9/23/12

Nabucco Post!

It’s time for more MN Opera blogging!

The 50th season of the MN Opera starts off with Nabucco, one of Verdi’s early, but well known works.  It follows the plight of the Jews as they are assaulted, conquered, and subsequently exiled from their homeland by the Babylonian King Nabucco (aka, Nebuchadnezzar).

The good is all very very good.  It’s stunningly beautiful.  Really.  In every way.  The music, the costumes, the sets—if you’ve seen what Hollywood thinks operas look like, this is it.  It’s elaborate, and colorful (so colorful, I’ll talk about that more in a sec), and there are so many people on stage, and all of them are in these lush costumes.  It’s unlike all of the other MN Operas I’ve seen in that the set doesn’t have the minimalist aesthetic that they’ve gone for in the past—there is nothing minimal about this set.   The costume design, though, calls back to the stark color symbolism and minimalist design that the MN Opera does well—with the Jewish folk all in whites and the Babylonians in bright jewel tones.  The dichotomy works well.

And the music.  It’s so, so good.  Here.  Listen to this: 


It’s meta (and I love me some meta in my fiction).  I mean, this opera is…not only the opera Nabucco, with the plot outlined above, but it is the opera Nabucco as performed and contextualized by the singers and audiences of 1842.  Complete with “tech” folk like the gaslight guy—a fancy man who lights the gas lights at the foot of the stage before the performance and re-lights one of the footlights that keeps going out between acts, and the “backstage crew” in their period costumes and special effects like a moonrise that were done the way Verdi might have done it, with a dude (in period costume) slowly lighting candles held behind a round paper screen that was then pulled up via ropes to hang over the chorus.  And elaborately painted drop cloth sets like the kind operas at the time would have used. 

And the wings held some boxes filled with noble men and women from the time, with their guards.  You see, at the time this was written and performed, Verdi’s part of Italy was under Austrian occupation.  So these folks in the wings were playing the part of the Austrian oppressors, watching an opera written and performed by Italians, about…an invading and oppressing force taking away somebody’s rightful homeland and kicking them out.

Confused?  Well…that’s the bad.

While the music is good, there is a reason why Verdi had to be forced into composing for it—the words and plot are…uh.  Really, really stupid.  It doesn’t make much sense, has a random love triangle plot that doesn’t really go anywhere beyond the first act, relies on the people in the opera to be really stupid (more than usual, but probably less than Madame Butterfly), and goes full bore into the “I’m an adopted kid and nobody told me so I’ma gonna kill everyone, k?” trope.  It skips over important bits, relies on the audience reading the program summary to explain things, and the ending is...well.  I'll get into that (in detail, be forwarned) later.  

 Uh.  

But it’s all sung so prettily.  Oh yeah, and one of the people that saw it with me was Jewish, and was extremely confused about why the Jewish folk kept referring to god as Jehovah, and acting basically nothing like Jews.  Silly, this is an opera.  Reality and cultural appropriation, what? 

When the director added in the meta historical contextualization of the opera, he muddied it further—and worse, since all of that meta stuff isn’t actually in the summary, and relies on the audience to be…well…like me, and read the whole program, or have an question and answer session with the musical director to figure out what is the deal with these people who don’t sing and are in wildly anachronistic (The rest of the production tries to set itself firmly in biblical times) 1840s costumes who are dancing on the stage between acts, and watching the production from their “box seats” in the wings of the stage, and moving furniture, or lighting candles and footlights, and random 1840s Austrian soldiers appearing in the background of scenes and marching across the stage between each act, and a random encore with the cast and “backstage crew” holding up the Italian flag…well…lets just say it could have been clearer. 

Which isn’t even going into the use of a narrative about Jewish oppression (set in a time when Jewish folk were definitely being oppressed by everyone else in Europe) being used by Verdi and now the current director to talk about the Austrian invasion of Italy.  One of those things is still fairly relevant.  And it’s not the oppression of some of the Italian people under Austrian rule.

But it was really, really pretty.  Here.  Some more beautiful music.


In an effort to get you all to see the opera AND understand what the hell is going on, I give you my own summary.

Act One:
'Thus saith the Lord, Behold, I shall deliver this city into the hand of the King of Babylon, and he will burn it with fire' (Jeremiah 21:10)

Ok.  So the Israelites are trying to keep their country from being overrun by the Assyrian forces.  The Assyrians are winning, and destroying all their temples and they aren’t doing so hot.  The Israelites kidnap the invading king’s daughter (Fenena), and are going to see what a hostage situation will do to improve their chances of not being taken over and destroyed.  Y’know.  Because invading kings generally will give up and go home if their kids are threatened with destruction.  That never backfires, ever, right?

Who thinks this was going to go well?  Nobody thinks this, except the people in the opera, because they have a narrative causality curse.

Of course, the daughter is pure of heart and wonderful and the nephew of the king of the Jews (Ismaele) is in love with her because she rescued him from prison that one time.  No, its never explained why he was in prison.  Just that he was.  He keeps her from getting killed, and is going to help her escape from his people and run away with her.  This is opera.  I’ll forgive that.  This is the sort of thing young lovers in opera do.

They don’t get far; Abigaille, Fenena’s elder sister comes in—and she’s AWESOME and GIANT, and competent, and wants to kill everything—I had a favorite character right away.   

That dude on the ground? She walked in and slit his throat. Why? because she's a damned General, and he's an enemy fighter.  Abigaille.  You are awesome.
 Turns out, while Ismaele was in prison, Abigaille wanted a piece of his adorable, tiny, tenor ass.   She doesn’t much care about love; she just wants Ismaele in her bed, like now.  If he agrees, she’ll spare his people, and won’t turn them into slaves or kill them all or nothing.  She is perfectly capable of doing this.

Ismaele refuses her, because he is in love with Fenena, and because of plot reasons.  While they have their little singing argument where Abigaille swears her undying vengeance on Fenena and Ismaele, the Jewish forces are in a full retreat, and behind them comes the invading king, Nabucco. 

The Jewish leader Zaccaria tries to hold Fenena up as a hostage and threatens to kill her unless Nabucco pulls back or at least lets the Jewish folks on stage—I mean, in the temple—go free.  Ismaele rescues her again, and seals his fate as the Jewish guy all the other Jewish folk are going to blame for what comes next—i.e. being all killed or made into slaves and all the temples sacked and burned.  At this point, you think, ok.  That is what this opera is going to be.  Love triangle central with a side of danger.

Act Two:
'Behold, the whirlwind of the Lord goeth forth, it shall fall upon the head of the wicked' (Jeremiah 30:23)

Act Two opens several months later, and Abigaille isn’t bemoaning the loss of her bedmate, but instead telling us all that she is angry that her father is off invading and oppressing some other country and didn’t leave her in charge even though she is the eldest, or take her with him, even though she is an awesome fighter.  Oh, and that she found out why he did that—she's got a letter that says that she is adopted and the bastard daughter of a slave.  Well, now it all makes sense.  Clearly, there is only one course of action for her now—she’s already sworn vengeance on Ismaele and Fenena and all the Jewish folk, now she needs to kill her father, his people, and personally take over the whole world, singing “Destruction, my rage demands it!” and that she will rule “from the golden throne of peace, red with the blood of those who scorned me!”  She’s clearly got the blessing of her God Baal—she and the priests of Baal who are encouraging her decent into Awesome Conqueror of All--because gold sparkles start falling from the sky. 

“She sang sparkles down from the fuckin’ sky” –Abby Lerhke, who shares my love of Abigaille

 Elsewhere, Ismaele is feeling sad that everybody hates him and he got people killed, and enslaved and people keep shouting things like “traitor!” at him, but Zaccaria calms the haters down by saying that its ok—Fenena, as the current regent of her father’s country while he’s off fighting another war, has converted to Judaism, and is going to release all the Jewish slaves.  This is also the last time Ismaele is at all relevant to the plot. 

I’m skipping over the stupid plot point that Abigaille and the priests of Baal decide to put it about that Nabucco is dead in order to take the throne from Fenena, because I don’t know why the librettist decided that NOW he needed to go for realism and not Opera Logic, and also because it is only in the opera for about 5 minutes, while Fenena and Abigaille argue over who should be Queen, and who is the real traitor here—Abigaille, who has her country’s own interests at heart, or Fenena, who just converted to the religion of the people her country just conquered.

Well, Nabucco enters just then, and is surprised to find out that he’s supposed to be dead.  He calls everybody traitors—to be fair, they are—and says to hell with the Jewish God, and to hell with Baal—they don’t like him, but he’s just conquered another people and put them all to the sword, so clearly, that means he, Nabucco, is God.

Which gets him struck by lightning.  Abigaille then takes his crown off of his writhing body and calls herself queen.  I wouldn’t argue with her, and neither does anybody else.

Now. Here’s the thing.  I saw Nabucco blaspheme against TWO gods.  But I was not raised Christian, so I don’t assume that Jehovah is anymore valid a hypothesis then Baal, except that I play the Diablo games, and I’ve killed Baal, with my own, pixilated, barbarian hands, whereas I’ve never interacted with Jehovah at all.

The text of the opera seems to posit it was clearly Jehovah that smote him, but the director (current) nor the librettist saw fit to actually show that in the text.  I’ll ignore that for now, but it bothered me at the time, and I still think that the lack of textual proof that it was Jehovah makes the rest of the opera really, really, stupid.

On to Part Three:
'Therefore the wild beasts of the desert with the wild beasts of the islands shall dwell there, and the owls shall dwell therein'. (Jeremiah 50:39)

So Abigaille is Queen.  She wants to put the Hebrews to death, because of reasons, and because Baal is evil, and so is her awesome High Priest, he of the amazing fingernails.

Seriously.  Look at this awesome dude. He looked like a Skeksi.  He moved like a Skeksi.  He was amazing.
But she’s still just regent, because her “dad” didn’t actually die of getting hit by divine lightning of vague origins, he just went bonkers (this is where biblical, literary, and operatic logic are all in agreement.  Getting a divine shock makes you crazy, not dead).  And Abigaille can’t just order the death of at least a third of her country’s slaves.  She has to get Nabucco to sign that order.  He’s still King, after all.  Sanity is not a requirement for kings—case in point, Russia.

Ivan The Terrible, folks.  He didn't earn the name by delivering cookies.

 She taunts Nabucco into signing the death warrant, and then after he’s signed it and she’s given it to the guards to carry out—she reminds him that his real daughter, Fenena is Jewish now, so she’ll be put to death with the rest of them. 

He’s not thrilled.  At all.  Less thrilled when she puts him in prison for his own good, because of the madness, you know.  He tries to take back his throne, saying that she’s a bastard, but she just burns up the only proof and he’s powerless.

I told you the libretto relies on stupid people acting stupid, right?

Then there is a scene that is all about a gorgeous song sung by the Hebrews.  The most famous song of the show—you saw it up top if you listened to it.  It’s all about the hope of the oppressed to rise above and defeat their oppressors, even if all they can do is die and go back to their homeland on “golden wings of thought”.  Stunning, musically and physically.  It doesn’t advance the plot, but in opera, sometimes you just have to make room for a beautiful moment.

This was a beautiful moment.  Va Pensiero.
Part Four:
'Bel is confounded, Merodach is broken pieces; her idols are confounded, her images are broken in pieces.' (Jeremiah 50:2)

Part Four then, is all about the comeuppance.  Oh, and death.  Still an opera.  This act takes place in the prison.  Nabucco is wreaked with guilt, and he can hear Fenena being brought out to the place of execution, probably.  He might be imagining it.  In any case, he converts to Judaism, and prays to the God of the Hebrews, and vows to go out and rebuild temples and bring his people to Judaism, if only he’ll spare his daughter. And lo and behold, he regains his senses and his guards declare their loyalty to him.  And he sees his daughter (probably?) killed, and then Abigaille comes to him in his prison (probably?) after taking poison after being overcome with horror at her own actions, and declaring that she’s also embracing Judaism.  And then…well, and then I think Nabucco dies.  At least in the production I saw.  Everybody ends up dead and Jewish.

This act is where the director stumbles the most, in my opinion.  See, the program text and the stuff that actually happens on stage…well, they don’t agree.  And other synopses online…well, they don’t agree with either the opera I saw, or the summary in the program.  Here’s the language used about what happens in the program. Bolding mine.

“Nabucco is uncertain whether he is awake or trapped in a nightmare…[summary of events up to his first prayer to Jehovah above]…Though believing that he has been rescued by Abdallo {the head guard} and that his army is once again loyal to him, he sees the death decree being carried out in front of him. He hears Zaccaria hail Fenena as a martyr to the cause of the Israelites as she resigns herself to death.  The distraught Nabucco renounces Baal and orders the god’s idol be destroyed.  His senses failing once again, he wonders if he sees Abigaille approaching.  Having poisoned herself in horror at what her ambition has brought upon her kingdom, Abigaille confesses her crimes.  Slipping in and out of consciousness, she prays to Jehovah for pardon as the Hebrews reaffirm that their god will always raise up those who are afflicted.”

It seems to have skipped an important aspect of the basic storytelling tenant “getting your damn message across.”  Because, in the production I saw, it was pretty clear that the entire act was Nabucco hallucinating.  People randomly appeared and said things he wanted to hear--things like that his army is his again, suddenly, and for no reason.  Then Fenena comes into his cell—just after we saw the Hebrews walk by with a dead woman raised up above their heads—maybe that was Fenena, maybe not, but they had just been singing about Fenena’s martyrdom before the corpse was carried across the stage, so in stage terms, this was not uncertain.  If you sing about a dead woman, and then you carry a dead woman across the stage, those two dead women should be the same person.   

Then Abigaille walks onto the stage, singing about how she has embraced the religion of the Hebrews, and also taken poison out of guilt and asks for everybody’s forgiveness—especially Fenena—even though she’s never EVER sung about guilt or even hesitation before now.  Nabucco keeps singing about how he is going to free all the Hebrew slaves, and convert his country to Judaism, and rebuild all the temples. And then Zaccaria (suddenly there) calls Nabucco the king of kings for all time, and Nabucco falls down, clutching a stick he’s been using as a sword, and the stage goes black.

That’s a hallucination in stage terms, followed by the death of Nabucco, I’m sorry.

But one of the synopses (bolding mine, again) I found online says, “Fenena and the Israelite prisoners are led in to be sacrificed (Va! La palma del martirio / "Go, maid, go and conquer the palm of martyrdom"). Fenena serenely prepares for death. Nabucco rushes in with Abdallo and other soldiers. He declares that he will rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem and worship the God of the Israelites, and orders the destruction of the idol of Baal. At his word, the idol falls to the ground of its own accord and shatters into pieces. Nabucco tells the Israelites that they are now free and all join in praise of Jehovah. Abigaille enters, supported by soldiers. She has poisoned herself. She asks the forgiveness of Fenena, prays for God's mercy and dies. Zaccaria proclaims Nabucco the servant of God and king of kings.”

That’s…a bit different.  Different message.  Different staging.  Different tone.  If the director of the MN Opera’s Nabucco had wanted to, he could have staged this in a way that didn’t cast doubt on the meaning of the play.  We needed to see Abigaille take her poison--or at least see the effects of it, since she is about to have a long, drawn-out operatic death, and you just can't sell that if you are walking around of your own volition.  We need to see Fenena as she prepared for death, and seen her actually rescued.  And Nabucco's restoration and release needed to be clearer--maybe have the prison taken off the stage, or actually opened, instead of just moving it around Nabucco, leaving the audience to figure out if he's really out, or, since he doesn't actually leave the presence of the bars or go outside of their reach.  Or even just choose a different color for the Jews that differentiated the ones that lived from the ones that died.  

 See, the MN opera has a habit of putting the dead-person-to-be in white.  White is the color of Operatic Death.  White, in all of the operas I’ve seen so far at the MN Opera, is the color of sacrifice, of righteous suicide, of death and madness.  And all the folks who convert or are already Jewish are all in white.  So symbolically, a reading could be made that all of the Hebrews and Converts, who are all gathered in the prison cell at the end are all dead, with Abigaille’s white interrupted by the red scarf of not-sympathetic-enough to count as righteous suicide, but still dead.

There is no mention of whether or not Nabucco is actually doing these things, and plenty of evidence to believe he is not actually doing them, only believing himself to do them.  Especially since the opera I saw did not show Nabucco as someone who is capable of doing all of that and seemed to operate under dream logic—i.e., people appearing randomly, his (supposed) dead daughter come to comfort him, and then Abigaille comes into the prison, by herself, after poisoning herself. 

Which doesn’t even come close to getting at the point that I made in the second act—Nabucco equally blasphemes Jehovah and Baal.  And it’s only the assumptions of the librettist and the director that the folks watching it would be Christian (or for modern audiences, Jewish), and assume along with them that Jehovah did the smiting. 

Well…I don’t know about Jehovah, but Baal has a nasty lightning attack.
Ok, so it’s not a lightning attack, technically it is a Mana Burn Attack, but you can make the case that a Diablo 2 Mana Burn Attack is a direct attack on the power and mind of a hero—which makes it even more likely that it was Baal who smote Nabucco, because that is what happened.  His mind and power were taken from him.  So yeah.  Context Matters.  Especially when dealing with someone who is as obsessed with that game as I am.

4/17/12

Madame Butterfly

Madame Butterfly

So, I knew very little about this opera before I went to see it.  I knew the name, and I had seen the promo materials—and I’ll be honest, I was a little wary of what I was going to see.

I mean—this is an opera, based on a short story written in the 1890s by a white dude, then turned into an opera by another white dude, about a Japanese woman giving up her culture and family to marry an American, who then abandons her for a “real marriage” aka: another American lady.  Madame Butterfly then kills herself when it becomes clear her husband is a terrible human being who really did abandon her.  It’s written by an Italian and is sung in the same language—but that is just Opera.  Weird language choices are par for the course.

For you musical buffs, this is what Miss Saigon was based on.

This could have been awful and racist.  I was pleasantly surprised.  Quite pleasantly surprised.  There was no exoticism of the Japanese Other, this wasn’t painted as “oh those silly Asians, so obsessed with honor”, and the culture shock aspects were handled with a respect that isn’t often seen in modern media—and the culture shock we were supposed to be identifying with wasn’t the American’s culture.  He was the weird one.  Our lovely diva’s culture was the baseline. 

It was a neat trick.  Especially we, the audience, were clearly supposed to be white, European/American I mean, it’s an Italian opera.  The story’s emotional impact was heightened because we could see what Cio Cio san could and would not—that her husband was a racist pedophile, who had married her to get in her pants and was counting on the extremely liberal divorce laws of Meji Era Japan to keep him from any lasting consequences.  The American (Pinkerton) even says that he’s only marrying her temporarily while he’s stationed in Japan till he can go home and marry a “real wife.”  His buddy calls him a pedo piece of shit, but in fancy opera speak.

I’ll add an aside here; this opera belongs in the category of stories that tell us just why we no longer let 15 yr olds decide to marry somebody.    Cio Cio san…well.  She’s 15.  And in love.  And absolutely convinced that her husband is in love with her.

Yeah.  In Opera speak; you know that this is going to end with blood all over the place.  Uh.  Spoiler alert—it does.  She suicides when her dick husband tries to take her kid away and raise it with his new wife.

Like Lucia, this opera is carried on the strength of the Diva—and she was fantastic.  

 I hated Pinkerton, but my heart broke for her because she made me believe that she was in love with the bastard. 

The folks supporting her are also very good, and as usual, the MN opera brings their signature minimalist style to the stage allowing the singers and their superb acting to carry the play.  I laughed at Madame Butterfly’s sass, I wanted to smack Pinkerton and make him make her happy.  I thought her son was adorable, and her support group seemed to be trying very very hard, but they were up against the terrible triple odds of dealing with a lovesick teenager and two patriarchal societies with notions of what a woman is worth.  Go, get tickets.  It’s almost sold out, and for very good reason.  

http://www.mnopera.org/

This is the love duet from the first act.  So pretty, but boo! Hiss! Pinkerton! Hissss!


1/31/12

Opera! Werther

Its that time again!  Opera!  This time it was a Tragic Romance from the 1890s called Werther.

Tragic romance opera?  Yeah. if this is spoiling anything, you don't know opera very well.
 
 
So…Here’s the good—as an opera, the music is perfect—the best, probably that I’ve seen.  The set and costumes and casting choices are spot on perfect. 

Seriously folks—the dude who played Werther was wonderful.  He has a clear operatic tenor, perfect for the pathos of the production.  I may be biased, because I love tenors.  I cried from the sound of his voice in several parts, even if I thought what he was saying was ridiculous.

But…well, lets talk about the plot.

See, the plot of Werther is this: 

Werther, a “cousin” (by Victorian and earlier standards—so related, somewhat distantly and totally marriage fodder, ok, y’all?) stops by Charlotte’s house for a party. 

Charlotte is a young woman coming into marriageable age who has taken over the “mother” role for her younger siblings after her mother died.  Werther sees Charlotte interacting with her sibs, and falls for her natural beauty and grace.  They go to the party, Werther offering her his arm. 

Werther is in love, and it is implied that Charlotte is also in love with him—but her mother, before her death, asked her to marry Albert.  And for Charlotte, that is the end of it.  No matter what her heart wants, a “promise must be kept.”

So she goes home, Werther leaves, and that’s that.  The first scene is finished.

When next we see Werther—he is going to the 25th wedding anniversary of the local priest.  Where he runs into a newly married Charlotte and her husband Albert.  They are content, though it is obvious that Charlotte still carries a bit of a torch for Werther—but is generally happy in her marriage.

Albert rubs Werther’s nose in it a bit, because he’s an asshole, but the big part of this is that Werther knows that there is no hope for him and Charlotte—which drops him into a deep depression.  And when he catches Charlotte alone, he begs her (on the floor, rolling around in his angst, clutching her skirts…yeah) to kiss him, to tell him she loves him, to run away with him.

ANGST! 


But Charlotte is resolute, and tells him in no uncertain terms that she is married to Albert, and that is that.  She begs him to leave her alone for now, but that she’d like to see him over Christmas. She clearly Likes him, but doesn’t really Like Like him.  At least, she not willing throw over her family for a guy she hardly knows, even if she does Like him.

This is where Werther moves from a nice, if tragic, opera and moves into unintentional humor, and made my notes start going “what? Werther, no.  Werther, NO.  Bad Werther! No means no, Werther!  Werther—what, what, what are you doing?”

All of this could have been avoided if Werther had a Sassy Gay Friend.  If you are confused GOOGLE THIS RIGHT NOW.  RIGHT NOW. GO ON, I'LL WAIT.

Werther becomes that guy.  You know.  The one that threatens to kill himself if you don’t go on a date with him.  Who won’t take no, for whatever reason, for an answer.  Who thinks that his happiness trumps yours.  Who is willing to guilt/threaten/force the girl-who (admittedly) likes him- into more than she is comfortable with.

I’ve had that guy as a stalker.  Not fun.  Not attractive.  BAD MEMORIES.

No, Werther, No. Werther, NO.  NO.


So.  Christmas.  Werther has spent the last several months writing Charlotte increasingly deranged love letters—he tells her he’s going to kill himself, he tells her he can’t live without her.  Charlotte—as I said, she likes this guy, but she can’t and won’t love him the way he feels she should—so she feels guilty and at fault.


If that last sentence made you dislike Werther—congrats.  You are a decent human being.  If you don’t see the problem…uh.  I can’t help ya there.  Go find someone patient to explain it to you.

She likes Werther and feels for the guy—but she has a small breakdown as she realizes that there is a good chance that he’s dead because it is Christmas and he hasn’t shown up—and the last letter she got was a couple of weeks ago.

She's not happy.  Its a sucky situation to be in.


Then he shows up.  And he does more of the threatening/guilting thing.  Then he chases her around her house, grabbing her and holding her and totally not listening to her telling him how much this is NOT OK.

She gets him to leave again, gives him the kiss he’s wanted, and he disappears into the night, still being the angst-muffin, and still not satisfied.

And then Albert (remember him?) comes in. 

This is Albert.  He is a giant douche.


 And he saw Werther in the town.  And was asked by Werther to borrow Charlotte’s father’s pistols “for a long journey”.  Lets be clear here.  Nobody is fooled.  Albert knows what Werther is going to do with these.  Charlotte knows too.  Charlotte refuses, but Albert, as her husband (and remember, this is a Victorian Opera, so he’s sort of God of the House), tells her to give the messenger that accompanied him in the pistols, and basically forces her to hand over the guns with her own two hands.  Albert is a dick, ok, ya’ll?

As soon as the messenger leaves (and her husband, assholery achieved, goes off stage), Charlotte chases after the messenger, obviously going off to try and stop Werther’s suicide.

This is an Opera, and a tragic one, and so you know what’s going to happen here.  There is a beautiful (soooooo beautiful) duet that needs to happen as Werther dies, at length, in Charlotte’s arms.

Yup.  Right where we expected.  Opera folks die so pretty.

So.  Good Opera, on the whole.  The music and the actors, and the sets and the costumes—if that is what you are looking for in an Opera, go see this one.  Its just…that…the plot.  Bad Plot. Stop making these wonderful opera singers look silly in their pain.

Historical Context Time!

This Opera was first performed in 1892, written in 1887.  Arranged marriages were still the norm (especially for the crowd that could afford to go to the opera, and the possibility of an arranged marriage going bad was a real fear, and a real problem.  Apparently, there was a small rash of suicides from young men and women in similar situations after seeing this opera when it was first performed.

The rising ideal of love over everything, a key in the rise of the bohemian life-style, and the decline of arranged marriages put this play firmly in the middle of the movement--and explains why it was so well received.

Werther is obsessed with the idea and ideal of love, and because of that ideal willingly gives up his wealth to love in poverty, and he kills himself for his love without regard for the afterlife, living in the moment.  This Opera came out of France, during the height of the movement, and it’s pretty clear.  “Leibe oder Tod”  (Love over death) is scrawled on the back of the final set, and Werther dies in Charlotte’s arms, with a spotlight both on them and the word “liebe” on the wall.

Its running through Feb 5th.  Go see it if you can--if you want, you can see it tonight (sorry for the short notice!) for $20*! 

*Limit up to 4 seats regularly priced $50-110 for the Tuesday, 1/31 performance only. Online: Enter blog20 and click “Add Coupon”. You will see your savings applied. Do not complete order if coupon does not load. Service charges and other restrictions may apply. Offer ends January 31, 2012. For additional information call the Ticket Office at 612-333-6669, M-F, 9am-6pm.