Household Opera

Scattered thoughts on my second Met HD broadcast

So I saw the Met's Tristan und Isolde in HD on Saturday, and was relieved to see there were no casualties after the run of bad luck that's plagued the production. Robert Dean Smith had stepped in as Tristan #4 after the first three had all been incapacitated or replaced. At the first intermission, Deborah Voigt joked a bit with Susan Graham, who hosted the backstage features, about singing Isolde opposite a different Tristan each time. She'd never even met the previous Tristan, which, she said, "made for some interesting love scenes!"

I'm (still) not one of those people who flip out over Wagner, but I'm starting to see what the fuss is about. Despite the crick in my neck I got from sitting at the end of row 3, it somehow didn't feel like an endurance test, even after five and a half hours. It was the duet in Act 2 that made the whole afternoon, for me: it was like being swept out to sea. (In a good way.) Act 3 didn't overwhelm me to the same extent, mostly because so much of it is Tristan's, and while I loved Deborah Voigt, I was lukewarm toward Robert Dean Smith. (One has to make allowances for his having been flown in at the last minute, but still.) But it reminded me that, great big nerd though I am, opera isn't so much a cerebral experience for me as it is a visceral one.

Last time I went to a Met broadcast, I found that the experience was better than it might have been if I'd been there in person. This time was a little more 50-50. On the plus side: comfortable seats, watching James Levine conduct, and seeing so much in close-up. On the minus side: annoyingly intrusive camera direction, particularly evident in the director's penchant for split-screens (sometimes as many as six little boxes on the main screen at once); also, not nearly as much "screen" acting from the leads as there was in the Grimes broadcast. There were production elements I liked, especially the lighting change to bright red as Tristan and Isolde drank the potion in Act 1, and one or two that made me scratch my head (what was up with the little model castles and knights all over the stage at the beginning of Act 3?).

And the other nice thing about seeing it in the theater instead of listening on the radio was the sense of being part of a movie audience, munching on a box of Junior Mints and striking up conversations with the people next to me as we waited for the lights to go down. I spotted one fellow audience member in the theater's ridiculously chichi cocktail lounge studiously reading what looked like a complete score. And really, how often does one see that?

[Edited to add: Alex Ross of the New Yorker has a terrific column on the production, pointing out the fine line between operatic triumph and inadvertently hilarious disaster. I'd never heard that story about Leo Slezak missing the swan boat in Lohengrin, but oh how I wish I'd had a chance to see it.]

The Scottish play of the opera world?

I just hope nobody collapses or falls into the prompter's box during tomorrow's matinee of the Met's Tristan und Isolde. I also hope that the run of bad luck that the production's been having won't make the live movie broadcast feed conk out in mid-performance while I'm watching from here in Philly. It's enough to make one think of analogies with a certain reputedly cursed Shakespeare play.

(Do the same superstitions attached to Shakespeare's Macbeth Scottish play also apply to Verdi's Macbeth? Inquiring minds want to know.)

Oh, and in other news, my final exam and conference paper draft? Done! I'm going to enjoy my weekend of not writing anything as much as I possibly can.

A Met broadcast, a rave, and a blogger meetup

I saw my very first Metropolitan Opera HD broadcast this weekend! And my first Peter Grimes! And...well, not my first blogger meetup, but great fun all the same. Initially, I was skeptical about the whole idea of live opera on video broadcast — I was afraid it would be too much like watching opera on DVD, where the camerawork always seems to be either too static or too intrusive, and it's just close enough to live performance to remind one of what one is missing.

I'm not skeptical any more.* I'm sold. I hope the Met keeps this project up, and I'm now seriously contemplating spending something like six hours next Saturday parked in a seat at the Bridge for Tristan und Isolde, despite the scarcity of free time in my schedule and despite the fact that I'm still on the fence about Wagner. That's how good Saturday's broadcast was.

I saw it with Terry Teachout of About Last Night, who's writing a column about the HD broadcasts and who was, if anything, even more enthralled than I was. It's a terrific production, voice-wise and acting-wise — even though I'm not that familiar with Grimes, I could hear the perfectness of Anthony Dean Griffey and Patricia Racette as Peter Grimes and Ellen Orford. I'd heard that Griffey's Grimes comes across as too dark, too brutal, too unsympathetic, but I didn't get that at all, because — as Terry and I wound up discussing during the intermissions — the camera stays close enough to the singers that you can see the acting as well as the singing. Ellen's "Peter, we've failed," in Act 2, was heartbreaking, because you could see the realization hit both of them. It got me right in the throat. I've never sat close enough to the stage to pick up on that level of detail, and opera-glasses only do so much when you're in the upper tiers.

Plus, the cameras stayed on for intermission, poking into the Met's backstage spaces, following Donald Runnicles into the orchestra pit, catching up with the two leads for an interview, and switching over to the BBC for a live feature in Britten's home town of Aldeburgh. And during the sea interludes, the cameras went into the pit to show us the orchestra. I've always liked watching musicians play, so I liked the way I got to recognize their faces ("oh, there's that one flutist again!").

I went home with my head filled with Britten's amazingly pictorial sea-music, which conjured up waves and storm-clouds even while my eyes were trained on the orchestra. Then I dreamed about Patricia Racette's voice. And there are still four more broadcasts left this season!

* I also appear to have gotten over my dubiousness about a) English-language opera, b) 20th-century opera, and c) tenor-centric opera. That's rather a lot of prejudices dismantled in one afternoon.

[Update: Sarah of Prima la musica, poi le parole saw it too, and weighs in.]

Note to self

Googling the piece of music that's stuck in your head will not unstick it. If anything, giving in to the impulse to Google for it will make the earworm twenty times worse.

Damn you, Léo Delibes, you and your ubiquitous duet.* Also, please get out of my head now. OK? [clutches skull and whimpers]

* Not only is it the British Airways theme, it appeared in an episode of The L Word I was watching the other night, hence the earworm. (Hmm. I wonder if I could ever get myself hired as Overeducated Culture  Consultant on that show? "The Anne Carson references were rather a good idea. But Lakme? I don't care if you're slyly alluding to that scene in The Hunger, try something baroque with lots of mezzos in drag instead!" And that would probably be when they'd hire someone else. Oh well...)

One project down, three to go.

There are still a boatload of projects waiting to be done, but I've finished my final website project for my web design class: a guide to movies about opera. I had a lot of fun working on it, and I think I'll most likely keep it going after this quarter is over. If you're interested, let me know what you think!

Operas on stage and screen

Detailed information about this year's Met movie broadcast season is finally up. There are two venues in Philly, including one I can readily get to in University City. Whoopee!

Oh, and Rigoletto at the Academy of Music was great — they did an especially good job casting the three principals (Chen Reiss wowed us all as Gilda), and the production as a whole had a kind of tight, suspenseful energy to it, even for an audience knowing exactly how it turns out. It's in some ways a really startling opera: as the program notes reminded us, the censors insisted on changing a fair number of plot points, but it still manages to be really scathing about the corrosive effects of unbridled power on everyone who comes into contact with it.

And speaking of stage and screen, I think I've settled on the Opera Person's Movie Guide as my website design project topic. I'm now catching up on a few relevant DVDs; last night's, in a neat transition from the sublime to the ridiculous, was the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera. I suspect the sentence "You'll never hear the Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore quite the same way again" will find its way into my movie guide.

Opera and the fantastic

So I was flipping through The Encyclopedia of Fantasy in preparation for teaching an upcoming instruction session (for a class with fantasy fiction on the syllabus), and came across an entry on "Opera." A really long entry, consisting of a 20-page-long list of operas "based on myths, legends, folktales and so on or that contain fantasy elements," arranged chronologically by composer. Since classical mythology was the basis for pretty much every baroque opera ever, there are plenty of obscure 17th- and 18th-century operas I'd never heard of. But the list of modern operas is equally long and fascinating. I promptly photocopied the whole entry to stick into my Kobbé's Opera Book as a supplement.

I wouldn't have thought that the fantasy fans and opera fans would intersect, but it makes a certain amount of sense: verismo aside, opera isn't exactly known for sticking to realistic elements and avoiding fantastic ones. Every librettist and their brother seems to have had a go at the Orpheus myth, or the Faust legend, or the Brothers Grimm, or E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman."

This is why reference books, especially outside one's usual areas of interest, are so much fun to browse. Though this one was particularly entertaining; you've got to love an encyclopedia that encompasses Hieronmyus Bosch, Milton, Borges, surrealism, Edmund Spenser, and H.P. Lovecraft. (There didn't seem to be any Lovecraftian operas in the list — just as well, probably — but I'd never known that both Debussy and Philip Glass, among others, adapted Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher.")

Met Opera broadcasts question

I don't suppose anyone knows where the Met's movie-theater live broadcasts are going to be screened next season? I'd like it if they were coming to a theater near me, but so far, the screening locations seem to be a closely guarded secret. Or maybe they're still signing movie theaters up.

The lineup looks interesting, anyway. If I can make it to any of the broadcasts, I'll try to catch Macbeth, Peter Grimes, and La Fille du Regiment (especially because Natalie Dessay is in it). I'm also pondering whether I want to sit through all five hours of Tristan und Isolde in a movie theater, or whether I'd prefer be under the same roof as the performers for such a marathon opera. (I'm not really a Wagnerite, but WNYC's "Tristan Mysteries" radio series has gotten me interested.)

At any rate, there'll always be the Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts even if the screenings aren't an option...

Speaking of Shakespeare and opera...

I'd never heard of the International Opera Theater until today, when one of my coworkers told me about them. But apparently they adapt Shakespeare's plays into chamber operas, and, what's more, their version of The Winter's Tale is going to be performed here in Philly on June 22nd and 24th. I am intrigued, not least because The Winter's Tale is quite possibly my favorite Shakespeare play of them all, and I've never seen it performed on stage.

Between that and the Center City Opera Theater's production of Lowell Lieberman's The Picture of Dorian Gray, June is shaping up to be the Month of Operas Adapted from Literary Works. (Not that there aren't a great many operas in that category, but still.)

Falstaff mini-review

I'm posting this from the iSchool's main computing lab, in the interval between finishing a statistics midterm and whisking off for a night out. (I still don't have access to teh internets at home. I miss you, internets.) This is just to say that I really enjoyed Falstaff, and if anyone reading this is still trying to decide whether to see it, then consider this a thumbs-up. Lovely singing all around, and an engagingly funny production, despite what seemed like the world's longest scene changes (I all but exchanged life histories with the people in the next seats, not that that was a hardship).

I've been trying to formulate a thought about how some of the characters perceive themselves as taking part in very different types of dramas — Ford (briefly) channels Othello, though fortunately without any of the tragic consequences, while Falstaff in the last act gets dropped into what seems like an eerier version of the forest from A Midsummer Night's Dream — and even though we, and all the female characters (who mastermind the whole plot), know much better, it's still all there in the music nonetheless. But that's about as far as the formulation has gotten.

I'm thinking of getting a season subscription next year. Question is, am I really going to want to see Cyrano and Hansel and Gretel? Must ponder.