At the Lighthouse

Last night I took The Boyfriend to the Opera for the first time, to see Don Carlos. The Boyfriend is not an operafan, he had only ever seen one opera prior to the one last night, and it hadn’t been much of a success. So I was of course a tad nervous about what he’d think of his second go at the genre, and maybe that’s why I found myself talking non-stop during the break about why the King Philip’s aria in the third act is the best operatic music ever written, what other scenes in other operas were my favourites, and why, in general, opera is a great, great art form, complete with my arms flailing wildly and me mimicking like a crazy person, eager to get the message through.

After the fact I realized, of course, that I could have spared myself a lot of that flailing and mimicking, had I only waited to give him this lengthy lecture ’till we were in the vicinity of a computer. Because, seriously, after youtube.com has been invented there is really no need for trying to describe anyone anything any more: You just click on that youtube icon on your Favourites link, do a search, and show them what the hell you’re talking about. It’s all there.

And so, I’ve decided to do a top-5 chart of my favourite opera moments, here on this blog, so that I may show my boyfriend, and anyone else interested, exactly what the hell I’m talking about when I talk about opera. Each opera moment will be illustrated with the courtesy of youtube, and described by me.

5. “Deh vieni, non tardar” – Le Nozze di Figaro

This aria from the fourth act of The Marriage of Figaro is lovely. There is no other word for it. Seductive, smooth and flexible, the sound of it flows like a cool breeze through a garden on a warm summer night. 

After her marriage to her beloved Figaro, a valet, chamber maid Susanna has snuck into the castle’s garden where she’s conspiring with her lady, the Countess, to play a trick on The Count, who’s been neglecting his loving wife and pursuing Susanna, who wants nothing to do with him. However, as Susanna realizes that Figaro is in the garden, too, furiously and wrongly believing Susanna to be about to, well, ”perform her feudal duties” with their master, Susanna decides to get back at her jealous spouse by showing herself from her most seductive side, thus enraging him further.

And well she succeeds! To me, Susanna is easily the sexiest among operatic heroines, with her shrewd mind, tough will, witty tongue and attractive appearance, and all of these virtues shine through in this aria, where she lets her soprano slides like sweet caresses from one note to the other, all the while never loosing sight of the tricks she’s playing on the two men in her life; the Count and Figaro. The woodwinds in the orchestration are deliciously ambiguous, harking both of the enchanting scene that Susanna is describing in her aria (murmering streams, laughing flowers and fresh turf), and of Susanna’s surpressed giggles at her own scheme. 

I’m not crazy about Susanna’s heavy-looking costume in the above clip, but the scenery and the dark-blue light are very nice!

4. “Tutte le feste al tempio” – Rigoletto

If I were to make up the most humiliating and morfifying scenario possible, I think it would be having to live through a very unpleasant sexual encounter, only to be faced immediately afterwards with my father, who, as I would learn only in that same instant, was actually a court jester, complete with a hat with little bells on it.

These, exactly, are the circumstances in this very moving scene from Verdi’s Rigoletto. Gilda, who’s been overly protected by her father to the point where she hasn’t even known what his name was or what he did for a living, has just learned about the birds and the bee the hard way: She has been abducted to the castle of the Duke of Mantova, and the Duke (whom she believed to be a poor student who was madly in love with her) has date-raped her, and when she finally escapes she finds her father there, - dressed up ridiculously in a court jester’s outfit! And he’s asking her to tell her what just happened to her! “Heaven, lend me courage!” exclaims Gilda before starting her recount of her sufferings, and one certainly can’t blame her.

The recount she delievers is the mournful, minor-key aria found in the first 3:40 minutes of the above youtube file, and I think it’s incredibly beautiful. It contains all the fragility, uncertainty, immense joy, and terrible sadness of the Gilda character, who’s the epitome of all the naive-and-abused, young women this world has ever held.

The remaining four minutes of the youtubed video show Rigoletto’s desperation upon learning of his daughter’s dishonour, and subsequently his very moving attempt at comforting her sorrow.  I like both Andrea Rost’s and Paolo Gavanelli’s performance in this seemingly very traditional staging of the opera. (Even if I think that Gilda’s nightgown could have been a little more risqué than it is. She’s very demure-looking for a recent date-rape victim).

3. The Final scene of Eugene Onegin

Eugene Onegin is a relatively new aquaintance to me.

I first saw the opera last Spring in a Copenhagen cinema, where the staging of the above clip was shown on the big screen. I was there with an opera-loving friend, and neither of us were prepared for the impact the opera had on us. After the first act, we were both very much affected by the rejection that Tatiana lived through, and ended up spending the entire break relating to her pain and discussing painful rejections that we had lived through ourselves. And, familiar the storyline of Eugene Onegin, we were both looking forward to the final scene, where Eugene Onegin re-enters an older, married Tatiana’s life, only to be rejected by her, even though she still loves him. “That ought to show that haughty jerk!”, we agreed, anticipating sweet, by-proxy revenge over the men who had hurt us ”Then he’ll regret his own arrogance!”

But then, when we did reach the final act, what we found was that there was no victory in her rejection – at all. Tatiana was miserable and not triumphant in the least, when she rejected Eugene Onegin. And contemplating their desperate last duet with each other, we fully forgave him, too. Because revenge isn’t sweet at all, and no triumphant haughtiness could ever make up for the pain of lost love. Which is a beautiful message, but a heart-wrenching one, too. My friend and I were both moved to tears and were visibly trembling when the lights in the theatre went up again after Eugene’s “O, lamentable fate!” and the opera’s dramatic final cords. She and I had to take a long walk afterwards to steady ourselves, we were that shaken. I’ll never forget that day.

I think the above staging, with Renée Fleming and Dmitri Hvorostovsky is absolutely brilliant, and I can’t imagine it being done better than this. The scenography and the costumes are simple, but bear impact, Renée Fleming is wonderfully sweet in the part of bold daydreamer Tatiana, Hvorostovsky is every bit as haughty as he should be, and the two of them have magnificient chemistry. Bravi! Also, *sob*.

2. “La povera mia cena fu interrotta” – Tosca

I love that thing they often do in operas, where they pretend to do be casually chit-chatting, all the while they’re totally hating each other or scheming against each other. Eboli and Rodrigo do it in Don Carlos, too, Ieronimus and Leonard do it in Masquerade, and Iago and Cassio do it in Otello.

No one, however does it better or more interestingly than Tosca and Scarpia in Tosca, I think. “My humble dinner was interrupted” says Scarpia, which is just such a wonderful euphemism for what just happened -  Scarpia has violently interrogated Tosca’s political rebel boyfriend right in front of her, and, upon his continuous denials, has had his guards dragging him off to be executed! Dramatic Floria Tosca is not a good actress in real life, so of course she can only keep up the chit-chat for so long before she once again interrupts Scarpia’s dinner. “How much [money do you want]!”, she snaps at Scarpia, in the hopes of buying Mario, her boyfriend, free. Ah, but Scarpia doesn’t want her money, he says, he wants something else – namely her; her body. Scarpia is still terrifyingly matter-of-fact when he proposes this gruesome negotiation, but it doesn’t last: Soon his desire for Tosca shines through his slick conversational skills, and he throws himself at Tosca, with a druggingly passionate claim, leaving Tosca to understand that more than negotiating with cold, corrupted chief of police, she’s dealing with a sadistic maniac: “Already in the past I burned with passion for the diva. But the way you’ve been tonight, I have never seen you before. Your tears were lava to my senses, and that fierce hatred that your eyes shot at me only fanned the fire in my blood.”

In other words, the more she hates him, the more she rejects and fights him, the more he wants to get it on with her. Ick! The most claustrophobic moment is reached when Tosca, desperate to escape Scarpia and his devilish suggestion, cries: “I hate you, vile person!”. “All the same to me,” groans Scarpia, ”- spasms of anger, or spasms of passion…!” The scene ends with the eerie sound of the scaffold drums beating for Mario outside the window that Tosca vainly threatens to jump out of, as Scarpia advices Tosca to think over his proposition veeeery carefully…

It doesn’t get much better than this, drama-wise, I think. Tosca is desperate, and Scarpia is so scary, yet grotesquely alluring in his raging passion. The subsequent scene with Tosca’s aria “Vissi d’arte” is very popular, but I’m actually not too fond of it. To me it halts the action in an otherwise perfectly composed, action-packed second act, and brings too much attention to Tosca, whose diva-like psychology I regard as insignificant to the story. To me, Tosca is the story depicting the movements of a society where a conservative reign is giving way under the pressure of a rapidly growing rebellion, and as such, the diva Floria Tosca only represents the goods that each party hope to gain; love, beauty, art, popularity. Floria Tosca is Mario the rebel’s boyfriend because the times they are a-changing in Rome, and the rebels are starting to win. And when the old, losing regime, represented by Scarpia, realizes this, they do what an oppressive regime always does when threatened: They use violence to get what they want. It’s this political movement that we see in the second act of Tosca, brilliantly depicted through the struggle of a woman against the sick passions of a sadistic man.

The staging shown in this clip, featuring Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi, is from a very popular recorded staging of Tosca, but I have to say that I’m not all that crazy about it. I prefer the 2002 Jacquot Tosca movie, in which Ruggero Raimondi shines enough in the part of Scarpia to make up for the fact that Angela Georghiu and Roberto Alagna are totally hamming it up. (I do like the way Gobbi grabs his man-boobs upon singing about Tosca’s tears being like lava to his senses, though! )

1. “Ella giammai m’amo” – Don Carlos

This is my bring-to-a-desert-island aria. As I explained to The Boyfriend, arm-flailingly, last night; this aria simply contains all human misery. All the misery of humankind, worked into one, amazing aria. Aging King Philip, realizing that his wife doesn’t love him, finds himself old and unloved, and destined for a lonely death, a death that will offer him the only peace he will ever be able to find. Accordingly the music of the aria moves from anguish at his broken heart, over a lento march of sorrow at the thought of his own royal funeral, and on to an agitato wish to rise above his human form and be a God, who might look into the heart of his wife, of Elisabetta, the heart that will always be closed to him. It doesn’t get any more moving than this, I think. Verdi’s music is brilliant, and I love the lyric’s subtle use of the colour of white as something threatening: The youthful, pale light of dawn that awakens Philip from his reveries, his own white hair that Elisabetta contemplated sadly when she received him as her husband. Absolutely perfect.

I like the staging of the youtubed video, although I think it’s a shame that the editor has left out the first few bars of the prelude to the aria – this is one of those arias where the anticipation of the prelude forms a complete symbiosis with the release of sentiment that the aria delievers. I love the EMI recording of the opera with Ruggero Raimondi sining Philip: Raimondi beautifully climaxes with a powerful forte at the final, desperate outcry “Amor per me non ha!”.

/marie