what operas, doc?

[calimac]

Having gone yesterday to a San Jose Opera performance of The Barber of Seville (Scott Bearden does a great job, both in singing and in comic acting, with the buffoonish villain Dr. Bartolo) - that's the second opera I've seen performed in 15 months, a very high rate for me - I'm going to tease the people waiting for my list of pop songs that I like with, instead, a list of operas that I like.

It's not a much longer list. I'm not an opera person, I'm a symphony and chamber music person. All music exists in time, but the music I like gives the air of being a static structure that you're examining in time. It's the aural equivalent of walking through a great architectural creation, or turning a beautiful small sculpture over in your hand and looking at it from different angles.

Whereas opera is drama. Different thing. Drama with music in it, and the two don't always mesh. Even the most dedicated opera fan will admit that opera is often not very good drama. And the music is often designed to showcase the singers rather than exist as beauty for its own sake. (Yes, there's concert music that does that too. It's not my favorite concert music.)

I like:

Mozart. I've seen Don Giovanni, Cosi Fan Tutte, The Magic Flute, and The Marriage of Figaro, and that's a fair chunk of Mozart's masterpieces.

Rossini. Love his overtures, though the only operas I've seen staged are Barber and a translated adaptation of L'Italiana in Algeri titled The Riot Grrrl on Mars.

Carmen by Bizet. The only opera ever written with more than one really good tune. (I am aware that Bizet wrote other operas. I know nothing about them.)

A smidgen of Wagner, if I can have him in a smidgen. My favorite whole Wagner opera is Das Rheingold, because it's short and because it's an ensemble piece, with a minimum of hours and hours of two characters alone on stage emoting at each other loudly.

American ballad operas. Works like The Crucible and The Ballad of Baby Doe by otherwise obscure composers like Robert Ward and Douglas Moore (respectively).

But in all these cases "like" is a mild word. I'm not jumping up and down in eagerness to see any of them. What I really like is Gilbert and Sullivan. They wrote 14 collaborative operettas, of which two are never performed; I've seen the other 12, most of them many, many times. And their apostolic successors are American musical theatre, alias Broadway. Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Bock and Harnick: sure, why not? I'd rather see those than a grand opera, and that's about as lowbrow as you're going to see me get.

Comments

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

Whereas opera is drama. Different thing. Drama with music in it, and the two don't always mesh.

True. I'll even take that a step further and say that I think of opera as spectacle: drama, set to music, in often elaborate productions. It is best experienced live as a full production and not just in a concert for voices. Heck, I even enjoyed Alban Berg's Lulu when I saw it performed, and I'm not the biggest fan of Berg's music.

I find that I tend to like opera more than many people. I grew up with the music of the few operas that my parents liked -- singing along, even, in faux Italian. I discovered and loved other operas (such as Porgy and Bess and a lot of Mozart) on my own, as a teenager. Wagner, however, still leaves me fairly cold (except perhaps for a certain scene in Apocalypse Now), though I've only heard recordings, not seen it performed.

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

All music exists in time, but the music I like gives the air of being a static structure that you're examining in time. It's the aural equivalent of walking through a great architectural creation, or turning a beautiful small sculpture over in your hand and looking at it from different angles.

Beautiful! And yet that's not at all how I experience the classical orchestral and chamber music I love. I have to think about this.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I already know you're not into Gershwin, so let me just suggest "Hary Janos" by Kodaly for your listening pleasure. I listen to it more than any other opera, even "Carmen" and "Porgy & Bess" (which are also on my player).

I have a lot of little chunks of operas on the player, but only half a dozen complete works. "The Fiery Angel" and "War & Peace" by Prokofiev, "Falstaff" by Verdi, some Gilbert & Sullivan, and the three mentioned above. Oh, and some Purcell, which is listenable and it's in English! But the chunks -- I purchased Naxos's two-disk A-Z set, and someone gave me a different Naxos sampler, but the real treasure trove turned out to be a stack of the free CDs that came with a friend's subscription to (I think the name was) Classical CD Magazine. I went through and harvested all the opera selections from those.

I'm still looking for any recordings of Audran's operettas, especially "The Mascot." Thanks to a CD of music associated with Tintin, I found a wonderful bit of "La Dame Blanche" by Boildeau ("Air de Jenny"). Then there's a universe of Caruso recordings, piano transcriptions, and even music box opera excerpts, but this comment is plenty long enough already.

Hary Janos -- there's lots of good music that's not in the Suite.

what operas, doc?

[(Anonymous)]

I'm impressed that your favorite Wagner is "Rheingold" because mine is too, and I'm always apologizing for it not being "Siegfried" or "Gotterdammerung." Have you ever seen or listened to Strauss' "Ariadne auf Naxos"? A delight, and full of singable tunes.

Tehanu