Francesco Sacrati, La finta pazza (1641)

This opera's claim to fame is that it was the first one ever performed in France. Well...maybe. The wikipedia page on French opera claims that this is the case, but the one on the opera itself claims that it was "presumably the second opera ever in France." OH WE PRESUME THIS, DO WE? So what was first? They're not saying. Nor is anyone else. I'm going to assume that this one holds the title until someone demonstrates otherwise. But regardless, the point is: "the opera is considered to be one of the most successful operas of the seventeenth century, and the first big hit of the genre."

I thought I wouldn't be able to see this, but hey, there's a production on youtube! With French subtitles. I looked on amazon to see if this or any other Sacrati operas were available commercially (he wrote nine of them, sez wikipedia, though it's not clear how many of those are extant); unsurprisingly, the answer is no, but I DID find this extremely inexplicable product:

Good for confusing all your friends and relations, for sure.

So what's this about, then? Well, it's about Deidamia and Achilles, which as you know was also the subject of Handel's last opera, called--wait for it--Deidamia. That is, the princess of Scryos who was Achilles' lover while he was hidden there disguised as a woman prior to the Trojan War. And this has a similar plot to that: Ulysses (here accompanied by Diomedes) comes to find him and bring him along to murder Trojans, and he's conflicted because of his love. Here, he's all ready to leave Deidamia, but she pretends to be insane (hence the title, "The Feigned Madwoman") to get him to marry her. IRL, I do not think that that's the best way to stop your lover from leaving you, but it works here. Well, he still leaves, and as we know dies at Troy, so I'm not sure that was worth the trouble. But it happens, anyway. There's also a subplot here where Diomedes had been Deidamia's lover in the past until she threw him over for Achilles. In the end, he's just left bitter and disappointed. I'm afraid he's been red-pilled.

So that's cool. Did I like this? Well...kind of. I like this kind of music, so there's no reason I wouldn't have, basically. I guess I was maybe slightly cooler on it than some. Just based on this, I don't like Sacrati as much as Cavalli, for instance, and it feels a bit overextended for what ultimately is a pretty simple plot. Also--I had this issue with the Handel opera too--Achilles is not a particularly sympathetic or likeable character, and I think Deidamia would be better without him. Ulysses is pretty amusing, though. Of course, honesty compels me to note that the subtitles were pretty rough going for me: I would have thought they'd be easy to understand, like they were for Cavalli's Erismena, but for whatever reason, that wasn't really the case, and it's possible I would have liked it more were it more comprehensible, not that I couldn't basically follow it.

Still, cool to have the opportunity to see it. As ever with these things, I really wonder that, given that they have the video fercryinoutloud, it's not available on DVD.

The Opera Story - Episodes (2020)

HUH. So I would never have known about these if I hadn't randomly clicked onto Operavision's "Digital Operas" page--they hadn't been promoted anywhere else on the site; just slipped in there apparently in the dead of night. They're not actually exclusive to Operavision; you can also watch them on The Opera Story's own youtube channel--though given that, as of this writing, they have all of seventy subscribers, they don't seem to have much market penetration, so it would be fine for Operavision to boost the signal--if they were actually doing that. WEIRD.

These are more or less obliquely COVID-inspired short pieces along the same lines as #OperaHarmony, although these are shorter and a bit less ambitious, on the whole--the longest is four minutes; the shortest, a mere ninety seconds. There are twelve of them, but that's only a total of thirty-six minutes. Well, let's have a look.

Episode 1: Skype Call (Vahan Salorian)

Two women talking over each other on a Skype call, with piano accompaniment. Most of these only have piano accompaniment. I understand that it would be unreasonable under the circumstances to expect a full orchestra, but it's still a bit boring to me. This is well-done, I suppose, but honestly, the whole "people having trouble videochatting" thing is just such a cliche at this point, and the piece doesn't do anything interesting with it.

Episode 2: Song of the Rocks (Lucie Treacher)

Lots of footage of rocks, and also water and stuff. It's about the natural world reasserting itself during COVID. Pretty good. I like both the lead singer and the wordless chorus in the background, along with the ominous, whatever, clonking sounds.

Episode 3: Glass Number Three (Dani Howard)

Footage of a woman looking like it was taken in a phone's portrait mode. Switching from her face to her bottom half, and particularly her hand holding a glass of wine. She's freaked out that she might lose a loved one to (presumably) COVID. And THAT is why she's on, wait for it, glass number three. The music is really minimal here--kind of just one sustained, high-pitched note. Hell, if it were longer than two minutes, it might be unendurable, but it's pretty okay as it is.

Episode 4: Soy Sauce (Alex Woolf)

Narrated by, yes, a bottle of soy sauce, who is unhappy because they used to be popular and useful for people everywhere, but now they're forgotten; people don't use them anymore. It's certainly a novel premise, but I don't exactly understand it: are people not using soy sauce because of COVID? Where does that come from? Is it because people aren't going to sushi restaurants as much anymore? That seems questionable, and there's no hint that that's the point anyway. Points for novelty, I guess, but I'm doubtful about the whole idea, and not a huge fan of the piano backing.

Episode 5: Egg (Vahan Salorian)

This is sort of the same thing, oddly enough. This egg wants to be eaten, but no one will eat them! Oh no! Is there a problem with people not eating eggs?  I eat eggs all the damn time! Or is it some sort of metaphor for people trapped inside under COVID? I don't get that impression. But...well, otherwise, it's even weirder than the soy sauce thing. Nice egg animations, but again, I really doubt the premise, and the music doesn't transport me.

Episode 6: Got Your Goat (Alex Woolf)

There are some baby goats. Yes, I know they're called "kids," but if I say "there are some kids," no one will know what I mean. They're talking about how, with all the people inside, they're able to munch on the plants with impunity. Hey, you get to look at footage of cute kids for a few minutes. Who could object? Again, the music is just, eh, but it's fine.

Episode 7: Cookies (Joaquim Badia)

A woman is going crazy about websites asking her to accept cookies. She does not want to. She's against cookies, I guess because she's supposed to be on some kind of diet. But then, in the end, she eats a cookie anyway. Caught! It's not really related to COVID except maybe in the sense that people are online more, but it's cute enough, AND HEY, it features a string trio, which to me is a lot more interesting than just the piano. Whoo!

Episode 8: Three Two One Ready or Not (Noah Mosley)

People--as represented by animated hands with faces on them--are playing hide and seek. It's kind of inexplicable, but it has an appeal, especially when the one hand keeps going "you'll never find me Janet, you'll never find me." Still, I feel it could do with a bit more context. Blah blah, more piano.

Episode 9: Nature - Water and Air (Dani Howard)

Water and air sing about how people need them over attractive nature footage. They suggest that disasters like this may remind us how we're their guests, and we should respect them. Yeah, fat chance. We're really super great at never learning anything ever. Still pretty okay, though. Music features violin, cello, and flute, which I like.

Episode 10: Love and Light (Vahan Salorian)

A youtuber talks to their audience--as facebook reaction icons float across the bottom of the screen--solicits paypal donations, then, off-air, bitches about how they're not getting all they might want, only it's not actually off-air. Doh! Different than most of these, so that's all right. Of course, youtubers always want you to send them money (or more specifically, join their Patreon), so is COVID relevant? Eh, it's fine. Again, more diverse music than the norm, so good for that.

Episode 11: Life Is Sweet Life Is Shit (James Garner)

A couple waking up in the morning. He sings about how life is sweet, but she's of another opinion because she's required to go back to work. They question their relationship. But they decide that they really do like each other, probably. This is really the only one of these that has a sort of linear story, in micro. For that reason, I liked it, though again with the piano.

Episode 12: Don't Just Clap (Lucie Treacher)

Images a series of stoops (clearly somewhere in the UK). The singer does not know what to do in these circumstances--not just the disease but generally environmental degradation and the like. A little bit banal, but its heart is in the right place.

--

So what did we learn from this? Not a whole hell of a lot! Some of these are okay, but none of them are anywhere near as good as the best pieces from #OperaHarmony, I'm sorry to say. Should I choose my favorites? I'm not going to choose least favorites; I don't want to be negative here. Okay, top there:

1. Life Is Sweet Life Is Shit

2. Three Two One Ready or Not

3. Nature - Water and Air

Maybe? I mean, I know the entries on these are kind of lukewarm. But I guess that's my feeling about the whole thing! The Opera Story also has a few full-length pieces available; perhaps I will give one of them a try.

Brett Dean, Hamlet (2017)

This is my fiftieth twenty-first-century opera.  I thought you'd want to know that, even though I'm definitely wrong.  There are many operatic Hamlets, of course, but before this, the only one regularly performed was Thomas'. But this...is a completely different beast.

Do you know about Hamlet? It's a well-known play by a well-known playwright named William Shakespeare. Although some people think that his works were actually written by another man of that name. But in any case, I should stop babbling. The story of Hamlet is the story of this, more or less. Unlike the Thomas version, it's clear that composer and librettist are actually familiar with the play. It features a fair amount of original dialogue, albeit sometimes from different versions of the manuscript and always severely chopped and screwed for a kind of shock-of-the-new alienation effect that works well (two of the players argue about whether it should be "too too solid flesh," or "sullied"). Also, it features Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern (countertenor roles, a surprising choice that works well), and much larger parts for Horatio and Polonius than Thomas. Still no Fortinbras, however.

The music is this kind of ghostly, fragmented thing. I think it's pretty great. It's not better than the Thomas version because it's more faithful to the text or more self-aware of whatever; it's just better because it's better. You can watch it here if desired. the title role is played by Allan Clayton, and, well, I think that casting is also trying to mess with our expectations, because--with no judgment implied in this statement--he's a fat guy with a big bushy beard, which is not how I think of Hamlet (although my image of him as a consumptive romantic hero is clearly anachronistic). Still, you get used to him, and he's really good. Also notable is Barbara Hannigan as Ophelia. She really gives it her all, especially in her mad scene, which is possibly the best such thing I've ever seen, though I'd have to revisit Lucia di Lammermoor to say for sure. Other highlights are Rod Gilfry (who I found totally unrecognizable throughout) as Claudius and John Tomlinson bringing some spooky gravitas to his triple role as the Ghost, Gravedigger, and Lead Player.

I'm not talking about a specific character here, but I must highlight the climactic duel scene at the end, which is absolutely incredible. There's this chorus while Hamlet and Laertes are fighting chanting from what I assume must be an authentic fencing manual of the time, which is kind of bizarre but amazing and the whole thing is just so apocalyptic. You're kind of wishing for Fortinbras in fact to show up just to show us, don't worry, this isn't literally the end of the world; there's some kind of renewal. But nope! I mean, not that I'm complaining. This is a great opera, and if we can only have one Hamlet, it's definitely my preference.

Pascal Dusapin, Faustus, the Last Night (2006)

Huh. Another Dusapin. I wasn't overly taken with his Macbeth Underworld, but evidently I thought this would be worth seeing anyway. Well, I was looking up Georg Nigl, who played the male lead in Von heute auf morgen, and the wikipedia entry said that he was known for creating the title role in this opera. So I idly looked it up, found a youtube video (which, yes, features Nigl in the lead--recognizably the same guy, even in such a wildly different role) and just impulsively decided to check it out. What more can I say?

This is not the Faust story as you'd get it from Berlioz or Gounod or Boito: it's a very stripped-down, intentionally abstruse thing. That video is unsubtitled, so even though it's in English, a lot of it was very hard to follow, but I don't get the impression that I would likely have been able to make much more sense of it even with subtitles. The whole thing--in this production, anyway--takes place with the characters--Faustus, Mephistopheles, an angel, and a few other characters whose purpose is not entirely clear--clambering around a giant clock face. This may be the last night, but it's not clear whether time is actually passing. There's not much action; Faustus grills Mephistopheles a lot about light and about the nature of the universe. Which, hey, gives him a step up over the character as portrayed in other versions, who, in spite of allegedly having sold his soul for knowledge, basically just idly dicks around. Mephistopheles--who is made up to look almost identical to Faustus--seems rattled and uncertain at his questions. You really do have to wonder about this world's cosmology.

I feel that this sounds pretty similar to Macbeth Underworld, from what I can remember. I think I like this one more, though. It definitely has that eerie, atmospheric feel to it. Wouldn't mind seeing it again with subs for greater comprehension.

Arnold Schoenberg, Pierrot lunaire (1912) and Von heute auf morgen (1930)

Actually, Pierrot lunaire isn't an opera, even though it comes up when you do a google search for "Schoenberg operas." But I'm sort of trying to figure out Schoenberg, so I watched it anyway. There's a good performance with English subtitles here.

What it is is a song cycle for a chamber orchestra and soprano based on a series of poems by the symbolist Belgian poet Albert Giraud, featuring the protean figure of Pierrot in a number of situations, some lyrical, some gruesome, and some just surreal. This was written before Schoenberg worked out his twelve-tone system, so while it is atonal, it's not that. But it raises the opportunity for me to try to answer the question: can I tell the difference? And the answer is: nope! If you told me this was a twelve-tone piece, I would happily nod along. There's a good post here about the differences by a person who seems to know what they're talking about, but I think if I want to understand, I'm REALLY going to just have to spend some time staring into the sun.

Regardless! Whatever it is, I liked it (and I liked Kiera Duffy's singing). It may be atonal, but it doesn't have any of the jagged, dissonant feel that one, by which I mean me, associates with the form. It's just kind of pretty. I thought. Good late-night music. I might actually be willing to just listen to the music here, which isn't something I'd ever have said about any other music of this sort.

So that's encouraging! How about Von heute auf morgen? Well, that is an opera--the first one ever written in twelve-tone. You associate this kind of music with grim tragedy or at least with Very Serious Drama, but this is a short domestic comedy--and a rather charming one at that.

There's a married couple who've just come home from a party, at which they were both taken with other people--her with a famous tenor, him with her friend. They think about their marriage. Do they still love each other? What kind of relationship do they want to have? Do they want to be free and easy, like "modern people" are? The answers turn out to be yes, the same kind they've had, and no. Their two objects of temptation turn up, but they're not interested. They don't want to be "modern" in that sense.

The music is...well, what it is. It's fine, which is sort of my all-purpose unhelpful description of all music like this. The story has a more or less conservative message, but not in an offensive way. Also, their bickering never comes across as mean-spirited, like The Lockhorns or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It doesn't hurt that Georg Nigl and Brigitte Geller in the leads really act the hell out of them--they really bring the characters alive.

So I liked this a lot. But I want to draw your attention to the plot summary on wikipedia, screen-capped in case it's changed:

It seems to me that the person who wrote this either didn't understand or was too freaked out to mention the fact that the drama here revolves around whether this couple should open up their marriage. That "they champion the latest trends in society"--yes, specifically, the trend of not being bothered if your spouse is sleeping with someone else. There's something oddly childish about this description.

Good stuff, good stuff. I would like to see more Schoenberg, but I don't think his other two operas, Erwartung and Die glückliche Hand, are on video anywhere. Shame.

Christoph Willibald Gluck, Alceste (1767)

I suppose this is Gluck's best-known opera after Orfeo ed Euridice, but I had never seen it and I wasn't all that excited about seeing it, due to my somewhat muted response to most of the other Gluck I've seen. But I did! And I'm glad of it! So there!

This is of course from Euripides, from whence also Handel's Admeto. The king, Admeto, is dying, and can only be saved if someone else sacrifices their life in his place. Who will do it? None but his wife Alceste. So she pledges to do just that, and Ademto gets better, but they are both heartbroken by her impending demise. But then Apollo comes down and says that because of how much they love each other, Alceste is saved. That's the original Italian version, that I saw. The biggest difference from the original play, as well as the Handel opera, is that Hercules--who saves Alceste from death in those versions--does not figure here. Which is clearly the right choice, given the tone that Gluck is trying to strike. The whole point of it is that Alceste is saved because of the strength of the couple's love. If instead she's saved because of the strength of Hercules...it sort of dulls the impact, doesn't it? But for whatever reason, when Gluck extensively revised it years later for a translation into French, guess what? Hercules is BACK, baby! Yeah! Yeah? Yeah.

Well actually, I loved this. It's definitely become my favorite Gluck opera. The depth of Alceste's and Ademto's love for each other is...well, quite possibly more vividly conveyed than love in any other opera I can name. Very impressive. And not a dry eye in the house while they're mourning, even though you know a happy ending (really, the purest deus ex machina) is coming. Excellent production from the Teatro La Fenice, also: very clean, minimalist design with checkered floor tiles, a low staircase, and a few columns and arches in the background. Ideal for conveying the drama, I would say.

Seeing this made me want to seek out more Gluck. Before, I'd never really made an effort to see what's available, and now that I have, I'm kind of shocked to see that I've basically seen everything that's available, apart from a few low-quality, unsubtitled videos on youtube. That's five, for the record, out of a total of forty-nine--kind of shocking that there wouldn't be more available from as important a composer as Gluck, even granting that his early works--when I guess he was more a straightforwardly-baroque composer--are considered of less interest. Which candidate is running on the pro-Gluck platform? I am a single-issue voter on this, so I need to know before I cast my ballot.

Francesco Cavalli, Il Giasone (1649)

I think from now on I'm going to include DVD cover images with these reviews where applicable. Make the blog a little more visually...something. "Dynamic" might be pushing it.

Supposedly, according to various articles on the internet that may or may not all stem from one claim that may or may not be in any way factual, this was the most popular opera of the seventeenth century. Quite a claim. This would be based on number of performances, but I have a hard time seeing how that can possibly be verified. Still! They say that, so it's probably worth seeing. I mean, it's Cavalli, so it's probably going to be worth seeing anyway. I don't need an excuse. But...I don't know how I was going to finish this sentence.

It's...well, based on the story of Jason and Medea. Sort of. Very, very sort of. It never ceases to amuse me how little respect people in baroque times had for classical mythology. Sure, it varied: Cavalli's La Didone, in spite of the grafted-on happy ending, basically takes the drama seriously; L'Orfeo is very, very solemn; and Charpentier's Medée is a grimmer, more mythologically-grounded take on the same material here --but people of the time were extremely willing to just travesty the shit out of this material. And I love them for it!

SO ANYWAY. It's very busy, with characters constantly dashing on and off-stage; it would take forever to provide more than a basic plot outline: Jason and Medea are in love, in theory. But Jason is already married and already has children with Hypsipyle, the queen of Lemnos, and she wants him back so she sends her servant Orestes to find him. There's also Aegeus (Theseus' father?), who apparently had a thing with Medea in the past and is still in love with her. And there's Aegeus' comedy servant, the stammering Demo. Ultimately, Hypsipyle finds Jason and demands that he return to her, but he's vacillating around like a big dope. Medea is pissed at this and demands that he kill Hypsipyle. He doesn't want to get his hands dirty, but it's cool if one of his men does it, so he orders her to go meet with his captain, Besso and say a specific thing to him, and he orders Besso to fling whoever says this to him in the ocean. However, instead Medea comes, says the specific thing, and gets thrown in the ocean, only to be saved by Aegeus. Now she's in love with him again (and sorry for trying to get her rival murdered). So Jason is ordered to return to Hypsipyle, which he does, and everyone's happy. And that's that. Also, did I mention that there's a horny old nursemaid? That's a character type that Cavalli is extremely fond of.

I know that SOUNDS goofy, but I don't think it quite gets at how goofy it really is in the small details: Demo insisting that he drowned in the ocean and now he's dead and also he's swallowed a whale; Besso declaring that he won't drown Hypsipyle because "I only kill one queen per day;" Jason's sitcom-level efforts to placate both Medea and Hypsipyle--it makes me feel closer to our seventeenth-century forebears to realize that they had whimsical senses of humor like this.

There are actually two productions of this available on disc; the other, being I guess older, seems to be much more watched--it has a bunch of amazon reviews while this has none--but I was extremely happy with it. Goofy, sure, in a way that people complain about sometimes, sure, but it seemed to fit the general tone of the piece very well. A confident mixture of anachronistic setting and especially costuming, with Hypsipyle (pictured on the DVD cover) and her attendants dressed in 1920s chic lugging steamer trunks around; the Argonauts looking like some kind of mixture of bikers and black-clad secret service people, with Ercole himself (of course Hercules is a character here; you know he's always hanging around) as a huge-muscled Hell's Angels type; and Cupid (another singing character) as a person in a somewhat terrifying giant, anatomically correct Cupid costume. It's pretty darned nutty, in all, but in a way that brings me delight in great measure.

Is it the best opera of the seventeenth century? Well...hard to say, really. Not necessarily, but it IS super-good, and if we have to choose one, hell, I guess we could go with this, while recognizing that it's necessarily at least a somewhat arbitrary distinction.

This is what I watched instead of the Presidential debate, by the way. This was self-evidently the correct choice. I don't know what you people were expecting.