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Tuesday, April
30, 2002
Roberta is recovering. We had dinner with friends, and got
back late. I have been entirely unable to adjust to the new time, and I
don't get to sleep until about 4 or 5 AM, after which I want to sleep
until noon. This isn't good. At 1500 I went out with the
camera to the Spanish Steps, and I will get a good photo essay on the
cultural wars from that. It's going to take a bit of work, but I think I
have some good photos that have inspired some interesting thoughts. Tuesday
night was the opera. Foolishly I didn't take the camera. The Teatro
dell'Opera is small by our standards but magnificent. It says it was
restored in 1938, Victor Emmanuel, Reggio, Benito Mussolini, Duce, and
someone else who was governor of Rome being responsible for the
work. The opera was Adriana Lecouvrer, which I had
not only never seen but never heard of. I really don't know much about
Francesci Cilea or his librettist Arturo Colautti either. Fortunately
there was a plot summary in English. My Latin is a bit rusty, and of
course there aren't any supertitles although I found myself futilely
looking to where they are in the LA opera house. The scene is Paris in
1730 and begins at the Commedie Francaise. Adriana Lecouvreur was the best
known actress in Paris, and a friend of Voltaire. The plot is based
loosely on a true story and is best summarized as aristocrats and theater
people behaving badly. You don't expect things to
turn out well, and they don't. It's a well known operatic fact that
nothing improves a soprano's voice like TB. In this case the soprano, who
plays a great actress devoted to her work except for an all consuming
attachment to a heroic but faithless aristocrat (played at the opera's
opening by Enrico Caruso, but not tonight) is perfectly healthy until she is poisoned by a
sniffing a bunch of faded violets. That has no immediate effect, but after
about ten minutes she gets weaker while her voice gets stronger. That goes
on for another fifteen minutes, punctuated by brief collapses before she's
reinvigorated for another aria. Eventually she dies, of course. She was
poisoned by the mezzo-soprano, an aristocratic Princess. The Princess has
been using her baritone husband's love nest for liaisons with the tenor
and isn't about to let a good tenor get away. The husband has been trying
to seduce Adriana, but Adriana isn't interested, being completely
enthralled by the tenor who has been having an affair with the Princess in
the same house that the Prince has been using to dally with another
actress until he can trade her in on Adriana. He has more or less managed
to get rid of Duclos, the other actress, but he gets nowhere with Adriana.
We presume the Prince and Princess are stuck with each other after Adriana
dies. They had really interesting poisons in those days. There
is a very well performed ballet in the third act. All operas performed in
Paris had to include a formal ballet. Parisians expected a ballet, and the
composer had no choice but to put one in no matter what that might do to
the plot. In this case the ballet, the Judgment of Paris (five dancers,
Mercury, Paris, Juno, Minerva, and Venus, complete with golden apple of
discord) is performed as a ballet for the entertainment of the
guests of the Prince and Princess, so it fit right in, but the composer
got his revenge by having Adriana and the Princess have a deadly quarrel
during the climactic scene of the ballet, and the dancers don't get any
applause until their third act curtain call. There
are curtain calls after every act. Many of the performers aren't in Act
Four, and some never appear for the final curtain call. The baritone
Prince isn't seen after the third act, nor is his nasty little sidekick
the Abbe Chazeuil. The mezzo Princess isn't in the fourth act either, but
she gets in on the final curtain calls, as do the dancers from Act Three.
It all seems rather unfair, but perhaps the Prince wanted to get home and
didn't want to stick around for Act Four so he could get his curtain
call. The voices are very good to excellent, the
orchestra under Daniel Oren was excellent -- Oren not only gets top
billing but his name in the same large typeface as the composer. The
costumes and sets are splendid, it's all very professionally done, and
it's an excellent production. Roberta is more fond of opera than I am, and
knows a lot more about what to look for, but I liked it just fine.
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