The fields where they lay once now locked behind gates

Apparently this is travel week.

Der ferne Klang (1912) was worth its last-minute overnight to Annandale-on-Hudson. Even aside from the gorgeous ragbag modernity of the music (so far as I can tell, if Schreker liked a style or a grammar or a particular a/tonal effect, he threw it in and the results are as multivoiced as good dialogue), the story was fascinating in ways I hadn't expected from the opera's reputation. It's in deliberate argument with the traditional melodrama of the tormented artist and the faithless muse: he's not the focus of the story, she is; and the tragedy is not that she held him back or that he hesitated between love and art, but that in chasing a dream of romantic inspiration instead of holding fast to her—a false choice, one he never needed to make—he betrayed them both. I could summarize the opera and make it sound entirely conventional: by the time he meets her again, she's become a courtesan; they are reunited one last time on the eve of his debut as a composer; there will be some Liebestod before we're through. And that would misrepresent the opera so badly, it wouldn't be worth the instructive contrast. See it instead. I'm glad I did.

(It was also excellently staged; Thaddeus Strassberger won my heart forever by cutting one of Grete's arias to the frame-story from Fritz Lang's Der müde Tod (1921). Of the upcoming season at Opera Boston, Beethoven's Fidelio was the production I was planning to skip. Strassberger's directing. I think it's season tickets this year.)

Now I'm off to Purgatory Chasm in Sutton with fleurdelis28 and her sister. Presumably we will return. We'll be on the lookout for psychopomps.