Seventeen years of yawning and sore necks

[muckefuck]

Ugh! All that sleep night before last, and I still could barely keep my eyes open for the last third of Così. Sure, Davis' direction was a bit more sluggish in the second act than the first, but that wasn't it. I've simply run up against a fundamental flaw in my constitution.

I feel I really haven't been doing justice to the operas this season, some of which have been quite spectacular. Dialogues des Carmélites actually brought me to tears, which is something a production hasn't done since I don't know when. It stirred up so many interesting issues related to religion, martyrdom, persecution, and the like that I was intimidated out of tackling it. For one reason or another, I've been too tired or too distracted to feel up to the challenge.

Così fan tutte is intimidating for another reason: With it, my exposure to opera comes full circle. Nuphy thought that Aida at the Caracalla was my first live opera experience, but several months before that I got student tickets to the Berliner Staatsoper during a university-sponsored outing to Berlin and the opera was Così.

It was a difficult introduction. One of bunj's co-workers was dragged to Così as a Valentine's Day surprise and his wife e. was lamenting what a rough experience it must've been for the first-time opera-goer: A three-hour running time, a complex plot, and a happy ending in name only. On top of all that, I couldn't follow the plot because the Staatsoper didn't have supertitles 17 years ago and none of our penurious party had bought a libretto. (To make things worse for the rest of us, two of our international band didn't need to; they were native Italian speakers, and they were laughing together the entire time.)

Still, it was Mozart, and I could enjoy the beauty of his music even if I didn't have the slightest idea what was going on onstage. (Ironically, he is--or was at the time--the only prominent exception to the rule that operas in Germany are performed in the local rather than the original language. Any other composer and I would've had a fighting chance!) I went on to catch two more operas that year, the aforementioned Aida as well as Berg's Wozzeck in Basel. I probably got the most out of the last one despite the foreignness of the music because it was the only one in which I could understand what the hell was going on. (Not only could I follow the dialogue, but I'd read the source material.)

How did Così 1990 compare to Così 2007? I remember so little of the first one, it would be hard to say. Now that I don't need to, I can make out more of the Italian, (e.g. despite Allen's horrible accent, I clearly heard him pronounce "Io sono uomo di pace!") even though I still don't understand it nearly as well as I feel maybe I ought to. Thanks to Nuphy, I have more of a clue musically--that time, I know I didn't catch such important details as the fact that the leads are more classically matched vocally (tenor with soprano, baritone with mezzo) when they're wooing each other's beloveds.

From what little I remember of the previous production, it was fairly traditional. (I'm sure if it had taken place in an airport departure lounge or the bridge of the Enterprise, I would've remembered.) Last night's departed mainly by being set on the eve of the Great War, which added more poignancy to the young swains' march off to battle at the end. I have no idea which had the better cast. The Lyric's was perfectly adequate, despite being filled with home-grown talent rather than names known round the world. In all likelihood, though, that was probably the case at Berlin as well.

Comments

[wwidsith.livejournal.com]

So there is a language you don't understand! There's hope for the rest of us yet..

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Any language is hard to understand when screeched by Middle American sopranos.