Feb. 7th, 2013

seekingferret: Two warning signs one above the other. 1) Falling Rocks. 2) Falling Rocs. (Default)
I saw Le Comte D'Ory Tuesday night at the Met. I was not previously familiar with the opera- it was kind of everything I expected from it, though. Stupid and full of witty and clever and very attractive music. Very stupid.

The plot of Le Comte D'Ory is thus: In 13th century France, the Count of a particular region has taken his whole male retinue to fight a Crusade, while all the women have retired to a castle and sworn to act like widows until the men return. A young count from an adjacent region, a dissolute and roguish fellow named le Comte D'Ory, decides he's going to get into the castle and seduce the countess. Who, startlingly, is the count's sister, not his wife. Which is one of many things I don't understand, because usually in a story like this the whole point would be the secret adultery.

Anyway, the count comes up with an incredibly elaborate plan to sneak into the castle. He dresses up like a mystical hermit and spends eight days in the town outside the castle offering mystic advice and blessings. Eventually the town falls in love with him and his spirituality and wisdom draw the attention of the countess's lady in waiting, who seeks him out for advice on how to help the countess deal with her depression. This leads to an invitation into the castle. His page, who thinks he's the hermit, goes with him because he is in love with the countess and wants the hermit convince her not to wait until her brother returns to marry him. The count, as the hermit, advises a love affair as the solution to her depression, but advises against consummating it with the page because as the page of the dissolute and roguish Comte D'ory, he is not worthy of her. [This is the beginning of a pattern where the Comte's strategy for seducing the countess involves saying insulting things about the Comte in disguise.] She should therefore have a love affair with him.

This works predictably badly, because the countess was not interested in a romantic relationship with a mystic hermit and the count offers no good reason for her to change her mind, and then to cap it off, the count's tutor shows up and reveals the hermit to be a fraud. End act 1. Except not. After this dramatic moment that would be the perfect ending to the act, we get two more songs, first the announcement that the crusaders are returning in two days, and then a song where the count vows to sneak in again and seduce the countess and everyone else rolls their eyes. Because pacing is for losers.

So Act II has plan B. The count dresses up as a nun, sneaks back into the castle, and tries to seduce the countess as a nun. While the whole time the countess is going "Why is this nun hitting on me?" Also, as the nun, the Count insults the Count in florid and varied language, because the way to seduce a woman is to insult yourself to her while in disguise. The countess doesn't see through the ruse, but when the page shows up he immediately figures it out, and comes up with a plan to outsmart the count.

The plan? The comte, the countess, and the page have a threesome. Then trumpets sound, the crusaders return, and the countess sneaks the count and his men out a secret passage and everyone else sings a song about how great husbands are.


I don't know, apparently this was supposed to be funny. Occasionally it was. Mostly it was just dumb. We couldn't figure out why the count was investing so much time in his elaborate plans to seduce the countess when he had no endgame. He was an ineffectual Don Giovanni. There was no strategy for what to do after the costume got him into the castle, no idea of how to make the countess actually interested in sleeping with him once she was tricked into letting him in. We couldn't figure out why the page, supposedly in love with the countess in an actual, mutual, non-crazy way, had waited until the last week of what must have been a months-long or years-long seclusion to try to sneak into the castle. We couldn't figure out how the countess chose who she would or wouldn't sleep with, and why she agreed to her brother's crazy plan of locking herself in a castle and acting like a widow until he came back.

In a good comedy, character motivation matters. It's not crazy things happening that makes it funny. It's crazy things happening in ways that we find comprehensible, that we can trace back and understand why it happened despite saying "Oh, no, don't do that!" It's characters reacting to crazy things happening in ways we can sympathize with.

Le Comte D'Ory was anarchic and illogical, instead. Characters did things that made no sense, and that was supposed to be the joke. I had no idea what their goals were.

And the staging was pretty mediocre. Bartlett Sher at the Met generally seems interested in contextualizing his comedies in metatheater. (I've seen two of his shows at the Met, and his South Pacific at the Vivien Beaumont. I WISH his South Pacific had been more self-conscious and thoughtful) His Figaro, which I wrote about a few years ago, stages the action around several massive, freestanding doors. As I wrote then, the effect is to suggest that comedy is all about unexpected entrances and exits. In Le Comte D'Ory, Sher stages it on a stage within a stage, with a prompter visible to the side, pulley-wheels visibly lifting objects up and down from the stage, and special effects like thunder and lightning provided by stagehands shaking low-tech props while moving around, off the stage within the stage but on the stage. Again, he is revealing the hidden workings of the theater, revealing the magician's tricks. But to what end? Le Comte D'Ory is a bad comedy, and surrounding it with deliberately amateurish stagecraft does nothing but call attention to its badness. This is an opera that requires attention to every detail of the director's magic to make it even remotely believable, so why intentionally try to sabotage our suspension of disbelief? If you have that much contempt for the opera, you may as well just do it as a concert staging and just revel in the music.

Because there is a reason the Met staged it. The music is pretty splendid. There are no immortal melodies, but there are many excellent ones, and the ensemble writing sparkles. There is much motion in the music. Themes move from singer to singer, from instrument to instrument, full of vivacity and humor, full of musical jokes and clever underscoring. There is, however, none of Mozart's genius for character here, which might have been the opera's salvation. Even the dumb Mozartean operas overcome their texts because even if the librettist is incapable of endowing his characters with goals and personality, Mozart's arias do it for them. Rossini can't manage the same trick here. But it nonetheless provided a nice showcase for Pretty Yende as the countess and Juan Diego Florez as the Comte, plus Nathan Gunn slumming it with a single significant aria as Raimbaud.

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