Jules Massenet, Le Cid (1885)

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

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

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

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

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

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

I simply MUST draw your attention to this awesome piece.

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

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

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

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

Francesco Provenzale, La Stellidaura Vendicante (1674)

 

Steeeeelllaaaaa!

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

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

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

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

Antonio Vivaldi, Il Giustino (1724)

A new-to-me Vivaldi opera!  Hooray!  

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

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

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

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

Domenico Cimarosa, Le astuzie femminili

Cimarosa is mostly known for Il matrimonio segreto, but he wrote a ton more comic operas, of which this is one!  Boom.  And what's more, there's another coming out in 2024.  The Cimarosa Renaissance is upon us, and I couldn't be happier.

How to even describe the plot to this?  There's Bellina who just wants to marry her sweetheart, Filandro, but there's some hard-to-understand legal thing where she has to marry some other dude to get some inheritance or other?  Can she, with the aid of her maidservants and (very occasionally) Filandro, solve all of the problems?

Hmm.   We may never know.  The plot here is actually a bit hard to follow in any great detail.  It's standard opera buffa stuff, but the sense of it seems to be "people like this stuff; let's shovel a bunch of it fairly indiscriminately in front of them and see if they'll bite.  And that's fine!  On those terms, it works.  I can't off-hand say if the music here is better or worse than Il matrimonio, but it's certainly a lot of fun, with infectious set pieces galore.  The character of Filandro is kind of gormless, but that's not the kind of thing that bothers one too much.  And the production here is a straightforward, traditional thing; it probably won't excite anyone too much, but nor is it likely to offend, and I think there's something to be said for a neutral sort of production in opera that's being released on video for the first time.

I do want to take a moment, however, to note that libretto quality is a severely undervalued thing in opera.  Sure, this is good, but with a more coherent libretto, it could easily be transcendently great.  Le nozzi di Figaro would never not be a popular opera, what with Mozart and all, but one thing about it is that it has a really good libretto (the goofy "lost parents" stuff notwithstanding), and I'm quite sure it wouldn't have the status it does today if not for that.  Find a good libretto, composers!  It may not seem super-vital in the moment, but your legacy will thank you.

Terrence Blanchard, Champion (2013)

Well, here's Blanchard's first opera, which the Met decided to put on after Fire Shut Up in My Bones turned out to be such a hit (it's available on PBS 'til the nineteenth).  In the introduction, talking to Blanchard, Peter Gelb remarks that "I think Puccini would be feeling very pleased with his successor."  Somehow, I think that Puccini would have been totally baffled by everything about this, but who knows?

Anyway, Champion is about a boxer, Emile Griffith, who felt guilt because he killed a guy in the ring, and also was tormented by his sexuality.  That's about it; most if it takes place in the past with young-Emile as played by Ryan Speedo Green, and then we also have some present-day stuff, and some collapsing of chronology, with Eric Owens as old, dementia-riddled Emile.  And that's really it; there's not a lot of plot here.  Though if you're wondering whether to see it, I should note that this is where you'll hear Stephanie Blythe sing "well fuck me sideways," which could be a deciding factor.  In general, this is probably the most R-rated libretto I've ever heard.

There are a lot of great set pieces here; I have no problem with the music, and the colorful production is also super-fun to look at.  But when you get to the actual supposed drama of the piece, it kind of falls down.  When I first learned about this opera, I had the vague idea that the guy Emile kills was his lover, which would tie the two threads of the piece together neatly.  But he's not; he's just some random guy who as far as we know has no history with Emile and then shouts a bunch of homophobic slurs at him.  It's not that you can't feel bad about killing a guy even if you don't like him, and I may have sounded like some sort of psychopath for suggesting otherwise, but here, at any rate, it really doesn't work dramatically.

Likewise regarding Emile's sexuality; this whole thing is just really undeveloped.  There are a few scenes in a gay bar, but we never see him with a serious partner or really have any idea of how being in the closet is affecting him.  I'd say this whole thing could've used a pretty serious rewrite.

What the hell, though; it was fun to watch.  If you think that this blog's radio silence means I haven't been seeing operas, you are incorrect.  It's true that I'm not watching them at the frantic pace I once did, but it's still pretty much my favorite art form.

Francesco Corselli, Achille in Sciro (1744)

It's been a good time for baroque opera on the ol' Operavision lately: last year we had Orpheus month in October, featuring not only an excellent production of Monteverdi, but also a thing fusing Orfeo with Indian classical music, to stunning effect.  Then earlier this year there was a new production of Agrippina--very traditionally staged but still very good.  Later this month, it's rarely-staged Vivaldi--but right NOW, it's THIS guy, an opera seria by a composer I'd never heard of.  Boom!

And it's really good, man.  It has more or less the same plot as Handel's Deidamia, but a completely different libretto--yup, it's another Metastasio, recognizably so, although it lacks the typical tangled Metastasian romantic convolutions.  It's all about Achilles being disguised as a woman (careful--this'll be banned in Florida before you know it!) so as not to have to go to war, and he's in love with Deidamia, the Scyrian princess, but doggone it, he really wants to go off to murder Trojans, so when Ulysses shows up to convince him to do just that, all bets are off!  It's actually not a very edifying story when you come right down to it, is it?  I know it's not useful or meaningful to approach Greek mythology with a contemporary sensibility, but I can't help it: the Trojan War was some bullshit!  There, I said it.  Cancel me if you must, but I stand behind everything I've said.

That doesn't really matter, though, because there's some really great music here.  It starts a bit slow, I  feel, but ultimately, even minor characters get their chances to shine.  There IS one mild disappointment, which is that Franco Fagioli was originally meant to sing Achilles, but had to cancel at the last minute due to illness or some such.  So instead we get this Gabriel Diaz dude, who, you know, is fine, but I do miss Fagioli--although either way, the decision to give the character a long curly red wig when in disguise makes him look like the offspring of Weird Al Yankovic and the Wendy's girl.  Anyway, as countertenors go, I prefer Tim Mead--another guy I didn't know--as Ulysses.

Corselli spent most of his career at the Spanish court, where this opera was written.  It is above my pay-grade to say whether there's anything in it, musically, that was written specifically to cater to Spanish tastes--although it is notable that the acts all open with honest-to-god choruses.  That's not generally a thing in opera seria, the only choruses in which tend to be brief celebratory things by the protagonists at the end.  But be that as it may, it IS obvious that the libretto was somewhat modified: there's a sort of confusing thing at the end where Achilles and Deidamia getting married is equated to a union between Spain and France--I do not know the specific cultural context of the opera, but it must have been written to commemorate some wedding that was supposed to cement some sort of Spanish-French alliance.  Bit of a stretch, given that neither of these characters have anything whatsoever to do with western Europe, but there you have it.  It's kind of interesting, at any rate, and it sort of explains the confusing thing in the generally very traditional production where various figures which one can only surmise are French and Spanish nobility (one woman in particular) wander around the sets.  Hmm!