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Mar. 28th, 2011 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretMy mother's in the hospital recovering from emergency abdominal surgery to repair a twisted colon. I could really use everyone's prayers right now. Chaya bas Yocheved.
In better news, saw another opera last week. Last time I took this particular friend to the opera, we saw "Ariadne auf Naxos". Which is a great show- it's a farce where Strauss mashes up a commedia dell'arte troupe with a serious faux-Wagnerian opera. The part where Zerbinetta yells at Ariadne in this incredibly virtuosic aria about how stupid she is to angst for a lost love is close to my favorite comic moment in all of opera. But it's a difficult opera to make sense of if you're not steeped in operatic convention, and this was my friend's first opera. So she kind of struggled with it. Where by 'kind of struggled' I mean told me she wasn't going to go back to the opera with me.
I managed to convince her to see Donizetti's "The Elixir of Love" with me last week by swearing that it was nothing at all like Ariadne. And it wasn't. Elisir is simple, ludicrous, and full of pretty bel canto singing. You can just shut off your brain and enjoy the music and the pratfalls, and that's what we both did. "There's nothing wrong with not thinking," my friend told me at intermission, and she was right. So the good news: I have convinced her that it's possible to enjoy opera. The bad news: she still thinks all my favorite 20th century operas are nonsense.
So... Elixir of Love. Stupid story, pretty music sums it up. City Opera's production sets in the the American Midwest in the 1950s, and the set was attractive but the stage design was not particularly coherent. I don't really see what setting it in the '50s gets you, other than apparently an homage to Peter Sellars's famous Cosi fan tutte. I mean, you also get fun costumes. The hero wears a leather jacket, the rival wears a US army uniform, the girls all wear pretty dresses. The set was classic City Opera- small-scale, beautiful, and well-done.
My favorite thing about the story, actually, was a screwup in the resolution. The hero drinks the 'elixir', then every girl in town pursues him because they think he's just inherited his uncle's fortune. The girl he loves sees all the other girls, gets jealous, and confesses her love for him. But they never resolve it- they never tell him or her that the reason the other girls were chasing him was his inheritance. In fact, they never tell him he inherited at all, leaving one to wonder if the story that he's inherited the fortune was a lie or misinformation or some sort. This is soooo cool... I may have gone into a bit of a rant about comic tropes about restoration being subverted after the show. And it also leaves you to wonder if there was a supernatural intervention, if perhaps the Elixir really did work, through naturalistic means.
Oh, I should say something about the hero and the rival. I was teasing my friend afterward about the rival really being the hero of the show. "He doesn't get the girl in the white dress, but ends up instead with the girl in the red dress, who's sexier and not as mean. And he undergoes more character development than you usually see from the third wheel in an operatic love triangle- going from mistrusting Nemorino to liking him and signing him up to be a soldier, going from an ambition to sleep with a hundred women to an ambition to sleep with every woman in the world..." Okay, I was forcing this, but still, I really liked Belcore.
My other favorite thing was the snake oil salesman doctor and his elixir. He was played so well, with hilariously comic dance routines that really told the character's story effectively. All of the funniest moments in the show came from him, I thought, though we must remember that I was destined to love him because I love examinations of the struggle between science and folk wisdom in earlier points in history.
Anyway, yeah, that was fun. This week I'm seeing the City Opera's three one act Monodramas by Zorn, Schoenberg, and Feldman. Very excited.
In better news, saw another opera last week. Last time I took this particular friend to the opera, we saw "Ariadne auf Naxos". Which is a great show- it's a farce where Strauss mashes up a commedia dell'arte troupe with a serious faux-Wagnerian opera. The part where Zerbinetta yells at Ariadne in this incredibly virtuosic aria about how stupid she is to angst for a lost love is close to my favorite comic moment in all of opera. But it's a difficult opera to make sense of if you're not steeped in operatic convention, and this was my friend's first opera. So she kind of struggled with it. Where by 'kind of struggled' I mean told me she wasn't going to go back to the opera with me.
I managed to convince her to see Donizetti's "The Elixir of Love" with me last week by swearing that it was nothing at all like Ariadne. And it wasn't. Elisir is simple, ludicrous, and full of pretty bel canto singing. You can just shut off your brain and enjoy the music and the pratfalls, and that's what we both did. "There's nothing wrong with not thinking," my friend told me at intermission, and she was right. So the good news: I have convinced her that it's possible to enjoy opera. The bad news: she still thinks all my favorite 20th century operas are nonsense.
So... Elixir of Love. Stupid story, pretty music sums it up. City Opera's production sets in the the American Midwest in the 1950s, and the set was attractive but the stage design was not particularly coherent. I don't really see what setting it in the '50s gets you, other than apparently an homage to Peter Sellars's famous Cosi fan tutte. I mean, you also get fun costumes. The hero wears a leather jacket, the rival wears a US army uniform, the girls all wear pretty dresses. The set was classic City Opera- small-scale, beautiful, and well-done.
My favorite thing about the story, actually, was a screwup in the resolution. The hero drinks the 'elixir', then every girl in town pursues him because they think he's just inherited his uncle's fortune. The girl he loves sees all the other girls, gets jealous, and confesses her love for him. But they never resolve it- they never tell him or her that the reason the other girls were chasing him was his inheritance. In fact, they never tell him he inherited at all, leaving one to wonder if the story that he's inherited the fortune was a lie or misinformation or some sort. This is soooo cool... I may have gone into a bit of a rant about comic tropes about restoration being subverted after the show. And it also leaves you to wonder if there was a supernatural intervention, if perhaps the Elixir really did work, through naturalistic means.
Oh, I should say something about the hero and the rival. I was teasing my friend afterward about the rival really being the hero of the show. "He doesn't get the girl in the white dress, but ends up instead with the girl in the red dress, who's sexier and not as mean. And he undergoes more character development than you usually see from the third wheel in an operatic love triangle- going from mistrusting Nemorino to liking him and signing him up to be a soldier, going from an ambition to sleep with a hundred women to an ambition to sleep with every woman in the world..." Okay, I was forcing this, but still, I really liked Belcore.
My other favorite thing was the snake oil salesman doctor and his elixir. He was played so well, with hilariously comic dance routines that really told the character's story effectively. All of the funniest moments in the show came from him, I thought, though we must remember that I was destined to love him because I love examinations of the struggle between science and folk wisdom in earlier points in history.
Anyway, yeah, that was fun. This week I'm seeing the City Opera's three one act Monodramas by Zorn, Schoenberg, and Feldman. Very excited.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-28 06:12 pm (UTC):: I may have gone into a bit of a rant about comic tropes about restoration being subverted after the show. ::
I suspect that I would enjoy watching you after the show, as much as I would enjoy the show itself.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-28 06:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-28 07:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-30 09:07 am (UTC)<3
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-30 09:08 am (UTC)