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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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fleurdelis28 and her sister. Presumably we will return. We'll be on the lookout for psychopomps.
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.
no subject
Have a good time at the Chasm. You'd better return, cos if you don't the Underworld will be stormed by a vast army of your friends who want to read the next bit of your Pharsalia translation.
no subject
If you have anyone to stay with in the relevant area of the Hudson Valley, I recommend taking advantage of their hospitality.
You'd better return, cos if you don't the Underworld will be stormed by a vast army of your friends who want to read the next bit of your Pharsalia translation.
. . . that would be kind of awesome, actually, but I take your point.
no subject
I haven't, alas, but thanks for the recc--an I did, I would.
. . . that would be kind of awesome, actually, but I take your point.
It would be, but storming the Underworld sounds like a lot of work. And we might be stuck running it, after.