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Apr. 15th, 2013 09:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretIt turns out Rossini's Moses in Egypt, to which my prior exposure had been listening to excerpts and reading the synopsis when I wrote my paper on Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, is not so much about Moses as it is about Egypt. I saw it in Michael Counts' NYC Opera production yesterday.
There's this whole family of Pharaoh- a son, who is in love with an Israelite woman and consequently doesn't want the Israelites sent away, and a daughter, who is sensible and wants her peoples' suffering to end. There is Pharaoh's magician Mambre, who is in this production blue-skinned and ineffectual. And there is Pharaoh, an imposing and prideful bass voice whose decisions move the action. It is their suffering that Rossini wants us to feel, not the suffering of the Israelites in their slavery.
Consequently, the action begins with the 9th plague of Darkness and flows until in the final moments of the opera the Egyptians tragically drown themselves in the Red Sea. The phenomenal Act I finale, enhanced in NYCO's staging with extra chorus behind the audience, features Moses casting the 9 1/2th plague of fire, the one Moses inserted so that the death of the first born could be a dramatic death scene in the second act.
I don't really know what to say about all this, other than that I was expecting something profoundly Christian and spiritually moving, and that was not this at all. This was an opera seria using the Exodus as its narrative frame the same way other opera serias squeezed melodrama from other historical and quasi-historical events. It is, theologically speaking, a slight, uninteresting work.
I really enjoyed Counts' direction of the three Monodramas at NYCO two years ago. My praise of this production design is more qualified. Its central feature was a massive video screen that stood in for virtually all set. And it was a colossal failure for nearly all of the time. It was boring at times and confusing at others, and rarely was it an improvement over an empty set. On the other hand, the actors were well directed, the stage movement and acting and operatic storytelling were effective. Overall I judge Counts' direction to be fair.
But I wanted this to cast more of a shadow on Schoenberg's opera than it did. I wanted to see Moses as a character, and instead we got Moses as plot mover, the guy who kept pointing at his watch impatiently and saying "C'mon guys, we got a split sea to catch." In an odd program note, the guy cast as Moses is quoted as saying that he kept wanting Moses to be a hero, but he's not, he's just an ordinary guy trying to do what God wants him to.
In an even odder program note, the writer claims that except for the atonal scales, Moses in Egypt and Moses und Aron tell the same story. In fact, their scenarios are 100% disjoint. Schoenberg jumps from the second plague to Sinai. Rossini starts with the 9th plague and finishes at the Red Sea. My mother, when I told her about it, laughingly suggested that someone should write an opera of plagues 3-8. There could be a whole aria about cow diseases.
Today is the 20th day of the Omer
There's this whole family of Pharaoh- a son, who is in love with an Israelite woman and consequently doesn't want the Israelites sent away, and a daughter, who is sensible and wants her peoples' suffering to end. There is Pharaoh's magician Mambre, who is in this production blue-skinned and ineffectual. And there is Pharaoh, an imposing and prideful bass voice whose decisions move the action. It is their suffering that Rossini wants us to feel, not the suffering of the Israelites in their slavery.
Consequently, the action begins with the 9th plague of Darkness and flows until in the final moments of the opera the Egyptians tragically drown themselves in the Red Sea. The phenomenal Act I finale, enhanced in NYCO's staging with extra chorus behind the audience, features Moses casting the 9 1/2th plague of fire, the one Moses inserted so that the death of the first born could be a dramatic death scene in the second act.
I don't really know what to say about all this, other than that I was expecting something profoundly Christian and spiritually moving, and that was not this at all. This was an opera seria using the Exodus as its narrative frame the same way other opera serias squeezed melodrama from other historical and quasi-historical events. It is, theologically speaking, a slight, uninteresting work.
I really enjoyed Counts' direction of the three Monodramas at NYCO two years ago. My praise of this production design is more qualified. Its central feature was a massive video screen that stood in for virtually all set. And it was a colossal failure for nearly all of the time. It was boring at times and confusing at others, and rarely was it an improvement over an empty set. On the other hand, the actors were well directed, the stage movement and acting and operatic storytelling were effective. Overall I judge Counts' direction to be fair.
But I wanted this to cast more of a shadow on Schoenberg's opera than it did. I wanted to see Moses as a character, and instead we got Moses as plot mover, the guy who kept pointing at his watch impatiently and saying "C'mon guys, we got a split sea to catch." In an odd program note, the guy cast as Moses is quoted as saying that he kept wanting Moses to be a hero, but he's not, he's just an ordinary guy trying to do what God wants him to.
In an even odder program note, the writer claims that except for the atonal scales, Moses in Egypt and Moses und Aron tell the same story. In fact, their scenarios are 100% disjoint. Schoenberg jumps from the second plague to Sinai. Rossini starts with the 9th plague and finishes at the Red Sea. My mother, when I told her about it, laughingly suggested that someone should write an opera of plagues 3-8. There could be a whole aria about cow diseases.
Today is the 20th day of the Omer