Nov. 5th, 2007 10:04 am
Woodwinds and wuda
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muckefuckSo I need a good alias for a friend who's a journalist, language freak, and opera queen. He happens to be an ethnic Korean raised by Scandihoovians, which means I'm playing with names like "Ip Sŏnsaeng" and "Seoulveig", but none of them are really clicking. Probably best to abandon that angle altogether and take the opera route. Suggestions?[*] (I also need to keep better track of the names I do pick, since it was only by browsing past Halloween posts that I remembered coming up with "Diego" for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
monshu's across-the-hall neighbour.)
In any case, turns out he was also at Friday's performance. Not only that, Giulio Cesare is one of his all-time favourite works, so I was happy to hear his take on it. He didn't sound as disappointed by the gimmicky nature of the Glynebourne staging as my brother and I were (at one point I found myself asking Aren't the dancers doing Mel Brooks' French Mistake?), but he did concede that having Cleopatra's final aria/dance number be as silly as her first was a misstep. After all, she's the only character that really shows any development throughout the whole damn thing (all four freakin' hours of it)--to the degree thatbunj really felt the opera should be named for her instead. Yes, I know having any at all was a pretty progressive move on Handel's part, but there's only so much I can do to put myself into the pointy shoes of an 18th-century operagoer.
I have to admit, I felt misdirected, since seeing his august name automatically led me to expect the Ides of March, "Et tu, Brute?", and all that. The fuller title, Giulio Cesare in Egitto would've remedied that, as would reading a libretto or something beforehand, but I prefer to know as little about the plot as I can when seeing an opera for the first time--keeps me on my toes. In this case, that still didn't prevent me from dozing off, but at least I was able to push it to the second act. I can't blame the singers or the production staff for that, just my own unaccustomedness to seeing a long opera on the heels of a full work week.
I can't remember ever seeing an opera before that had not one, not two, but three alto castrato roles, plus a trouser part for Pompey's hot-headed son. That plus the physicality of the martial roles--Tolomeo does a backflip! Achilla stickfights!--got me thinking: This work predates the birth of Peking opera (from pre-existing forms) by only a few decades. It's odd to think that there were such aesthetic parallels on opposite sides of the world for a time before naturalism seized the imagination of the Europeans and changed everything. (I would be another century and a half before the same would happen in China.)
[*] First person to make a Madame Butterfly reference gets the sword. Try me.
monshu's across-the-hall neighbour.)In any case, turns out he was also at Friday's performance. Not only that, Giulio Cesare is one of his all-time favourite works, so I was happy to hear his take on it. He didn't sound as disappointed by the gimmicky nature of the Glynebourne staging as my brother and I were (at one point I found myself asking Aren't the dancers doing Mel Brooks' French Mistake?), but he did concede that having Cleopatra's final aria/dance number be as silly as her first was a misstep. After all, she's the only character that really shows any development throughout the whole damn thing (all four freakin' hours of it)--to the degree that
bunj really felt the opera should be named for her instead. Yes, I know having any at all was a pretty progressive move on Handel's part, but there's only so much I can do to put myself into the pointy shoes of an 18th-century operagoer.I have to admit, I felt misdirected, since seeing his august name automatically led me to expect the Ides of March, "Et tu, Brute?", and all that. The fuller title, Giulio Cesare in Egitto would've remedied that, as would reading a libretto or something beforehand, but I prefer to know as little about the plot as I can when seeing an opera for the first time--keeps me on my toes. In this case, that still didn't prevent me from dozing off, but at least I was able to push it to the second act. I can't blame the singers or the production staff for that, just my own unaccustomedness to seeing a long opera on the heels of a full work week.
I can't remember ever seeing an opera before that had not one, not two, but three alto castrato roles, plus a trouser part for Pompey's hot-headed son. That plus the physicality of the martial roles--Tolomeo does a backflip! Achilla stickfights!--got me thinking: This work predates the birth of Peking opera (from pre-existing forms) by only a few decades. It's odd to think that there were such aesthetic parallels on opposite sides of the world for a time before naturalism seized the imagination of the Europeans and changed everything. (I would be another century and a half before the same would happen in China.)
[*] First person to make a Madame Butterfly reference gets the sword. Try me.
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Tolomeo makes a good alias, considering how much he likes the opera. Plus, it's a cool name.
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