbroken because his son is gone and, he thinks, has joined a simply dreadful group, but Benda and Julie convince him otherwise and he's freed and gets reinstated as heir and everyone's happy except for Adolf and the Burgrave, which would be a good name for an artsy sort of musical duo.

I actually liked this a whole lot, notwithstanding the somewhat dated production. I got caught up in the drama, and hey, Dvořák. A lot of folk influences here, very fun. The Czech singers that no one has ever heard of are all fine. As far as Slavic composers go, I guess the difference between him and Rimsky-Korsakov is that Russia has enough cultural clout that even if the latter's operas aren't much performed abroad, they're still pretty readily available in video form, whereas most people don't think much about the Czech Republic. But this is good. I would LOVE to see more Dvořák operas.

Philip Glass, The Perfect American (2013)

It's an opera about Walt Disney, which is certainly an intersection of several of my interests. But...[sotto vote]I think that title might be...ironic.[/sotto voce]  We shall see what we shall see.

It takes place on and around Disney's sixty-fifth birthday, while he was in the process of dying of lung cancer. As expected, it's a non-linear presentation without any plot to speak of, alternating between flashback and present-day in surreal fashion. Other characters include Walt's brother Roy; his wife Lillian; and Wilhelm Dantine, an artist who was fired from the company, apparently for trying to unionize the animators. Also, Andy Warhol, because why not, if you're talking about the ways cultural icons like Disney are mythologized.

It's very musically interesting. Having watched my second Glass opera, I'm totally baffled by criticisms that his music is somehow boring. I mean, no, he's not Puccini, if that's your only frame of reference, but crikey, he's obviously not trying to be, and he's very interesting in his own right. Although, granted, his style probably doesn't serve this particular story quite as well as it does Akhnaten. Whatever; it's all good.

But the first question you would probably have is: what about the character of Disney itself? How is that treated? And I have to say...it's a little bit complicated. Right, so obviously he had his faults, and obviously the opera will dwell on them. I don't know quite how to evaluate the exact truth value of everything here, but it's certainly the case that he was anti-union, and I imagine he was culturally conservative, and generally right-wing. That's all easy to believe. It's NOT true, as far as I can discern, that he was personally racist (and yes, I am well aware of plenty of instances of racism in Disney product, probably more than you are, so don't start); the scene in which this is revealed consists of him having a dialogue with a malfunctioning animatronic Abraham Lincoln from the Hall of Presidents, which is kind of a brilliant idea, but the substance as far as I can tell is pure slander. So, you know, some of it seems reasonable, some kind of iffy, but I know that it's as much about myths we tell about ourselves as it is the man himself, so I'm not, like, super-outraged about it or anything. What it's hard not to take exception with on occasion is the tone, which is as subtle as a woodpecker dropping a giant camera on your head, and frequently rather on the hectoring side. The libretto is not all it could be.

However, what's maybe surprising is that the opera isn't actually completely unsympathetic to Disney. His nostalgic desire for a never-was past is clearly myopic, but also sort of poignant, and it's clear that he really does care about his work and his creations. Furthermore, his relationship with his family is presented in positive terms, as is the bonding he does with a boy in the next hospital room over. It's actually kind of moving, more so than it might be because of truly excellent work by Christopher Purves (whom I recently saw as the lead in Saul); he doesn't look anything like Disney, but he really does a bravura acting job, laying bare not only the character's prejudices, but his vulnerabilities and his ideals. The production as a whole is very good, too, mostly centering around the hospital bed and bringing in props and background images as needed. You might wonder how an opera like this would work from a legal standpoint, but the director threads that needle quite well: it's okay to name Disney characters (and beyond the obvious ones, here we have an opera where Scrooge, Gyro, and the Beagle Boys are mentioned by name, which can't help but tickle me pink), but as far as images...well, I'm pretty sure that using them would, or should, qualify as fair use, but when you're a massive megalithic corporation, it doesn't really matter what the law may technically be; you can still destroy any weaker entity who defies you. So there are some non-specific animations of animals, and pictures of a large ball with two smaller balls on top which is obviously suggestive but in a non-actionable way. It works fine.

Honestly, I wasn't necessarily expecting to be enamored of this ("the opera received mixed to negative reviews," wikipedia ominously tells us), but in spite of the somewhat clumsy libretto (based on a book which may or may not be similarly clumsy), I ended up liking it more than not. This production (the only production?) is freely available on youtube, which feels like it ought to be pretty blatantly illegal, but I dunno--EuroArts seems like an aboveboard outfit, so maybe there are licensing agreements. Well worth a look in any case. They should screen this at Disney theme parks.

George Frideric Handel, Saul (1739)

I'd already seen an opera based on the story of Saul, Carl Nielsen's Saul og David(though the Handel is really an oratorio). I must say, I don't find the story itself particularly dramatically compelling. Saul loves David but then when the people accuse him of only having slaughtered thousand whereas David has slaughtered tens of thousand, he gets upset and jealous and then dies after a dead prophet channeled by a witch tells him how much he sucks. Whee. Okay okay, that's a bit reductive, and you certainly could make something of this, but it would definitely need some work.

This doesn't do that work, really, but apparently Handel was really obsessed with this one (apparently, he had a bunch of specialized instruments commissioned just for it), and it very much shows. Lots of great music, choruses especially. It transcends its subject matter, and it's totally great, even if the title character is pretty cartoonish. Well, in fairness, this Glyndebourne production doesn't exactly make him any less so. He's kind of goofy-looking, and sort of flounders around the stage a lot. I mean, Christopher Purves is fine, and acts the role well, but it is what it is. It's a somewhat surreal production, mainly in costume contemporary to Handel's time, but with notable weirdness. Iestyn Davies is very good (GO COUNTERTENORS!) as David, even if he doesn't have the stage presence he might. Then again, that might be the fault of the oratorio itself, which doesn't necessarily give him the prominence he needs.

You (by which I mean "I") sort of feel like an oratorio staged as an opera ought to be instinguishable as anything else, but that's really not true. There's always going to be a level of abstraction that you don't normally find in operas. A chorus that doesn't necessarily correspond to any possible actual characters, people not really talking to each other...I still prefer them to be done as such; gives you something to look at. But still. That said, this production does an excellent job of feeling as opera-esque as it possibly could. My Handel fanboyism has not abated.

Samuel Barber, Vanessa (1958)

I want to watch more American operas. This is because--as is well-known--I am extremely patriotic, and it's interesting to see how my own dang country (RIGHT OR WRONG) has treated this artform that I love. So here's one of our better-known examples. Apparently it was neglected for a long time, but it's coming back into fashion a bit these days.

So it takes place in "a northern country" which seems like it has to be the UK, but which is not specified. In a manor house there live in seclusion Vanessa, her mother the baroness, and her niece Erika. She's been endlessly pining for her twenty-years-past lover, Anatol. It turns out he's dead, but never fear! His son, also named Anatol, shows up instead. He has a one-night stand with Erika but then starts a romance with Vanessa. What will be the fallout from this?

The characters are complicated, and somewhat opaque. It's often unclear what they're thinking or what they really want--which, to be clear, is the point; it's not a criticism. You really see how a good libretto can help bump an opera up a notch (though it's sometimes hard for me to tell how "good" a foreign-language libretto is, in literary terms). This one is by Gian Carlo Menotti, Barber's husband and a composer in his own right of numerous short operas that are still performed (probably the most notable being the charming Christmas piece Amahl and the Night Visitors). It's poetic and adds a lot of mystery and intrigue. This production imagines the opera's vague setting as a fifties-Hollywood-style thing (though there's stuff here that would never have flown in post-Code Hollywood) (All the female roles are played by statuesque blondes, eg.), which to me seems just perfect: even though there aren't any crimes here per se, it has that Hitchcock feel to it.

The music: I like it a lot. There are only a few parts that really stand out (most notably the last-act quintet ("To leave, to break," MY GOODNESS), but it all serves the story and thus works. I think this deserves to be performed more often. Alas, Barber only wrote two other operas: the even-rarelier-performed Antony and Cleopatra(which was considered a huge disaster at its premier) and the nine-minute A Hand of Bridge (which you can watch in a bunch of different performances on youtube--look it up; it's good).

Gioachino Rossini, Guillaume Tell (1829)

Rossini wrote this at the age of thirty-six, and even though he was at the height of his popularity and even though he lived another forty-odd years after that, he never wrote another opera. I gather he may have been suffering from mental illness, though he did rally and wrote some more music towards the end of his life.

Yeah, the one thing you know from this is the overture, or more accurately, the last two or three minutes of the overture. There's a lot of it that would be unrecognizable to you if you only know the doodoodoo doodoo doodoodoo doodoo, doodoodoo doodoo doodoodoo doodoo, doodoodoo doodoo doodoodoo doodoo, doo DOOOOO doodoodoodoo part. WOW trying to write out music phonetically like that DOES NOT WORK. You do have to wonder, though: did Rossini have any inkling at the time that he was writing one of the most iconic pieces of music ever? And it also makes me wonder, in a stoned-college-student kind of way: if he hadn't written it, would it still exist in potentia? It just seems unthinkable that this music shouldn't exist in some way. Duuuuuude. Of course, that raises even thornier philosophical questions, such as: if the William Tell Overture was inevitable, was "Two Princes" by the Spin Doctors likewise? That's a dark road to go down. Doesn't bear thinking about.

Well, anyway, that is a piece that goes on for several minutes; this is a three-and-a-half-hour opera, so obviously there has to be more to it? So what's it about? If someone had asked me that before I saw it, I'd've only been able to stammer out something vague about a guy shooting an apple off his kid's head? Or something? That is a thing that happens here, but it's not the entire thrust of the narrative. A long opera that was JUST about a single incident would seem positively avant-garde.

Well, what it's about is that the mean Austrians (all those goddamn Viennese waltzes I get SO MAD just thinking about it), led by the brutal Gesler, are oppressing the proud Swiss people, including ol' Billy Tell and his wife and son. So they're sad about that. Another Swiss guy, Arnold, is conflicted, because he's in love with an Austrian princess so he's going to fight for Austria but then his father is murdered by the Austrians what's he gonna DO?!? Anyway, Tell is captured and the sadistic Austrians make him shoot an apple on his son's head but he succeeds and escapes and murders Gesler and the princess decides to be on the Swiss side (it's extremely unclear how this works politically), so Arnold isn't conflicted anymore and...well, it wasn't clear to me quite whether they're actually supposed to have achieved liberty or whether they're just going to continue the glorious struggle, but at any rate, it's all very triumphant.

This is the first Rossini opera I've seen that isn't a goofy comedy. I don't think it's peformed that often (but then again, is any Rossini aside from Barbiere and maybe Cenerentola?), but...it should be, because it's pretty much all you could want. I find it sort of funny that it's an opera in French by an Italian about Swiss patriotism, but it's all good. I saw a Royal Opera House performance starring Gerald Finley; he's done all kinds of standard repertoire work, but for whatever reason I'd only seen him in contemporary operas, as the sleazy lawyer in Anna Nicoleand Robert Oppenheimer in Doctor Atomic. I liked seeing him in a "normal" opera. He's good! I hope I will again! The production itself was a bit confusing, with everyone in twentieth-century dress (with the bad guys, perhaps inevitably, in nazi-recalling costumes) and one silent guy dressed in a traditional William-Tell-esque get-up meant, apparently, to symbolize the, you know, Swiss spirit or whatnot. I got used to it quickly enough; it was fine. Perform it more often, I say!

Philip Glass, Akhnaten (1984)

The first three Met Live in HD productions this year weren't of any great interest to me: they showed Turandot, Manon, and Madama Butterfly, all in productions that had already been in HD years prior. If you have a new production, then by all means show it, but I just can't get excited about repeats like this. Maybe they put asses in seats, but considering that there are only ten LiHD productions a year...do something a little more daring, dammit. Something like the Met premiere of a Philip Glass opera. Please. That's more like it.

Actually, I can't claim to have known all that much about Glass before this. I have seen Koyaanisqatsi, which he scored, but that's about all and it was a long time ago. All I know is that his music is supposed to be repetitive and hypnotic. As indeed such it is here. This is about a historical pharaoh who instituted monotheism (Sun worship) in Egypt before being overthrown by conservative forces who did not appreciate this sort of radicalism. Well, that's what they say. I suppose the truth is probably more complicated. But at any rate, that's the story of the opera.

Well, such story as it has. This is very abstract, very slow, very ritualistic. The story is basically the above: Akhnaten becomes pharaoh, is in love with his wife, overthrows the dominant religious order, declares the Sun's supremacy, and is in turn overthrown and killed. This is all on a mythic level, with character never becoming any more specific than that. The libretto consists mostly of ancient texts sung in the original languages, with some parts (notably Akhnaten's centerpiece hymn to the Sun) in English. This Met production isn't subtitled; there are just title cards between scenes briefly summarizing the action. It's not a problem; the specifics of the text are more or less beside the point.

It's an amazing spectacle, perfectly stylized. Words I feel can scarcely do it justice...which is why I'm sticking a bunch of images here what I found on the internet. One will notice that it involves juggling; this is a visually striking element that serves as a great counterpoint to the music.  According to one of the backstage interviews, Glass himself liked it enough that he declared it was now an integral part of the opera. So there you go.

The two most striking pieces are a love duet between Akhnaten and his wife Nefertiti and the scene of his final downfall and death. As noted, the music is very repetitive, and the production is filled with slow motion and it works beautifully. This is seriously one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. Totally mesmerising. I am on the fence about whether or not I would like it if I just listened to the score (well, I'm sure I would if I were stoned to the gills, but that's kind of a given), but as an audiovisual piece it has few peers. All the performers are great, notable countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo in the title role and J'Nai Bridges (in her Met debut--what a way to kick things off) as Nefertiti. A huge triumph. The Met needs more stuff like this. I know a lot of critics really hate Glass, but I've gotta say, I'm a newly-minted fan.

George Frideric Handel, Tamerlano (1724)

Well, Tamerlano's the Timurid emperor. He's captured the Ottoman emperor, Bajazet, and also his daughter, Asteria. There's also some sort of Greek guy, Andronico, whose status is extremely unclear hanging around. Andronico and Asteria are in love, but Tamerlano wants to marry her even though he's already engaged, the cad. A certain amount of angst ensues, there are murder plots, things aren't quite clear about who's in love with whom, Bajazet ends up committing suicide, but Tamerlano repents and everyone else is happy. The end.

When I was writing about Orlando, I remarked that I feel like I have a tendency to lose critical distance with Handel operas, and to automatically declare the most recent one I've seen as my favorite. Well, it is with mixed feelings that I must declare that we now see that this isn't necessarily the case. "Mixed" because on the one hand I'm glad to see tangible evidence that I do in fact have critical faculties, and on the other I'm sad because I didn't like this one very much, for both story and, more importantly, musical reasons. First: the story is really pointlessly convoluted, and just not that interesting (the subtitles for whatever reason suffer from consistent bizarrely tortured syntax--you don't want to have to take time to parse their meaning, but you do--but I don't think that's really the main problem). This could be partially the production I suppose, but I kind of doubt it. The motives for Bajazet's suicide are kind of murky and don't have the emotional impact that you'd hope for, especially given how rare it is to see a good guy die in a Handel opera (is this the first I've seen? Well...do you count Semele as an opera, and do you count the title character as a "good guy"?). Also, while it's common to see bad guys reform in Handel operas--which is something I approve of!--I must say that the title character here is an unbelievable prick throughout, and his abrupt turn is neither believable nor satisfying. Bah.

Of course, if the music were good, all of this would be of relative unimportance, but, well...it's kind of weird how unengaging it it, given how good we know Handel was. There's a distressingly high recitative-to-aria ratio--and, as noted above, not in the service of a particularly engaging story! SO OFTEN it feels like a character is going to break into song and then just...doesn't, or does so so briefly that you barely notice. It genuinely feels like Handel wasn't really trying here. Of course it has its moments, but they're much fewer and further between than they ought to be. It was written in the same year as Giulio Cesare and Rodelinda,but it seems like a disservice to compare it to either of those.

This production is...fine. They got Plácido Domingo as Bajazet, which of course they really play up, even though he's only the fourth-most-significant character. He's fine, but honestly, nothing that special. Probably more than anything because neither is the character. It's a fairly sparse, abstract production that I basically like. There's a giant blue elephant at one point, so what the hey. I don't know; I could be wrong. Maybe if I saw another version everything would snap into focus and the opera would take its place among my favorites. But for now, I remain underwhelmed. Even Homer nods.