Everything I love is on the table, everything I love is out to sea

[sovay]

I can't believe I dreamed an entire opera whose closing performance by a small local outfit I was all set to attend before it was canceled at the last unavoidable minute. It was a Gian Carlo Menotti from 1948 and had never before received a Boston premiere. I had read its libretto for years because it was full of sand and sea-haunting: No body that presses its mouth to the shore closer than your mouth to mine. No eye that fades into the haze of the sun more fixed than your eye to mine. No ship of a letter that crosses the seas faster than my hand to yours, unless it has foundered, unless it has torn on the black rocks of the heart. It had one of his terse, enigmatic titles, The Visitor. The company that had put it up was called Marmalade and Gold, an allusion whose meaning did not escape the event horizon of waking, and specialized in bare-bones, slightly more than concert performances of oddities or undeserved obscurities of the twentieth-century opera world: I remember perusing the catalogue of previous seasons on their website and approving of their choices, all of which I suspect of not existing outside of the hour or so I was asleep. Erich Wolfgang Korngold did write a bunch of operas, mostly before—very popular choice—leaving Germany, but I do not believe a 1932 Der lahme König was among them. I am having a terrible week for which the external world offers nothing in the way of respite and even if I didn't get to hear any of its music, I appreciate the inside of my head attempting to furnish a break of art.

Comments

[ride_4ever]

Or is this the dreaming world and that the awake one?

[sovay]

Or is this the dreaming world and that the awake one?

Well, if so, I think we should all have the option of waking up and going to the opera instead of continuing to deal with . . . all of this.

[ride_4ever]

I second that!

[radiantfracture]

Why isn't your dreamworld the world? Your dreams are so true.

[asakiyume]

The bit of the libretto you recall here is awesome, that's for sure.

[sovay]

The bit of the libretto you recall here is awesome, that's for sure.

There was more in the dream that I couldn't bring out: I remember a sequence of repetitions, but not the words in them. I woke up and put ointment in my eye and immediately wrote what I could remember down. It may have been literal years since even that much was possible.

[sovay]

Why isn't your dreamworld the world? Your dreams are so true.

I wish. I would crash through dimensions like the Kool-Aid man for a Korngold Arthurian opera.

[kenjari]

Your dream conjured opera company sounds an awful lot like Odyssey Opera here in Boston. They just did a lesser-known Menotti opera, The Savages last month. If your dream world is breaking containment, I am all for it.

[moon_custafer]

No body that presses its mouth to the shore closer than your mouth to mine. No eye that fades into the haze of the sun more fixed than your eye to mine. No ship of a letter that crosses the seas faster than my hand to yours, unless it has foundered, unless it has torn on the black rocks of the heart.

Well that’s a love-spell if I ever heard one. Or maybe a bring-my-lover-home spell, of the kind that works infallibly but doesn’t guarantee said lover gets home intact or breathing.

[sovay]

Your dream conjured opera company sounds an awful lot like Odyssey Opera here in Boston. They just did a lesser-known Menotti opera, The Savages last month.

It's Gil Rose who did Opera Boston! That makes perfect sense! I'm so glad to see it!

(And Of Thee I Sing and Let 'Em Eat Cake just in time for the 2024 election, well done and ow.)

If your dream world is breaking containment, I am all for it.

Man, same.

[sovay]

Well that’s a love-spell if I ever heard one. Or maybe a bring-my-lover-home spell, of the kind that works infallibly but doesn’t guarantee said lover gets home intact or breathing.

I can't swear it wasn't. We are after all talking about the composer responsible for "The Black Swan."

[selkie]

I cannot bring respite but I do bring a tin of tuna belly!
Or maybe I can be respite in my own, boisterous way. I wish it were not going to be son-of-a-bitch pelting rain, we could go sit on the benches and partake of Expensive Delectable Clam.

[selkie]

August 2001. Dear Diary, there is unquestionably a dead girl in the bathroom. No one else knows that much Menotti and has the diction and ornamentation for it in this century. I wonder if this explains the disappearance of the two freshman roommates I was meant to have had, courtesy of the University housing office.