![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Mar. 6th, 2014 10:10 amApparently I'm on a stretch with 3 operas in 5 days, plus a contemporary classical concert. This is proving exhausting.
Last night was Curtis Opera Theater's "Dialogues of the Carmelites", a really lyrical mid-20th century opera about church martyrs during the French revolution, and about how faith develops and evolves as people grow up.
It centered around Blanche, the daughter of a French aristocrat who suffers a traumatic encounter with a peasant crowd and decides to enter a Carmelite convent as a way to retreat from her fear or a way to remake herself into someone who can confront the fear- she is not certain how pure her own motives are, and neither are any of the nuns who teach her.
It's unclear the nature of the trauma. All that's said is that the riot assaulted her carriage, but given how strong the 18th century trope of the scandalous pregnant aristocrat having her baby in the convent is, it's a viable reading that she was raped and is seeking to flee her family out of shame and fear that she is pregnant.
One of the standout moments of the first act is an orchestral interlude that the Curtis staged as Blanche being stripped one by one of her aristocratic garments and redressed in her habit. I am only slightly ashamed to admit prompted the thought that I wanted to vid the interlude to Batman's origin story from Batman Begins. It was definitely of a kind with that sort of origin story, of a hero being broken down in order that she might be built up again.
This was preceded by the first of the dialogues- the title is very much not a lie, most of the opera is constructed from recitative dialogues between pairs of nuns over lush Post-Romantic scoring. Conversations are about the nature of prayer, God's rewards and punishments, the nature of service to God, and ultimately about the meaning of martyrdom.
Poulenc's nuns are very concerned with the tension between Performing Devotion and Practicing Devotion. When the revolutionaries force the nuns to wear civilian clothing, they argue about the meaning of the change: have they been forced to give up an important part of their roles as symbols of the Church, or have they merely been made to cast off an irrelevant garment? When one of the sisters is offered an escape from her martyrdom, she asks if she can live with her sisters having taken a sacrifice she escaped, and is told by a priest that it her vows are with God, not with her fellow sisters. Predictably, again and again the narration seems to steer toward Practice over Performance, but I liked that it raised the question as though it weren't open and shut. I liked that it took as given that the visual appearance of nuns had a meaning behind it, and that it needed to be balanced against other virtues of the church.
Tonight I'm seeing Roomful of Teeth, and I am quite excited. Friday night is Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday. Saturday night is a local staging of the Magic Flute, for which I have limited expectations. Monday is Wozzeck at the Met. Woo Wozzeck! Woo James Levine conducting!
Last night was Curtis Opera Theater's "Dialogues of the Carmelites", a really lyrical mid-20th century opera about church martyrs during the French revolution, and about how faith develops and evolves as people grow up.
It centered around Blanche, the daughter of a French aristocrat who suffers a traumatic encounter with a peasant crowd and decides to enter a Carmelite convent as a way to retreat from her fear or a way to remake herself into someone who can confront the fear- she is not certain how pure her own motives are, and neither are any of the nuns who teach her.
It's unclear the nature of the trauma. All that's said is that the riot assaulted her carriage, but given how strong the 18th century trope of the scandalous pregnant aristocrat having her baby in the convent is, it's a viable reading that she was raped and is seeking to flee her family out of shame and fear that she is pregnant.
One of the standout moments of the first act is an orchestral interlude that the Curtis staged as Blanche being stripped one by one of her aristocratic garments and redressed in her habit. I am only slightly ashamed to admit prompted the thought that I wanted to vid the interlude to Batman's origin story from Batman Begins. It was definitely of a kind with that sort of origin story, of a hero being broken down in order that she might be built up again.
This was preceded by the first of the dialogues- the title is very much not a lie, most of the opera is constructed from recitative dialogues between pairs of nuns over lush Post-Romantic scoring. Conversations are about the nature of prayer, God's rewards and punishments, the nature of service to God, and ultimately about the meaning of martyrdom.
Poulenc's nuns are very concerned with the tension between Performing Devotion and Practicing Devotion. When the revolutionaries force the nuns to wear civilian clothing, they argue about the meaning of the change: have they been forced to give up an important part of their roles as symbols of the Church, or have they merely been made to cast off an irrelevant garment? When one of the sisters is offered an escape from her martyrdom, she asks if she can live with her sisters having taken a sacrifice she escaped, and is told by a priest that it her vows are with God, not with her fellow sisters. Predictably, again and again the narration seems to steer toward Practice over Performance, but I liked that it raised the question as though it weren't open and shut. I liked that it took as given that the visual appearance of nuns had a meaning behind it, and that it needed to be balanced against other virtues of the church.
Tonight I'm seeing Roomful of Teeth, and I am quite excited. Friday night is Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday. Saturday night is a local staging of the Magic Flute, for which I have limited expectations. Monday is Wozzeck at the Met. Woo Wozzeck! Woo James Levine conducting!