Singing the Spiel with Mozart: Atlanta Opera gets Enlightenment Ideals with its Bedazzled Nipples

I first saw Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail in Utah in 2014.  I wrote about it here. The Atlanta Opera's production opened with much deja vu for me, as I thought to myself, self, that sparkly purple waistcoat of Belmonte's looks awfully familiar. As some flipping through programs informed me, the Atlanta Opera employed a certain Jacob Climer, teh exact same costume designer employed by the Utah Opera for their abduction.. He also, based on his website, did the costumes for an Abduction presented by the Des Moines Opera.  All pictures I could find were of the exact same costume.  I wonder if he has a licensing fee for the costumes or if he just gets paid multiple times to design the exact same thing. Fortunately, in Atlanta, whoever was styling the wigs had the skill to make Konstanze look like Marie Antroinette was morphing into Dolly Parton rather than like a poodle had died on her head.  Also, Pasha Selim took off his robe periodically to reveal bedazzled gold nipples.

Image from the Atlanta Opera's Facebook page

Like their colleagues in Utah, the Atlanta Opera company also subscribes to the unfortunate Amerian tradition of translating the spoken words of a singspiel from German into English.  I hate that.  It's jarring.

To my relief, after the costumes and the translation issues, the resemblance to the Utah production ended. The singing quality was much higher.  I could hear all the singing!  Always a good minimum requirement for a singer is to be audible.  Atlanta continued its delightful streak of casting surprisingly good sopranos with Sarah Coburn as Konstanze. She coloraturas!

This was her debut as Konstanze, and her "Maten Aller Arten" was powerful and lovely.  Also, her interpretation of the character was dignified and did not involve falling over weeping every other minute. The other standout in the cast was Kevin Burdette as Osmin.  Burdette was last seen singing the  Pirate King of Penzance.  There he was the brightspot outstaging his fellow singers, here he was a brightspot  lifting the cast around him rather than just outstripping them.  Belmonte and Pedrillo were stiffly attempting comedy and then Osmin entered with dancing and laughter and alcoholism, and suddenly everyone around him was more alive and engaged.  Someone cast this man in every Rossini opera ever written.  But please have him keep the comic mustachios.

Osmin unsuccessfully courts Blondchen

Blonde and Pedrillo were lovely provided they weren't on stage by themselves.  As long as they were with Osmin (which they mostly were) they were funny and engaging.  What should be a great moment, when Blondchen slaps Pedrillo for the sexist double standard of faithfulness, when he demands to know if she has managed to avoid sexual contact with men after being kidnapped and sold into slavery while making no promises of his own faithfulness she slaps him.  As she should. It wasn't that Pedrillo and Blondchen were boring, they just couldn't quite command the stage by themselves.  To be fair, Pasha Selim was probably far less interesting, I was just distracted by the gold nipples and didn't care. 

The set featured a gilt picture frame that separated the stage into two sections. For the actual abduction scene, the picture was covered by paper, which our escaping ladies had to cut through.  I quite enjoyed that.  For some scenes, a projection screen was in center stage back but this was used sparingly and in order to show the distant coast.  At the beginning, a projection told the story up till now (ladies kidnapped, Belmonte sailing around the coast of Turkey in pursuit) in the style of a silent film.  I am still unconvinced of the necessity of using video on an opera stage ever but this was a much less obtrusive and more theatrically well used projection than in any previous effort by the Atlanta Opera. 

Overall, there were no bad moments in this presentation, only some non-fabulous moments. The fact that Atlanta can present an opera with many fabulous moments in it is wonderful progress for this opera company.  I used to always describe their productions as adequate, but not fabulous, and now they just can't maintain fabulous through an entire production.  Progress!  Also lovely is that in this current prejudiced atmosphere in which we Americans are busy stigmatizing Muslims, ordering them off planes, discussing putting them in concentration camps, and sometimes vandalizing and burning down their places of worship, an American opera company is putting on Mozart's opera in which a Turkish ruler behaves with more honor than a Christian ruler.  It fits, I think, in the European tradition of telling tales about the honor of the Saracens in order to put Christian knights in their place, but it still works now.

Norma: Druids on Parade

I did it!  I finally saw Jamie Barton live!  For any unaware, La Barton is a rising star of opera from Armuchee, a tiny town in Ga which is pronounced with more r's than it is spelled.  I think I played French horn at a concert in the Armuchee Baptist church while I was in undergrad near that small town.  La Barton graduated with her bachelor's in the college across town from the college where I got my bachelor's.  After her school was taken over by the Southern Baptist Convention and started asking faculty to sign "lifestyle" statements which, amongst other things, condemning all people having sex in non-baptist approved away.  Jamie Barton responded to this by ordering the college to never use her name in their publicity materials (she is their most fabulous alum, so that is a problem for them) and writing a letter to the local small newspaper criticizing their actions.  In small town rural Georgia, standing up against powerful Christian organizations is not an easy thing to do.

For all this, I was completely prepared to love her in Norma no matter what, but no personal bias was needed. Jamie Barton sang hell and guts out of Adalgisa and outshone everyone else on stage, including her costar Angela Meade.  Which is not to say they didn't do a great and wonderful job together.

This was my first Bellini opera and I can state categorically that my life needs more Bellini.  That being said, the LA opera did not stage this with sufficiently pageantry.  There was one single set, a steeply raked stage which I hope is the reason for the tenors shoes having heels that significantly differed from one another in height. The only affect was a moon that rose slowly across the backdrop and turned red at the end.  This is an opera about druids under Roman rule, illicit liaisons between Gaul and Roman, self-immolation, hidden children, and Druid rites.  Just the Druid rites and self-immolation need something in the way of pageantry.  Otherwise we have nothing to focus on but the emotional angst and the plot.  While the singers brought the emotional angst, the plot makes even less sense than normal in opera.  Two things really stick out as strange.  First of all, that a public and publicly virginal priestess/princess figure could have not one, but two children without anyone finding out.  Second, that the Druids are living under a cruel Roman rule.  This is asserted without example, while the Druids are threatening unbelievers with death in chorus and having human sacrifices.  What exactly are the Romans doing that is worse here?  I know they prohibited the Druid religion, but again, human sacrifice.  As far as Imperialistic suppression of native cultures go, I'm not finding that one so very terrible. 

Jamie Barton is a wonderful young Adalgisa, all full of love for some Roman and admiration for her Druid priestess superior. Even despite the less than stellar acoustics of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in LA she shone.  She gets a little heavy in spots, but overall, she has a lovely voice and a stage presence that draws attention.  Even while Angela Meade is bringing the angst to her Norma, Jamie Barton makes her look a little hamfisted in her interpretation.   Meade does not make me believe in Norma's motivations.  I'll admit, it's not a particularly believable role, and she is trying, and no one is Callas onstage, but I wanted a little more from her. I also wanted so much more from the Druid chorus.  The dancers that accompanied Norma everywhere were nice and flowy, and always present to hand Norma a gong or a knife were a good touch, but they weren't, in themselves, sufficient pomp.  Pollione, at least, was believable as a villain.  

So overall, it could have been staged with so much more spectacle than it was.  But overall, it was delightful.  The singers made a plain production into an engaging spectacle.  

Pillage, Rape, and William Tell

Warnings: rape and opera

I recently saw two articles discussing a recent Royal Opera House production of William Tell, which garnered boos from the audience during the rape scene the director saw fit to insert. Both articles are noteworthy for their attempts to change the subject.  The one, by talking about booing itself, the other by talking about Placido Domingo, without actually even addressing his point about respect for the subject matter (there is no rape called for or required by the libretto), though it did give the director's rationale (that we have to experience the suffering of the oppressed Swiss). 

Myself, I have seen the opera Guillaume Tell once, as a livestream from the Bayerische Staatsoper, and was not overly impressed with the production.  Like too many of that opera house's productions, it was very dark lighting wise, minimalistic set-wise, and and boringly modern costume-wise. Particularly so on the boring costumes in this case as I am too shallow to believe in the revolutionary ardor of men in sweatervests.  Also, I felt betrayed upon realizing that the melody I know and recognize as the William Tell Overture is not the overture, it is merely the overture to the final act, which is not the same thing.  Despite reaching a point watching the opera where I was rather over the production and not paying much attention, I do not recall any reason why a rape scene would be supported by either the text or the score.  I do, however, recall people telling William not to disrupt a nice wedding with his gloomy speech about oppression, so I think the same narrative logic would apply to replacing a jaunty ballet with a rape scene. 

However, since I don't recall this opera that well, I consulted Andras Batta's Opera.  Batta says that this opera supports a variety of interpretations" which is the artistic equivalent of saying more research is needed--a phrase that is completely meaningless because it is never not true. However, the themes he identifies are those of heroism, an oppressed people rising to an occasion forced upon them, and also a very noble peasantry sort of pastoralism (my phrasing, not his).  This means that a rape scene really does not fit into the ballet, since an uncredited supernumerary who makes no further appearances cannot either have a blissful pastoral appearance or demonstrate heroism in the face of oppression.   One might, in fact, conclude that the raped woman has no narrative purpose other than to be a nameless and faceless victim against a cultural background in which women are seen as property of men, damage to which is damage to the men in their lives and often as justification for further violence.  Mr. Roof shooting a number of women because "you people rape our women" for example. It's a Conan the Barbarian "hear the lamentations of the women" type narrative that demonstrates crimes against women without ever giving women a voice.   Literally, in this case, since this is an uncredited actress with no lines, and no identification.  It sounds a bit unsavory.  I would probably have booed this production as well. 

Friday Fabulosity: Salome

I have not felt overly fabulous this week, but right now I am preparing to stream Salome from the Wiener Staatsoper, and I'm really quite excited about this.  Catherine Naglestad is singing the eponymous role, and based on youtube clips, she rocks.

Depends on What you Mean by Love: Atlanta Opera's Madama Butterfly

Madama Butterfly is not, in my opinion, Puccini's best effort musically, nor yet the easiest to stage interestingly.  Nor is the Atlanta Opera necessarily the best company for overcoming either difficulty.  Nonetheless, I was pleasantly surprised.  I had seen the opera once before, but on video, which in itself is usually not a great medium for opera, and the complete lack of stage presence of Pavarotti did nothing to enhance this video.  Also, at the time I was too young to pick up on the rather interesting points Puccini makes about racism, sexism, religion, and American imperialism.  So here, as an adult, wearing a houmongi kimono (because I am that fabulous and thematically appropriate) with a pretty purple (but pretied, because I am that incompetent) obi, I found myself despite expectations quite enjoying the Atlanta Opera's presentation of Madama Butterfly.  Dina Kuznetsova may not be the most spectacular soprano ever, but she is pretty voiced and full of appropriate pathos.  Nina Yoshida, as Suzuki, provided a strong-voiced counterpart, and together, the two of them had enough stage presence to carry us through the second act, which is spent largely by the two women alone in the house.  I would have liked more supernumeraries whenever possible to add visual interest to the stage, particularly instead of what the opera was doing, which was project (mostly cheesy) images on the projector backdrop.   I hate hate hate projector screens in a performance.  Momix is the only company I will make an exception for.  Everyone else should just stop and go back to making pretty patterns on the stage with the lights.  It's less cheesy.  And for the love of cheese, director, don't beat us over the head with imagery with projecting giant slow moving butterflies.  Unless you are planning to go full Cirque du Soleil and just shower the audience with tissue paper butterflies (which was actually kind of a fabulous end to Varekai). I'd be okay with that. 

The only thing I did like about the set, which was just Butterfly's house and garden, was that the ambient light changed  whenever people opened or shut the back walls (behind which was the projection screen).  That was a nice touch.  Costumes were good as well.  The opera also set the scene by having kimono and ikebana displays out in the lobby.  Well done them.  

As far as watching the opera as an adult, I was really surprised at the extent and viciousness with which Puccini attacks the U.S.  I was expecting more of the orientalism that was common at the time, but that's mostly background in this story in which all bad things come from America and adopting American customs and religion.  There's no subtlety whatsoever.  Our tenor, that cad Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, exults in his ability to buy a wife and a house forever but cancel both with a few weeks notice, and then poses awkwardly while declaiming "America, forever!"

As a side note, I am absolutely going to start assuming awkward poses and declaiming "America, forever!"

Our eponymous Butterfly starts out as a dignified old money but newly poor girl working as a geisha.  She has, however, been sold to this itinerant American seaman B. F. Pinkerton, and instead of taking the approach of her peers, who pragmatically remark that foreign husbands never come back, she is head over heels in love with her foreign husband.  To the point where she is abandoned by her family and friends because they see her as abandoning them by adopting the religion of her new husband.  After (and with a remarkably silly projection of the bloody sun of the Japanese flag with some Japanese characters superimposed) he denounces her, Butterfly's priest type uncle and most of the other Japanese characters depart to never be seen again.  This is more a projection of the way religion works in America than an accurate reflection of how religion usually works in Japan, but Puccini knows nothing of Japanese religion and just needs a plot contrivance to leave Butterfly alone playing at being an American wife. Well, one can see anger at someone ditching family in favor of condescending imperialists, so it's maybe not too unrealistic, this abandonment. Back to Butterfly's American homemaking.  She makes a good go of it to, as she proceeds to be the paragon of Debi Pearl (Of {Created,Preparing} to be His Helpmeet fame) style perfect wifely submission.  As in, Ms. Pearl actively advocates that young wives sit at home being bored and lonely as it will teach them to be more dependant on their husbands, and that is exactly what Butterfly does, without ever complaining. She apologizes to her new husband for bringing some of her own stuff to the marriage and never protests about how he refers to her as a toy and a butterfly, and basically infantilizes her as much as possible.  Butterfly even mixes in the worship of America with the worship of the American God (which is how the god of the Christians is referred to throughout.)  She has a giant (and period accurate) American flag displayed in her house, and welcomes her visitors to "an American household."  She insists that she is Mrs. Pinkerton in the face of all evidence that Pinkerton himself doesn't consider himself married, and dismisses the lack of prayer-answering from her new god as this god probably doesn't realize she's in Japan, but is still better than the "fat and lazy" Japanese gods.  

Butterfly's wifely submissions still don't break down even after a heartbreaking and lovely scene of her standing alone, dressed in her wedding finery in the cherry-blossomed moonlight, waiting for a love that never comes.  She never questions that her son will indeed  be better off in America (not sure why, since it seems being raised by Pinkerton would predispose the kid into growing up to be an ass).  She also has far too much of a very American Christian sense of shame about her old profession of geisha, so now without a husband to give her money, she has no means of support.  This also makes her a paragon of Pearl-style Christian womanhood.  

Fortunately for my sense of justice, the opera stages her suicide as a fuck you moment against Pinkerton.  As in, when he gives her some anguished singing she turns around, looks him in the eye, and stabs herself.  I don't even care (much) that traditional Japanese suicide for women is throat-cutting rather than gut-stabbing.  I'm just relieved the production didn't try to play it as Giselle type forgiveness for the abuser in the end.  Because really.  Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton should not be forgiven.  Nor should a culture in which wives are expected to be submissive in the face of abuse.  

Abductions with Musical Accompaniment: the Utah Opera's Die Entführung aus dem Serail

A night at the opera!  My first such since before Tanzania!  How delightful!  The plans were the best laid, and as such, ganged aft agley, as my lovely sister was stricken sickly and I drove myself the whole way accompanied only by music and guilt.  Nevertheless, the Utah opera was presenting Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and while I fully expected it to be rather sexist and rather racist, because Mozart, I also expected the music to be breathtakingly lovely, because Mozart.

Music-wise, I was not disappointed.  The orchestra was fantastic.  I made friends with a knowledgeable lady sitting beside me who said that the Utah orchestra and opera are now one entity, so we were hearing the Utah Symphony Orchestra.  They played the heart and soul, not to mention the blood and the guts, out of that music.  A thousand bravissimis to the orchestra.  Seriously.  I was swept away from the first notes of one of Mozart's most kick-butt overtures.

I was also swept away by the entrance of the tenor, because he was wearing a really sparkly purple waistcoat and pretty gold shoes.  Between his costume, his sweet voice, and the orchestra, he made Mozart tenor arias not boring!  This is an accomplishment.  Then he stopped singing and I lost some of my enchantment. Entführung is, of course, a singspiel, with lots and lots of spoken dialogue which, presumably for reasons, was rendered into English while the sung pieces remained in German, which made the transition between singing and speaking very jarring indeed.  To make matters worse, throughout the presentation, several of the cast were having projection issues, but since I was close enough to see their mouths moving and just couldn't hear them, the general impression was that they were singing in dubbed-in German.

To continue, Pedrillo, in a nice green, was adequate, but not fabulous.  It seemed as if he wasn't quite fully committed to what he was doing on stage.  He did achieve full commitment and a beautiful moment in act three with his comic serenade, but until then he was rather shown to a disadvantage at having to share with stage with, first, Osmin, and later Blonde.  Osmin was wonderful.  Gustav Andreassen is not only a great bass (with a few projection issues at the beginning, but most of them were having those.  The orchestra was fully committed to their dynamics and the singers couldn't always keep up), he is the sort to dance about doing headslides while gleefully singing about executing people.  He was also in pretty red (stereotypical, but oh well) Turkish-ish robes and pretty red shoes.

The costumes were all rather wonderful, actually, with the notably notable exception of Konstanze's.  It's cake-topper pink poof, with presumably several layers of Crinoline of Doom beneath, and topped with a wig that looked like a toy poodle might have died on her head.

Konstanze, with the head of the Pasha taking up space in the foreground.
The Pasha is struggling to have real facial expressions. 

At least she made up for it by being unable to project in the lower registers and becoming unpleasantly strident in the upper registers.  A lady sitting next to me who is more familiar with the Utah Opera assures me that Celena Shafer is normally quite good and pretty-voiced, and was just having an off night.  Nevertheless, between her vocal failings and her one acting trick of jerkily bending forward with every dramatic phrase (for emotion?) I was not impressed.  It would have been really funny if Konstanze's music in any way supported anything but tragedy and tragic resolve, but it doesn't, and the wonderful wonderful orchestra continued to be fully committed to performing the heart and soul out of the music.  Her scenes with the Pasha just made all her problems worse.  The artistic director, who deserves all credit for having the surname of McBeth, saw fit to cast himself in the strictly spoken role of Pasha Selim, where he demonstrated that for all his directorial prowess, he has almost no personality whatsoever on a stage and attempts to make up for it with a sparkling lavender and gold robe.  Far be it from me to ever discourage a man from standing about in a sparkling lavender and gold robe, but between his standing and and Konstanze's oddly jerky emoting, the tableaux created between them was approximately as compelling as a school of jellyfish with tutus.  Appropriately enough, his entrance was hailed by a chorus whose members all had remarkably bad posture.  Back to complaining about Celena Shafer's Konstanze:  she really bugged me during "Martern Aller Arten," which is a very powerful piece of music that I happen to love, that she performed so very poorly.  She got through it, though noticeably running out of breath at points.  I mean, sure, it's hard, but that's what coloraturas are paid for.  During the final phrases, she was on her knees clutching at the legs of the Pasha.  No.  Just no.  The final phrases are defiant, not supplicatory.  Listen to the music!   This piece is when Konstanze stops being whiny and possibly in love with the Pasha (which is hard to understand with this Pasha) and declares she will die rather than love him.  Any supplicating has to take place in the middle of the aria  and then only when she promises that the Pasha will be rewarded by heaven for having mercy.  When she is declaring that she will suffer torture and die, she should not be draped beseechingly on the Pasha or lying on the floor.  I am officially over her.  Actually, that's a lie.  Later on I ended up being fascinated, because Belmonte gives Konstanze the portrait of her that he has been carrying around with him.  I think to demonstrate how devoted he has been, but she spends the rest of the scene holding onto the portrait, alternately staring at it beatifically and clutching it to her breast.  She is doing this to a portrait of herself.  The unbridled narcissism was inspiring.

Amy Owen, singing Blonde, was significantly more fabulous.  She was great. Her opening aria sounded like she was working a little too hard, but ever after that she had a light and lovely tone.  Where her colleague soprano, was boring if not annoying, she easily held my attention and won my love.  Her Blonde is the type to play on swings, fondle the biceps of the supernumeraries, take off her shoes and dance barefoot, and lecture Osmin while standing on a chair.   Quick, the Shakespeare signal! Someone needs to compare her to a summer's day!  Also, I wish I could make some bilingual pun with "Aupres de ma Blonde" here, but I don't have the language skills.   Anyway, to repeat, she was great.  Especially when Pedrillo and Belmonte demand assurance of faithfulness from women who have been kidnapped by people to whom consent isn't really a thing, Blonde responds by slapping Pedrillo.  That is exactly the response that deserved.  Konstanze just gets mopey.

A slap and indignation is also not how I was expecting a Mozart opera to handle that.  Given the unapologetic misogyny of say, Cosi fan Tutti with regards to faithfulness, I was pleasantly surprised.  While I'm on the subject, Entfuhrung isn't quite as overtly racist as I was expecting either.  I mean, sure, the whole set up is "these evil dark/Islamic people have taken 'our' women" but by and large the Muslims get a fairly fair shake.  As is historically accurate (well, maybe not with the Ottoman Turks, my memory is shaky here, I think I'm actually thinking more the Arab leaders in the Crusades, e.g. Saladin, but probably to Mozart & co, Arabs/Turks/Moors/Persians are a sort of homogeneous conglomerate of Otherness), a Muslim leader demonstrates far better ethics than his European Christian counterparts, and that rather makes up for the icky "let's get the Muslim drunk despite his religion, ha ha ha!" scene.  In fact, Osmin rather transcends all attempts in the libretto to make him look foolish here, though that is mostly because Andreassen is such a phenomenally better actor than his colleagues on stage who are attempting to make him look theatrically foolish.  There is a giant and prominent crescent and star on the gates to the Pasha's garden, which is rather weird, since it's analogous to Christians just building steeples on the roofs of their homes, but meh, it's Utah.

It was a good night at the opera.  It wasn't the level of opera of, say, the Houston Grand Opera, but it was fun and entertaining despite some flaws.  Honestly, it would be worth it just to hear that music performed with such understanding and commitment by that orchestra.  Such music will cover a multitude of sins.

Malaria: The Least Poetic Disease

The anti-malaria initiative people working in Tanzania are continuing their valuable work of posting pictures to Facebook, advertising their Facebook events to Americans, and asking Americans to like their Facebook work.  It's a vast circle of awareness raising for and by Americans.

Ignoring the point that if the U.S. were reported on the way it reports on Africa, we'd be asked to raise awareness for the poor Americans dying of cancer, obesity, heart disease, and HIV, Facebook campaigns that appear to not have any actual goal other than generating likes do nothing to help malaria be more than the most boring of all deadly diseases.

Other deadly diseases are immortalized in song and story.  Most famously the Black Death, which spawned a Poe story, The Decameron, nursery rhymes, vampire superstitions, and an abiding place in the imagination.  Since a version of the plague is still extant in several places in the world, carried on squirrels and pigeons, I have had occasion to discuss the possibility of getting the plague.  I'm not in favor, but a friend would be willing just to be able to tell people he'd had the Black Death.  I'm not willing to go quite that far for the conversational advantage, but I sympathize.

More recently, tuberculosis is the preferred disease of the opera heroine and quite a few mysterious and brave anime heroes, e.g Ukitake, suffer from a disease which, while not specified, causes periodic coughing of blood.

HIV/AIDS gets artistic treatment in Rent cribbed straight from the tuberculin heroine of Puccini.  Also not opera cribbings in the form of critically acclaimed cinema, e.g. Angels in America and The Hours.  

Malaria has, as far as I can recall offhand, a mention by Laura Ingalls Wilder (who refers to it as fever and ague) and a cameo in Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible.  Neither literary sketch of malaria has quite the effect on the imagination of Mimi or Violetta dying of tuberculosis, much less the partying nobles all succumbing to the plague at the entrance of the Red Death.

This is weird.  The anopheles mosquito is the deadliest animal in the world, and malaria is basically not completely preventable by, well, anything that doesn't completely destroy the environment. The U.S.  DDTed hell and guts out of the landscape and drained the wetlands to get rid of malaria.  Other than that, the futility of defending against a non-detectable mosquito ought to be at least slightly interesting, artistically.  But it's not.  Maybe if Manon died of malaria in the swamps of Louisiana that would help, but frankly, I love that she dies in the desert right outside New Orleans.
So.  Making malaria at least as interesting as Ebola, which makes the news for killing far fewer people than malaria has.  Any obvious way to do that?  Am I missing obvious great works of art that feature malaria?

Zounds! Opera now has Robots!

This news excites me extremely.  We have taken a step closer to the robot apocalypse and now we can be sure that our arts will be safe under our new robot overlords.

Until the Diva Sings

Sometimes I encounter articles that just make me want to beat my head against the wall.  I have heard from an apocryphal source that this activity burns 100 calories/hour, if done vigorously.  This  interview with Danielle de Niese is one such.  In this, she talks about the 'traditional stereotype' of opera singers as fat ladies, and claims that 'opera is just like any other popular music.'

First of all, this stereotype of the opera singer as a non-glamorous performer is simply not based in reality.  Back in the early days of the moving picture, Geraldine Farrar was a beloved silver screen star with name recognition on par with Rudolph Valentino.  Of course, at the time, opera singers were the popular singers, if for no other reason than that they were the people getting recorded back in the earliest days of the phonograph.  And as recently as the 50s, we have icons like Maria Callas, of whom Camille Paglia claims stood in as a modern substitute for ancient fertility goddesses. We should all feel free to disagree with Camille Paglia, but La Divina did have her fame, fortune, and audience worship.

This isn't to say that it's not a good thing for an opera singer to speak out against rampant stereotyping.  Stereotypes are bad.  I would, however, prefer it if La de Niese was more accepting as fatness as a thing rather than being so eager to equate opera with Beyoncé.  The article actually does address that larger body types in opera do happen, with a large school of thought that says this is necessary for the voice.  With a quote from Dame Kiri te Kanawa and an acknowledgment that some opera singers do face fat discrimination.  Which is awful.  People who create beauty are beautiful.  I deeply believe this.  Our opera singers represent beauty in a glittering beautiful staged world, and they are beautiful.  I am going to take a minute here to share my current fangirl crush and smalltown Georgia lady, Jamie Barton, kicking ass at the Cardiff singer of the world competition.  You cannot tell me she is not beautiful and glamorous.

At least the other quoted people in the article are both more sensible, and have more power over an opera production than this diva.  Kasper Holten, director of the royal opera, says "it’s not so much about being super slim and looking good on a superficial level, as having charisma and the ability to add colour to their voice,” he said. “If they feel good about their body and are comfortable, they can express themselves on stage.”  Yes.  That.  

Back to La de Niese's statement that opera is 'just like any other music' and her performances 'could be Beyoncé; show.'  No.  If I wanted to go to a Beyoncé show, I would be going to Beyoncé shows, but I don't.  I am the person who shows up at an opera house in an evening gown and long gloves and orders champagne for the intermissions.  Beyond a glamorous ambience, I go to opera because I want to hear glorious music that has withstood the test of time, performed by people spend their lives training their voices to high levels of technical ability.  When the non-operatic popular singers can sing bel canto with a full orchestra and not necessarily microphones, I may agree that opera is just like popular music, but until then, I will maintain that the coloratura soprano performing Mozart is superior musically to Beyoncé and company.  Viva Sumi Jo.  

La de Niese is correct on one account, she correctly points out that opera was originally for the masses, and like the majority of human art, is "about love, lust, relationship, betrayal; all things we can relate to today."  I would probably have just said that opera is about sex and death, but this works too.  She is also correct in that people don't necessarily know how to approach opera, or classical music in general, really.  I have noticed that some people, not familiar with the genre, come to opera not knowing anything about it, sit in pious churchlike, noninteractive silence expecting to be magically transported to heights of classical music-induced ecstasy, and then complain the music is boring.  One would really never approach any other kind of music this way.  To get back to the Beyoncé comparison, I'm assuming all her fans show up at her concerts knowing everything she is going to sing very familiarly and fully prepared to sing along.  They also know personal details about Beyoncé and feel a connection with her.  As humans, we like things we are familiar with and opera is no exception.  Most people will probably like it better when they know the music and know things about the composers.  

I think La de Niese is probably trying to do something good, but I think she is going about it the wrong way.  Enough with the fat shaming, and let's have a little more respect for the musical excellence of opera as compared with the contemporary popular singers of the U.S. Even as a marketing strategy, this is not good.  Opera is not good because it is just like something else, it is good on its own merits.  

Presenting an Opera Composed by a Woman! Finally!

The Washington National Opera is staging Jeanine Tesori's The Lion, the Unicorn, and Me. This is the first time ever that this opera house has presented an opera with a female composer.  Good on them!  I hope it's good.  Broadwayworld reviews and likes it.

Necromantic Sex and Unborn Children Singing to Batman

Because I'm stuck a few km to the left of center of nowhere here, my live opera experiences now arrive courtesy of the Bavarian Staatsoper, which streams live and free out of Munich.  Turing bless them.  If they would offer sufficiently low definition streaming options that I could have enjoyed their productions in Tanzania, Turing would bless them even more.  Yesterday they presented the Angsty Strauss' Die Frau Ohne Schatten.  I knew nothing about it prior to watching it.  Musically, it's sort of meh.  I've never been particularly moved by the instrumental music of R. Strauss, and I don't find that his vocal lines add anything memorable.  It's not bad, it's just that there's nothing in it that I remember five minutes after hearing it.  Plotwise, it's kind of like a cooler and more surreal version of The Magic Flute but without the awesome music, and instead, even more misogyny.  The libretto blatantly and inescapably presents a moral that women who can't have or don't want children are less than human or evil, respectively.  During one of the intermissions, this was actually addressed on camera by the director (I think.  I missed half the intermission talks due to needing to get drinks and snacks.  It was a four hour opera.  I needed the breaks.) who at least recognized, and attempted to mitigate, this aspect of the opera.  His take on the misogyny was to say that since this was an opera that came out of Germany around the time of the Great War, we can interpret the opera as a call for a continuation of life after the most destructive war then known rather than as a call for women as breeding stock.  I don't know that the text supports this or that this mitigated message really came through in the production, but I do appreciate the production team for trying.  It's not their fault that all the operas of the canon are written by (and largely for) men.  If anyone out there can write an opera, message me and I'll write a libretto and we can work on fixing this.

Anyway, the opera.  We open in the spirit world, where a nurse is creepily giving an injection of some sort to a woman in a ballgown.  Through expository recitative, we learn that the ball-gowned woman is the half-human daughter of the undefined Keikobad, and she doesn't have a shadow. What this Keikobad or the spirit world is, we don't actually know, but it seems vaguely reminiscent of Faerie, but everyone wears formal clothes and hangs out in a creepily lit room with a giant aquarium. The half-human woman is also the Kaiserin, because the Kaiser was hunting and encountered her when she was magically in the form of a white gazelle and they have gotten along swimmingly ever since except for she can't have children (the euphemistic meaning of a shadow here).   This is bad and also BAD because falcons show up, wander about surrealistically, and portentously portent that because the woman casts no shadow, the Kaiser is going to turn to stone in three more days.  The Kaiser doesn't know about this and wanders off to hunt, because that's all he ever seems to do.  The Kaiserin asks the nurse to help her get a shadow so her lover won't turn to stone and they toddle off to the human world to get one.

Scene switch to a shabby laundromat, the abode of Barak the dyer and his three stereotypical brothers: a man in plaid pants and a sweater vest, a blonde man with lots of eyeliner and a t-shirt I'm not hip enough to understand, and a man with long dreaded hair.  The brothers are just freeloaders, and they dislike the dyer's wife.  The feeling is mutual.  The dyer's wife is not so down with her Angel in the House role.  She doesn't want children, doesn't like sharing her marital home with her husband's brothers (who did wake her up fighting with each other for a piece of bread), and is generally just unhappy. So when the Nurse and the Empress show up and the Nurse offers her blonde hair, freedom from childbirth, and a hot guy in briefs and headphones(and people think I'm kidding when I say I watch opera for the fanservice) she is ready to make a deal.

Story character 101: avoid making weird deals with complete strangers.

Nevertheless, the wife (she never gets a name or more of a title than wife) offers her shadow in exchange for 3 days of service from the Kaiserin and the Nurse plus wealth and hot guys in briefs and headphones.  In the meantime, before giving up her "shadow" she confesses her distaste for her husband's bed, and so the dyer and his wife get separate beds while the creepy chorus of unborn children sings in the background.  That night, the unhappily married couple go to separate beds without ever talking about their unhappiness, and the night watch, instead of an all's well, serenade the city with a chorus on the joys of matrimony.

You spouses, who lie lovingly in each other's arms, You are the bridge spanning the chasm on which the dead come back into life.

Married people sex: it raises the dead.

I realize that I am an evil feminazi opposing traditional marriage here, but desire for children or lack thereof should really be something discussed before marriage, and if there is no desire for such, that's what contraceptives are for.  Do I need to do a condom demonstration for opera characters?  If it's a problem with the sex, there are conversations, books, and for some cases, doctors for that.  Not that this is probably a marriage based on equality since the nameless wife is identified as a beggar's daughter, so she probably has no options other than marriage at the terms of her husband, who, she comments, wants his dinner and his bed whenever he comes home from work.

Whatever.  The awkward state of their marriage continues for the contractual three days, during which time the wife angsts over, but ultimately refuses, the gift of the hot guy in briefs and headphones. But then her husband brings the entire children's choir home for dinner without warning, thinking this will make her happy, and she snaps and screams at him, including a fanciful account of the awesome sex with the hot man in briefs and headphones.  He nearly kills her with a sword he has from somewhere, but then everyone thinks better of their passions (how unoperatic!) and goes to bed.

They all wake up in part of the spirit world to await the judgment of Keikobad, who, like Sarastro before him, is coming across as petty and sadistic, as the dyer and the wife wait miserably in a giant waiting room while dead horses and soldiers float slowly past the windows.  While they stew in their unhappiness, a messenger of Keikobad shows up, calls the Nurse a bitch, and tells her that while it was the will of the Keikobad that the Kaiserin run to the human world, the Nurse is cast out of the spirit world for failing to protect the Kaiserin and keep her in the spirit world.  This is illogic of first order pettiness.  But the opera continues and Keikobad ends up deciding that everyone has overcome their trials and gets rewarded with (in the case of the women) their own shadows, and (in the case of the men) women who can make babies.  The Kaiser doesn't have to turn into stone after all, and the wife is going back to being a dutiful wife.  Huzzah?  The creepy chorus of unborn children arrives on stage to play shadow puppet games on the back wall of the stage and sing about happiness.  Meanwhile, giant animated images of (I swear I am not making this up) Batman, Jesus, Gandhi, King Kong, Marilyn Monroe, Sigmund Freud (I think), and Buddha are projected onto the walls of the set.  To demonstrate that I am not making this up, I have a screenshot.

I am suffering from a complete failure of intellect and imagination to explain this cast of characters in the context of the opera.  Or, frankly, any context whatsoever.  Darling readers, please tell me why and how this makes any sense.

Weathering the November in my Soul

The San Francisco opera has recently presented the opera Moby Dick, by Jake Heggie, and PBS kindly offered free streaming.  It was a snowy drear November Sunday, so I watched it.  I've never actually read the book, nor do I intend to, but it seems good opera fodder, being the tale of an essentially stupid quest spearheaded by a selfish egotist and almost everyone dies.  Actually, because of that, I had high hopes for it being the next (or, in my opinion, first) great American opera.  After watching it, well, it's really no worse than any other American opera.  Okay, so the composer does that annoying thing where he acts like structure just isn't important, and pleasing harmonies and cadences are just so last century, so the music ends up sounding like one long discordant recitative.  He does, however, discover motifs (or maybe themes, I'm not really clear on the difference) near the end of the first act.  Three of them!  Only fancy! With chord resolution, even!

What kept me watching was the incredibly wonderful staging of the SF opera, which magnificence foiled even the film crew, who were doing that thing where they try to zoom in on only parts of the opera at any given time, when a stage production is designed to be seen as a whole and from a distance.  Seriously, the staging was that amazing.  Normally the stage was just a ship's deck, but with clever use of lights and probably a projector the stage could become awash with waves while white light outlines of boats took shape and moved around the back of the stage.  The singers would perch on seats on the back wall itself while the boats took shape around them, creating a glorious illusion.  When the boats broke apart, the singers, tumbled down dramatically from their perches.   The cabin boy, after being briefly lost at sea (why was the cabin boy on a whale boat in the first place?), swims across a sea of blue light on wires. Wonderful!  When a whale was being rendered, a giant whale shape hung over the stage against a fiery moving backdrop (projection?) like a door to hell.  My only disappointment in the staging was that Moby Dick never actually shows up more than as a giant projected eye, which is kind of like having The Ring without a dragon onstage.

Plotwise it's what I expected.  Our megalomaniac tenor captain is fierce with a complete disregard for human life and a tendency to wave muskets at his almost mutinous first mate, Starbuck, who understandably thinks this whole white whale obsession is dangerous and stupid.   Greenhorn/Ishmael is kind of stupid and inexperienced.  Queegueg has a tendency toward chanting and sprinkling glitter about.  The crew engage are largely an indistinguishable mass, but sometimes they brawl over racial tensions.  Pip the cabin boy appears to be everyone's favorite with lots of drollery and a tambourine, though he incomprehensibly goes insane after his brief experience overboard.  And of course, no one gets out alive except for Greenhorn/Ishmael on his coffin.

There's an emphasis on religion throughout, but as unfocused as the music, which may be in itself a point.  The unfocused emphasis, that is, I really hope the music is not supposed to make a point.  Greenhorn/Ishmael starts out complaining about Abrahamic religions in response to Queequeg's chanting, telling him that Lents and Ramadans are pointless and keeping him (Greenhorn/Ishmael) awake.  Since Queequeg is identified as a pagan, which in this case seems to mean non-Abrahamic religion, this is a little odd.  Whatever.  After Queequeg rescues Pip from the ocean, Greenhorn/Ishmael decides to convert to his "pagan" friend's religion.  Starbuck, meanwhile, is dogmatically insisting on what things the Christian God does or does not approve of, which, conveniently, all line up with what Starbuck does or does not approve of. Ahab baptizes a harpoon in the name of Satan (who has started caring about whales?  Did I miss something theologically?) but then almost discovers humanism when he looks at Starbuck and says looking into the eyes of a man is better than gazing upon God.

Oddly, everyone describes whales as very dangerous, or in Ahab's case, the terrors of the deep.  Since the whales are only dangerous to those who are provoking them by sticking harpoons in them in order to render their fat and make money, this seems disingenuous.   I'm sympathetic to people who need to make money, but not to people who just make war on whales.  Seriously, Moby is described as killing lots of people but all of these people were trying to kill him first.

Moby Dick is a decent enough way to spend a dreary snowy day, but it's not music that I will remember or want to hear again.  Try again, American composers.

Many Happy Returns, Giuseppe. Viva Verdi!

200 Years ago today, Giuseppe Verdi was born to become one of the greatest opera composers of all time.  The first opera I ever saw live was actually his Aida, at the Verona Arena.  It was glorious.  Gigantic silk elephants floating overhead, a giant flame thrower behind the stage to punctuate dramatic moments with 50 ft gouts of flame, Hui Hei singing her heart out in "O Patria Mia," it was amazing.  Viva Verdi!

The Grand March, just because it's fabulous. 

Since then, I've cried at La Traviata in New Orleans and been deeply disturbed by Rigoletto in Houston. NPR calls Verdi operas a "vigorous soundtrack to human nature."  I'd agree with that.  Once again, viva Verdi!

In Which Another One Bites the Dust

The New York City opera is closing.  This is just sad.  Also, now I will probably never be able to see the operatic saga of Anna Nicole Smith, which sounds fantastic.  It's not like we can just stick opera in a museum somewhere and go look at it at our leisure.

In happier news, there is a dinosaur on the international space station.

Also, as one of my darling readers informed me, Terminator 2 is being re imagined as a Shakespeare compilation.

But I am still not going to be able to watch Anna Nicole operatically.