I see shapes forming inside paintings

Tonight was the world premiere of Zhou Long and Cerise Lim Jacobs' Madame White Snake by Opera Boston; I saw it with fleurdelis28, gaudior, eredien, and nineweaving, and it was amazing. The short version is that there need to be more operas with Buddhist morals. The slightly longer version is that it is, appropriately, an opera of many shapes, not only the dual Chinese-American heritage that informs both music and staging or the human and spirit worlds its characters transition between, but also the polyphony of stances they take on such elemental and elusive things as love, truth, mortality, identity, nirvana, ultimately answering nothing definitely for the audience: the effect is not unlike a koan. The badly abbreviated musicology is that I wish I knew more about Beijing opera, because I could identify fragments of gesture, tonality, and vocal technique in the performances, but not anywhere near enough to parse all of their interactions with the primarily chromatic score, although Fleur-de-Lis pointed out that the most heavily stylized, spoken register was associated with characters in their supernatural states, so that we hear it most often from the androgynous, chimeric Xiao Qing (Michael Maniaci), the green snake who is now half-woman and was once a man, from Madame White Snake (Ying Huang) as she moves in and out of the serpentine and from Abbot Fahai (Dong-Jian Gong) in his capacity as badass magician-priest, and possibly never from Xu Xian (Peter Tantsits), the human herbalist who becomes the White Snake's husband. The random dramaturgical shout-out is to the projections: they were used sometimes as backdrop and sometimes as a scrim and were never in danger of becoming a distraction, which I could not say about a similar effect in the Boston Lyric's Turn of the Screw. The random costuming shout-out is to the dress worn by Madame White Snake on either side of her transformation: ivory-colored, glittering in patches, it is torn in layers and trails behind her, so that in the first act it suggests the thousand-year-old snakeskin she sheds to become a woman, in the fourth the new woman's skin she is shucked from—strung now with warm blood—to become a snake again. The random cultural shout-out is the bilingual surtitles. The orchestration included dizi, xun, and erhu. And I loved how each act, being one of the four seasons, had its own prevailing color and a classical Chinese poem (sung in translation; the libretto is in English) as both scene-setting and epigraph. From this point on I'd just ramble. I'd wanted to see this opera since I first heard about it in 2008, and it was eminently worth waiting and organizing for—especially to see it with people with whom one could converse animatedly afterward. The weather wasn't even as appalling as the last two days have been. And thanks to Fleur-de-Lis, I now own The Manuscript Poems of A. E. Housman ed. Tom Burns Haber (1955), which is just awesome.

And then I came home and found that my poem "Candle for the Tetragrammaton" has been accepted by Sybil's Garage, so basically, tonight: success.