Irony at the opera

[jwg]

We went to see Dvořák's Rusalka tonight at the Boston Lyric Opera.

The scene opens with 3 Rhinemaidens swimming in the - oops wrong opera. The scene opens with 3 water nymphs swimming in the river. Rusalka is another water nymph and later gets turned into a human so she can go get married to the Prince. In the second act Cordelia - oh that was last night - the foreign princess mocks Rusalka because she is mute and tries to win over the Prince. This causes the situation that the lead soprano wanders around the stage for most of the second act without singing. Eventually as one would expect in most operas the Prince dies and Rusalka wanders off in misery.

And oh yes, there was a lot of other stuff happening with some very nice music. The set with lots of projected images of woods and ferns and other stuff was great. It was a nice opera and production.

And tomorrow we are hearing Dvořák's String Quartet No 12 - otherwise known as the American at Robert Kapilow's What Makes it Great which are always entertaining and educational.

Comments

[vasilatos]

And yet, ROTFLMAOL

[spwebdesign.livejournal.com]

Ah, a mute soprano, my favorite kind!

[rsc.livejournal.com]

Know whatcha mean. But she was fine to listen to, anyway -- it was Marquita Lister, whom we had last heard as a creepy-sexy Salome (in 2001!).

[spwebdesign.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the link. I've been looking at various singer websites to get ideas for my own. One of the things I'd thought about is offering different language options and how best to go about that. I like her site's solution of offering a link to each language version through the text "Welcome" in that language.

A long time ago...

[ursomniac.livejournal.com]

... I saw this AWESOME short animation that went through the plots of major operas. It was called something like "How to Enjoy Opera".

At the bottom of the screen was a counter that ticked up the number of people who were killed during the opera. At the end of each rendition, they listed all the wonderful sins and crimes that were committed: "Bestiality! Murder! etc." As you can guess, that poor counter went haywire when they got to The Ring cycle.

I would LOVE to find it again. I had hoped it would end up on one of those "best animation of the year" DVDs but no luck.