Slow recovery

View 714 Tuesday, February 21, 2012

I’ve managed to get up the energy to work on the novella LEGEND OF BLACK SHIP ISLAND by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes, and get the final off to our agent. This will probably be published by our agent as an eBook. It’s about the size that novels were back in the Laser Books days, but it’s far to short for today’s print market. It still has to be formatted and the formatted copy has to be proof read so it will be a while.

I also used up all my energy. We have the opera tonight and I think we are sufficiently recovered that we can go out in public without endangering everyone although I will be careful to carry lots of handkerchiefs in case of coughing fit, and not to breathe on anyone.

I have several essays to write. The world goes on. I’ll try to be back on schedule tomorrow. We can hope.

The opera was Simone Boccanegra, one of Verdi’s early political operas written during the Risorgimento, but then revised two decades later. I had never seen it before. The soprano, Ana Maria Martinez, was great in some scenes and a bit soft in others. Since she’s sung major romantic leads – Mimi, Violetta among them – in the big and cavernous Los Angeles opera house, she knows what’s needed, and the reviews I’ve seen of this production have mostly praised her, I conclude she probably had an off night. It wasn’t our regular night either: we had to exchange our tickets (for nowhere near as good seats, alas) because we’ve been sick. Pity.

Of course the big star was Placido Domingo, who has been an opera great for more than fifty years. He still has the voice, and the acting ability. He sings baritone now and doesn’t have to reach high notes, which would probably be tough at his age. but in fact the age doesn’t show. It wasn’t difficult to believe him as a young mercenary captain from Pisa in the prologue (the rest of the opera takes place 25 years later). Boccanegra was an historic character, the first elected doge of Genoa. One presumes the Genoese adopted this office from Venice, which had been a Republic for centuries. The opera plot is twisted and complex and not always easy to follow; one presumes that Verdi’s contemporaries were able to follow the allusions to contemporary Italian politics better than we moderns can. Of course Italy was never really united until Mussolini negotiated his Concordat with the Pope. One wonders what Verdi would have made of that.

In any event, we much enjoyed the opera. I confess that I think I could have staged some of the scenes, particularly fight scenes, better, but I often think that. It has actually been many decades since I directed a stage production, and I’ve never directed the action in an opera, where the goal is not so much to emphasize dramatic action as to give the singers a chance to sound off properly.

And now it’s late and well past bed time.