From the easy to the the unpopular

Seeing as I have to maintain my jetsetter lifestyle, I'm running away to London for two and a half months in a few weeks, which naturally means I have to switch a bunch of opera tickets.  No biggy, it just means that my opera season is a bit compressed now.  Lucky you! Either you get to hear about lots of opera all at once, or you get a huge break from hearing about any opera and only about my travels...I guess it depends on what you prefer to read.

But the ticket switcharoo means I got to see "Don Carlo", which I've only heard good things about.  I know I've said this before, I'm a big fan of Verdi.  He's just pretty, I can pretend to sing along, you can breathe along with a Verdi aria...I really like Verdi.  And although there are hundreds of people that have spend thousands of hours working on dissertations and studying his work, the basic truth is: he's an easy composer. Non-opera lovers can sit through one of his operas (even the ones that are 4 hours long like "Don Carlo") and still walk away smiling (if it's a good production).  And the MET did a fine job, the sets were nice (well they did include burning heretics) , the costuming understated, but beautiful, and the singing was fine.  I have very little to say about "Don Carlo".  I was really excited to get to see it, I wasn't disappointed, but it sure didn't blow my mind like "House of the Dead" last season or "Lucia de Larimoor" the season before.  Ferruccio Furlanetto, who played King Philip, was incredible I will admit, but he was the only stand out actor in the production. Not that everyone else was bad! They were fine, it's just that that's it, everything was just fine.

Then on Friday I saw "Pelleas et Melisande".  I'll start off with even for an opera lover, two operas in a week is a bit much...but...

"Pelleas et Melisande" is Debussy's only completed opera.  I had never heard of it.  And I was there opening night,  and I know that I wasn't the only one there that had never heard of it.

It's a difficult opera.  Folks that came for Mozart, that love Verdi (and as I just said I love me some Verdi) were not enjoying themselves, a lot of people left half way through (a lot of people left less than half way through).  However, after just saying this: I loved this opera.  It is so amazingly modern, everything that "Dr. Atomic" had tried to be but horrifically failed at achieving (which is strange I compare the two because Gerald Finley plays the lead in both: Golaud in "Pelleas et Melisande" and John Adams in "Dr. Atomic").  It's the imaginary story of an older king who marries a girl he knows nothing about that he finds in the woods.  When he brings her back to the castle she falls in love with his half-brother, and when he finds out, he gets mean and kills his half-brother, and then she dies in the end during child birth (but the king's child).  Standard opera story.  But it's an almost 4 hour long opera, that description took 30 seconds.  The opera is really about all the things you don't say to the people you love and don't love, the withheld moments and possibilities of life, in other words awkward silences and regrets.  It's so human it's hard to believe you're watching an opera.  At the same time though, the story is so far fetched that it blows your mind as you walk out on the street still feeling a little awkward for watching a series of relationships self destruct that realistically when there's absolutely nothing realistic about the actual story.

Debussy called it his "ideal" opera: a symbolist piece not meant for the masses.  There are no librettos, no arias, just musical emotion, and it is profound.  I often wonder why it is that I love the opera so much, and so often the only conclusion I come to is that I love the extremes, but I don't think that's entirely true.  What I think I love is the impossible truth that's hidden in them.  Not the extremes, but the realities hidden in the absurd, and it's the operas that emphasis that part of the medium that I have learned move me the most: "Pelleas et Melisande", "House of the Dead", although not so much "Lucia de Larimoor", it's still just a bella canti opera with a really, really good aria at the end.