Richard Stauss, Die schweigsame Frau (1935)

While many of Strauss' operas are comfortably part of the repertoire and performed regularly, there are a few that, for whatever reason, just aren't. To my knowledge, there is no complete video of Die ägyptische Helena or Friedenstag, and the only one of Intermezzo is sung in English, which...not ideal. The hell, people? This one falls into the same category, but fortunately, some awesome person uploaded a 1971 performance from the Bavaria State Opera. It has English titles, so clearly it was originally broadcast in some Anglophone country or other, but where? Hard to say. There's an unreadable little logo in the top left that I don't recognize.

This has a libretto by Stefan Zweig: gutsy to have a Jewish writer do your libretto at that time. Strauss refused to let Zweig's name be removed, which contributed to the initial run being cancelled after only a few performances. Right on. Fuck all nazis always, and in the exact opposite of a fun way.

It's based on a 1609 comedy by Ben Johnson (though this one apparently takes place in 1760--how am I possibly meant to be able to detect the difference?). There's a retired naval captain, Sir John Morosus who hates noises after having survived an explosion at sea. His barber recommends that he marry a quiet young woman to look after him in his old age. But when his long-lost nephew Henry appears, he decides, screw that; I'll just make him my heir (I'm not clear why this is an either/or situation). But then Henry reveals that he's a singer and brings in his opera troupe, complete with Aminta, his soprano wife. This does not sit well with Morosus, who determines to disinherit his nephew and get married after all. But the troupe decides to play a trick on him, by making him think he's married one of them, who will then act super-loud and obnoxious until he regrets his actions and re-inherits Henry. This plan works well: the woman who pretends to marry him is Aminta herself (shouldn't he recognize her from when Henry introduced them?), who feels remorse at having to act like a shrieking harridan but does it anyway. At one point she practices singing an aria from L’incoronazione di Poppea, which is amusing. Anyway, Morosus is extremely relieved when he learns it was just a trick, his nephew is back in his good graces, and he decides that actually music is okay, he can tolerate it, although silence is still better.

This may immediately remind you of Donizetti's Don Pasquale. Well, a rich guy marrying or trying to marry a woman who isn't what she seems was definitely a classic comedy trope. Less so nowadays, since it's hard for us to see such a man as just a semi-sympathetic buffoon rather than a monster of some stripe. Accordingly, this feels very old-fashioned compared to...well, every other Strauss opera I've seen. And yet, it's still a lot of fun! Strauss' music gets "zany" in places in a way you don't usually see, and the whole thing, if predictable, is still compelling, and sometimes funny (though not as funny as Don Pasquale).

This youtube version naturally doesn't quite have the video quality you might hope for, but on the whole the quality is better than you'd expect for something (presumably) recorded off a TV broadcast close to fifty years ago. It features big names of the time, notably Kurt Moll in the title role. Definitely stealing the show, I'd say, is Reri Grist as Aminta. Very charming, and one of the first African American opera singers with an international career (I mean, so says wikipedia. It's not like I just knew that off the top of my head).

I suppose, really, you can see why this isn't as widely-performed as some; it really does play it safe in terms of both form and content. But when you're dealing with a genius like Strauss, that still results in a solid operatic experience, and I definitely recommend it.

Willem Jeths, Ritratto (2020)

Hey look, it's my first 2020s opera. I know some people will go "the 2020s don't start until 2021, there was no year zero, I am extremely smart, blah blah," but I don't care about that. I don't know if you've noticed, but there really aren't many people around who were alive when the calendar ticked over from BCE to CE. It's just not connected to how how we perceive time and history. So. But actually, the point may be moot, because this opera has never actually debuted, in the technical sense: it was preempted from its planned March premiere by you-know-what. But the Dutch National Opera released a video of this dress rehearsal, so we can see it anyway. That also explains why there's no applause at any point and no curtain call.

The Italian word "ritratto" means "portrait," and this is in particular a portrait of Luisa Casati, a rich Italian heiress and patron of the arts in the early twentieth century, noted for her outrageous behavior (in spite of the title, the opera is mostly in English, albeit interspersed with substantial snatches of Italian and French). The opera doesn't have a plot, really: it's mainly the Marchesa talking about art with various of the prominent figures in her circle, most notably the painter Romaine Brooks and poet and father-of- fascism Gabriele D'Annunzio. It proceeds through the First World War and her eventual bankruptcy and death. She gouges her eyes out here at the climax, which I don't think is historical record. But obviously, that's not the point.

A lot of contemporary opera don't, let's be honest, have particularly memorable music. That doesn't mean I don't in some cases enjoy them, but the story is the main thing, with the music being more background. I'm happy to say that that's not the case here; this is very tuneful, with plenty of memorable arias. I really enjoyed it a lot. Being more about aesthetics than shit actually happening, it might remind you of Strauss' Capriccio. It's a fair comparison, even if this (unlike that) is in an ultimately tragic vein. This one's a winner, a promising start to the decade.

The other thing that's a winner is the production, and particularly the costume design: the "dress" part of "dress rehearsal" is taken extremely seriously, with all the characters decked out in outlandish costumes. Here's a screen capture that gives you the idea better than I could:

The Marchesa is the redhead holding up her hand just right of center. The color palate switches throughout the opera; it's not green the whole time. I must say, I'm glad that the Dutch Opera put this out for consumption, but I cringe when I think about them having to just eat the costs for this elaborate costuming. I hope everything is able to get back to "normal" soon, though it's hard to imagine how.

Christoph Willibald Gluck, Iphigénie en Aulide (1774)

Yes! Gluck wrote two separate operas about this extremely minor character from Greek mythology! They're both based on Euripides plays. Quick refresher in case you've forgotten: Iphigenia is Agamemnon's daughter whom Diana makes him sacrifice or else she won't let him go off to murder Trojans. So he does. Very edifying.

In Iphigénie en Tauride, the idea is that the goddess actually spirited her off to be her priestess rather than letting her be killed. Here...well, it's not that complicated: her dad doesn't want to sacrifice her but blah blah blah, Clytemnestra opposes this, and also in this version she and Achilles are in love (Deidamia apparently not existing in this continuity), and is he faithful to her, blah blah and also et cetera. In the end Diana appears and is all "kidding lol" (reminding me of the end of Idomeneo) so now everyone can be happy, except that Achilles is going to be killed in the war and Clytemnestra is ultimately going to murder Agamemnon. That stuff isn't specified by the text. I wonder how having another sister around would affect the plot of Elektra, or any of however many other plays and operas.

Not gonna lie: I found this a little on the boring side. The music is fine--and I think I can definitely see more clearly than I did in the past the intersection between the baroque and classical periods--but the drama I thought was extremely non-compelling, and--I noticed this in Iphigénie en Tauride also--it's just sooooo slooooow. I don't know; I suppose that's characteristic of baroque opera in general, but for whatever reason, it kind of got to me here.

The production may partly be to blame, too. I saw this one, which I think is the only available video. It's by Pierre Audi, who was also behind that stage version of Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder, and I think maybe I just don't like him. There's nothing terribly special here; it's just a vaguely modernized version with metal scaffolding and staircases on the sides of the stage. I feel it doesn't bring home the stakes of the drama very well, and--this will never not irritate me--in the latter part Iphigenia is wearing a suicide belt, and COME ON. You can't just stick such a charged signifier in there without a very damn good reason, which I don't think this remotely had. FAIL.

I'll definitely see Gluck's Alceste one of these days (his other oft-performed opera that I haven't seen), but I'm sort of on the fence right now about whether or not I really like him or not (or, perhaps more accurately, whether I like his librettists' sense of drama).

Nkeiru Okoye, Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed that Line to Freedom (2014)

Yeah! Let's watch an opera about one of the best Americans ever! A natural subject, or so it would seem.  Apparently there are several contemporary operas with her as a subject, but...this is one of them. I don't know how I planned to end that sentence.

Hey, remember when there were plans for Tubman to replace the odious Jackson on the twenty? Yeah...in retrospect, it should have been obvious that that would never happen once T**** got elected. I think at first we (okay, maybe just me) didn't quite realize what hardcore white supremacists he and his cohort are. Still, I suppose you could make the case that doing it would just be empty symbolism allowing us to feel good about ourselves while not addressing our country's festering problems. Or, indeed, that getting her all mixed up with American capitalism is more insult than honor.

Anyway. The question is, how do you shape her life into a compelling narrative arc, exactly? Obviously you have to decide where to start and where to end and what to emphasize. Well, we start with her as a young girl named Araminta, or Minty for short. One of her owners bashes her on the head with a piece of metal, which gave her visions and sleeping spells that lasted her whole life and probably made her become an abolitionist. She gets married, argues with and leaves her husband, escapes, comes back for her family and others, and that's about what she's doing as the opera concludes.

It is, I have to admit, a little bit jumbled, and there are a few eyebrow-raising moments, like when Harriet's come back south and her father comes in wearing a blindfold, and everyone asks, hey dad, why the blindfold? and he sings a comic aria about how he's wearing it so if anyone asks if he's seen her, he can truthfully say no, and...lol? What kind of tone are we trying to strike here, exactly?

Still, it's more compelling than not. The music is really great, mixing folk, gospel, blues, and soul together. Most operas that take place in a historical time and place make, it must be admitted, zero effort to evoke the given era musically, so it's nice to see this one do that, and get it so right.

You can see this on The American Opera Project, along with some others.  It's an unlisted youtube video that I could just link to, but I think it's only fair that you register, as they ask you to. It's a very good performance; notably, Janinah Burnett is revelatory in the title role, with a steely-eyed determination and, in softer moments, a smile that lights up the stage. I want to see a lot more of her. Briana Elyse Hunter is also excellent as her sister Rachel. Unfortunately, there are technical aspects of the video that make it not-ideal. First, the sound isn't perfect; in places, especially the second act, it has a distinct echo-y and tinny feel, and a lot of the singing is simply impossible to understand--this problem compounded by the fact that this has what must be the worst subtitle track I've ever seen, in the sense that it just cuts out after the first few minutes and never comes back. The piece deserves better.

Still, I liked it a lot, and I hope it doesn't just sound like tokenism when I note that it's my first opera by a black woman. But it is, and I'm happy about that. I mean, happy to have seen it. Not happy that it's thusfar the only one. Shut up.

I was looking through the wikipedia page for Harriett Tubman, and it's pretty darned dispiriting reading about her postwar life, and the mighty struggles she had to undergo to get even the most modest pension from the government. She was well-known and celebrated in many circles, but the overwhelming level of white supremacy that pervaded the country was not an easy force to overcome, as demonstrated by the fact that we still haven't.

I was, however, amused by the following passage, which describes how she met her second husband:

Tubman spent her remaining years in Auburn, tending to her family and other people in need. She worked various jobs to support her elderly parents, and took in boarders to help pay the bills. One of the people Tubman took in was a 5-foot, 11-inch tall farmer named Nelson Charles Davis.

You would think, reading this, that his height would be in some way relevant to something later on in the article, but nope! It's just a completely random fact about him shoved in for no clear reason. Good times.

Hans Werner Henze, Pollicino (1980)

Here's a short children's opera that Henze wrote. According to the booklet, he wanted to write an opera that children could participate in (hence the largish boys' chorus here). Britten would definitely have approved. The DVD booklet is written in very simplified language, and if it weren't already apparent that this was for children, in the back it clearly defines esoteric terms like "score" "conductor" and "rehearsal." Are a lot of kids really buying DVDs these days? Well, it's a nice thought.

The story is sort of an amalgam of various popular faerie-tale tropes: the parents are poor, so they abandon their seven sons in the woods: it's actually sort of funny; they do this twice. After they get home the first time, there's some business about how "we'll never be separated again"--then hard jump-cut to the kids again abandoned in the woods. The sort of thing you'd associate with movies. But helpful animals help them, and they're taken captive by a giant who's going to eat them, only then they escape with the help of his seven daughters, and everything's gonna be great! I guess. Oh, the main kid is named Pollicino, so that's what that is. Not sure about the ending though: okay, they're free from the giant, and they sing about how great everything is and it's springtime etc, only...what about their parents? Okay, maybe they're just bad parents, throwing their kids out repeatedly, but in the beginning they're singing about social injustice, about how they need to pay money for rent that totally destroys them even though it would be NOTHING for a rich person, and you expect this to be solved in some way, but no, we're just left hanging.

Aside from that, though, what's not to like? The music is very melodic and appealing. I can easily imagine this being a gateway for a kid into opera fandom--though given that the brothers here are obviously all played by professional choir members, the idea that "any kid can do it!" doesn't quite come across here. There's an interview with the director who clarifies that adults are also "allowed" to watch it, so that's a relief.

Gioachino Rossini, Semiramide (1823)

Hey! None of this semi-ramide business! For me, it's the whole ramide or NOTHING! I'm very uncompromising in this regard.

Yeah, so this is based on a play by Voltaire, which is in turn based on the story of a legendary Assyrian queen, Semiramis. There are several other operas with the same title, including a mostly-lost one (alas) by Vivaldi, but this I believe is the only one actually based on Voltaire.

Semiramide is the queen, her husband Ninus having died. Is this the same Ninus at whose tomb Pyramus and Thisbe were to meet? Maybe! Significant parts of this do indeed take place at his tomb, so, I mean, I didn't think that story took place in Mesopotamia, but who knows? Anyway, there's a somewhat tangled love...shape: everyone thinks Semiramide is going to pick a successor, and the main candidates are Assur, a prince and a villain; and Arsace, a general and a hero. They both want to marry Azema, and she wants to marry Arsace (as does Idreno, an Indian prince who has a lot of stage time in spite of being very superfluous to the overall story). But! Semiramide doesn't want to step down at all; she wants to marry Arsace and rule with him. Only, whoa, the ghost of Ninus appears and demands a sacrifice to appease his spirit, helpfully not specifying exactly who should be sacrificed. But it turns out that Semiramide had conspired with Assur to murder her husband, he having convinced her that he was planning on abandoning her. So she feels guilty about that. In other news, it is revealed that Arsace is actually Ninia, her son. He goes off to kill Assur, but whoops, in the dark of the tomb, he accidentally stabs his mom instead. Assur is arrested. When he realizes what he's done he's sad, but then there's a triumphant chorus welcoming him as king, so it's all good...I guess.  I think the message we can take from this is that six or eight thousand years ago, they laid down the law...in Mesopotamia.

Not gonna lie: the plot is a bit of a mess. There are all these twists that just come from nowhere and wait? What now? Huh? Also, I don't feel as though Semiramide gets enough attention to be the sort of tragic heroine she's meant to, and Azema seems like it's a more tiny, insignificant role than it should be. None of that really matters much, though, 'cause you're listening to some really damn great Rossini, and who cares why these people are singing? They're doing it beautifully. Great vocal acrobatics.

I do have one thing to say, though: I watched this handsomely traditional Met production.  The presenter is Christopher Maltman (yay!), who explains that the reason this opera hadn't previously been staged for twenty-five years was because it's so dern hard to find singers who are up to its vocal demands. Now, presumably this was what he was told to say, but really now: why do they keep telling lies like this? It's almost as though they're inexplicably defensive about not having performed the opera in question for so many years, and they're trying to make excuses. But come ON: are you really telling me that the role of Semiramide is so difficult that there's literally only one soprano in a generation who can handle it? That's obviously untrue. Sure, you can believe that a smaller opera house might have trouble finding the talent to mount your more difficult operas, but it's not remotely believable that there was ever a time in the Met's history--at least since they became an established institution--when they wouldn't have been able to do any opera they wanted. Come on.

Well, here the title character is sung by Angela Meade. I first saw her as Alice Ford in Falstaff--my third-ever opera, if memory serves.  She made a strong impression on me there, and she's really great here. Quite a stage presence. My other favorite is Ildar Abdrazakov (who previously played the title role in Prince Igor) as Assur; very sinister, and he has a good freak-out scene when he thinks Ninus' ghost is trying to get him.

I enjoyed this a lot. I've never not enjoyed a Rossini opera.  I shall see more soon.

Leoš Janáček, Kátja Kabanová (1921)

Well, now the only Janáček operas I haven't seen are the ones that are rarely performed and not to my knowledge anywhere available in video form. This sort of has the same tenor as Jenůfa, only without the happy ending.

The story is extremely simple: Kátja is recently married, but she's in love with another man, who also is in love with her. She freaks out when her husband goes off on a business trip, because she thinks it means she won't have the willpower to avoid cheating on him. She doesn't and and she does. As a result, she is eaten alive by remorse and jumps in the river and drowns, though I have to note that as presented, there is absolutely no way that, realistically, she was there long enough to drown before being fished out. There's also some other fairly superfluous detail involving her nightmare mother-in-law (who at one point complains that now her son is married and he seems to love his wife more than her--Freudian!) and her lover having an uncle whom he has to obey if he wants any inheritance, but that's basically it.

Now, I know there's no point in viewing the story in modern terms; no point in saying "Kátja, you are overreacting here to a really excessive degree." I mean, she even is for the time, but by our standards, definitely. The drama is what it is, and obviously people took these things more to heart than we would now (not that people can't still feel guilt and shame about cheating like this, but I doubt it drives too many of them to suicide). Still, I'm forced to admit that I had trouble really getting into this on a visceral level. Jenůfa may be similarly of its time, but the emotion there I found a lot more palpable.

As for the music, well, I know by now what Janáček sounds like. I like a lot of his music, but I find his lack of traditional arias or anything like that a bit wearing. The wikipedia page compares his late operas (and this one in particular) to Puccini, but boy do I ever not hear the Puccini here. Definitely of his time, for better or worse. If you hurry, you can probably still see this production for free! It transplants the action to some sort of Eastern Bloc city, which seems appropriate to me. Please enjoy! Or not. It's none of my business.