(no subject)
Dec. 7th, 2016 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretL'Amour de Loin composed by Kaija Saariaho, in Robert LePage's Met Opera production
The first opera staged at the Met in a hundred years that was composed by a woman!!! (YES, THE MET WAS ACTUALLY MORE PROGRESSIVE A CENTURY AGO THAN IT IS NOW.) No cookies for you, Peter Gelb.
I remain uncertain how I feel about it. Saariaho's musical palette tends toward microtonalism/spectralism, which is kind of a mixed bag for an opera. In terms of conjuring an atmosphere, setting a mood, her music is very effective. I wanted more melody, though. And I say that as someone whose favorite opera is atonal. I don't need melody in my opera, but I wanted it more in this one.
I'm also unsure how I feel about the story. There is plot, though not much of it- the French troubadour Joufre has given up his womanizing ways and devoted himself to writing brilliant (complex, ambiguous, microtonal) love songs in praise of a woman he has never met, across the sea- the perfect woman. Troubled by this change, his friends try to console him, but he is inconsolable until a pilgrim tells him that she has met the woman. The pilgrim becomes an inadvertent go-between, bringing word of this love from afar back and forth between the two until Joufre decides he must set sail and meet his true love, Clemence. Tragically, the sea voyage brings him near to death, and he dies shortly after setting eyes on her and confessing his love to her for the first time.
It's a vision of love I'm uncomfortable with. To my mind, love must be relational, it must be built in the interactions between people. Love from afar in this fashion does not make sense. It's also to a certain extent a vision of love that the opera expresses discomfort with, as in a fabulous aria where Clemence re-sings one of Jaufre's love songs dedicated to her and then goes through the litany of ways in which it fails to describe her, and wonders if it is possible for her to ever live up to it. This was my favorite moment in the opera. But in the final act, when the lovers meet at last and then Clemence comes to terms with her grief at losing him, this skepticism about love from afar is not present. It is a beautiful piece of music about grief and lost love, but it is anchored in the most crystalline bad-opera-love I've ever seen. Afterward, I compared the final Act to the last act of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. The conclusion of L'Amour de Loin is mercifully shorter, but it is similar in its commitment to treating terrible, fixated non-relational love as being the most romantic thing in the world, and the destruction of that love as being the most tragic thing in the world.
The most striking thing about the opera was LePage's staging, which set millions of addressable RGB LEDs across the stage in ribbons and magnificently animated them as a constantly moving sea on which the action took place. Combined with Saariaho's tone painting, the effect was remarkably vivid, the kind of spectacle you go to the Met to see.
The first opera staged at the Met in a hundred years that was composed by a woman!!! (YES, THE MET WAS ACTUALLY MORE PROGRESSIVE A CENTURY AGO THAN IT IS NOW.) No cookies for you, Peter Gelb.
I remain uncertain how I feel about it. Saariaho's musical palette tends toward microtonalism/spectralism, which is kind of a mixed bag for an opera. In terms of conjuring an atmosphere, setting a mood, her music is very effective. I wanted more melody, though. And I say that as someone whose favorite opera is atonal. I don't need melody in my opera, but I wanted it more in this one.
I'm also unsure how I feel about the story. There is plot, though not much of it- the French troubadour Joufre has given up his womanizing ways and devoted himself to writing brilliant (complex, ambiguous, microtonal) love songs in praise of a woman he has never met, across the sea- the perfect woman. Troubled by this change, his friends try to console him, but he is inconsolable until a pilgrim tells him that she has met the woman. The pilgrim becomes an inadvertent go-between, bringing word of this love from afar back and forth between the two until Joufre decides he must set sail and meet his true love, Clemence. Tragically, the sea voyage brings him near to death, and he dies shortly after setting eyes on her and confessing his love to her for the first time.
It's a vision of love I'm uncomfortable with. To my mind, love must be relational, it must be built in the interactions between people. Love from afar in this fashion does not make sense. It's also to a certain extent a vision of love that the opera expresses discomfort with, as in a fabulous aria where Clemence re-sings one of Jaufre's love songs dedicated to her and then goes through the litany of ways in which it fails to describe her, and wonders if it is possible for her to ever live up to it. This was my favorite moment in the opera. But in the final act, when the lovers meet at last and then Clemence comes to terms with her grief at losing him, this skepticism about love from afar is not present. It is a beautiful piece of music about grief and lost love, but it is anchored in the most crystalline bad-opera-love I've ever seen. Afterward, I compared the final Act to the last act of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. The conclusion of L'Amour de Loin is mercifully shorter, but it is similar in its commitment to treating terrible, fixated non-relational love as being the most romantic thing in the world, and the destruction of that love as being the most tragic thing in the world.
The most striking thing about the opera was LePage's staging, which set millions of addressable RGB LEDs across the stage in ribbons and magnificently animated them as a constantly moving sea on which the action took place. Combined with Saariaho's tone painting, the effect was remarkably vivid, the kind of spectacle you go to the Met to see.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-12-07 05:15 pm (UTC)Yes this! This is why I liked the first half more than the second half, I think. It undercut the love story it was telling. Another thing that I thought was striking was how the pilgrim was describing Clemence to Joufre at the beginning and when the pilgrim wasn't able to give details, Joufre would just make them up. To me that read as purposefully undercutting this kind of love. I did wonder if the whole idea was that this kind of non-relational love can only work if the two people don't know each other -- that's why Joufre has to die. Because if he had lived, their love wouldn't have worked. But I'm honestly not sure if that's me reading against the text or if that's intended. After the first half I would say it was intended. After the second -- I'm less sure.
But I really liked the lights/staging. That was my favorite part.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-12-07 05:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-12-07 06:44 pm (UTC)I didn't not like the second half -- though I definitely didn't catch all of the musical nuances you did -- but the first part is what I keep thinking back to.