What's opera, dog?

In response to 0595's most recent comment in my journal, I present a list of Ten Opera Plots Which Do Not Suck at All:

1. Mourning Becomes Electra Librettist: Henry Butler. Euripides Electra, but set in New England--by Eugene fucking O'Neill. 'Nuff said.
2. Susannah. Librettist: Carlisle Floyd. Young woman living in the hollers of Tennessee driven mad by the lascivious hypocrisy of a travelling prearcher and the narrow-minded prejudice of her community. (Yeah, it's depressing; do I have to quote Buggs Bunny here?)
3. Ariadne auf Naxos. Librettist: Hugo von Hofmannsthal. (Pretty much anything he did for Strauss was pure gold--and when Strauss tried to go it without him, it really really showed.) Rich man throws a big bash at which he's going to have two operas, a serious drama about the abandonment of Ariadne and a light diversion from a commedia dell'arte troupe. But dinner goes over and the fireworks won't wait, so he orders the two operas combined into one. The first half is all behind-the-scenes wrangling, the second is the opera itself--a pure delight, as Ariadne's moping is repeatedly interrupted by Zerbinetta's coquettish attempts to cheer her up.
4. Liška Bystrouška (The cunning little vixen) Librettist: Leoš Janáček. A young vixen is captured by a woodsman, escapes, finds a mate, raises a mess of young, and is shot to death. Breathtakingly simple and told without a hint of sentimentality.
5. A Wedding Librettist: Arnold Weinstein. Old and new money collide on the North Shore in this adaptations of a Robert Altmann film. Adultery, hypocrisy, drugs, homosexual subtext--it's all out there, but it also hangs together well.
6. Mefistofele Librettist: Arrigo Boito. More a series of highlights from the work by Goethe than a truly coherent sequence of scenes, probably because it was so drastically recut after its disastrous premiere, but much truer overall to the source material than Gounod's take on it. Also contains a devil-worship scene, which I think should be a must for any opera.
7. Der Freischütz Librettist: Friedrich Kind. Contains the mother of all devil-worship scenes as a huntsman sells his soul to obtain the magic bullets which will deliver him the girl of his dreams through victory in a shooting competition. Trouble ensues, however, when the fix is found out.
8. Così fan tutte Librettist: Lorenzo da Ponte. Two men bragging about the faithfulness of their sweethearts are convinced to put them to the test by disguising themselves and attempting to woo each other's partner. All fun and games, right? Not quite, as everyone discovers to their cost (including the audience, if the damn thing is staged right).
9. Пиковая Дама (Queen of Spades) Librettist: Modest Tchaikovsky. An avaricious young soldier seduces an ingénue in order to learn her mother's gambling secrets, accidentally killing the old woman in the process. Of course he comes to a bad end--it's Pushkin after all!
10. Falstaff Librettist: Arrigo Boito. Sir John Falstaff thinks it a simple thing to seduce the merry wives of Windsor, but they've got a plan to cook his hash! I'd say borrowing from Shakespeare was almost cheating if it weren't (a) plain that it wasn't his plots which made him a great dramatist and (b) so many others attempts hadn't fallen flat, including Verdi himself when he and a couple of hacks took on Macbeth years earlier.

Name of the Day

Shulamith Godwothon Pindar-Cohn