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Oracle? Pillar? Octopus? Who'll see?
Despite feeling very little better today, I refused to give up all my plans for this weekend, and so this afternoon I baked a brick of chocolate with raspberries and crème de cassis, brought it to dinner with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sharhaun and the philosopher who does not (as yet) have a livejournal, and we all went to hear The Rake's Progress at Emmanuel Music. I am interested by my reactions to it. The singers were excellent, at least two of them were actors into the bargain, and while this was a concert version, whoever was responsible for the direction contrived some staging that was both effective and very fun (the auction scene was the standout, making use of a stepladder, a lulav, a bronze Roman bust, a plushie fish, and some sort of taxidermied bird; it must have blown their props budget and it was worth it). And this may be the first time I've attended an opera where I liked the libretto better than the music. It's not that it was bad music. It was angular, tonal, modernist-with-eighteenth-century-touches Stravinsky. But it didn't fit the words, their rhythms or their weight, and the few scenes where they coincided (the auction, the roaring boys and their whores, the card trick for Tom Rakewell's soul) made the disjoints elsewhere all the more distracting. You were always having to hear through it for the story. I don't think it can just have been that English wasn't Stravinsky's first language; Latin wasn't, either, and his Oedipus rex (1927) is terrific. So I have to conclude that he wanted entirely different emotional effects out of Auden's text than it appeared to require, but mostly what this seemed to result in was a lot of unintentional Verfremdungseffekt. Nonetheless, I am somehow left with the prevailing opinion that what I saw was awesome, so maybe it's like Godard's Vivre sa vie (1962), it only clicks inside your head, in hindsight. Either that, or I just like morality plays where the Devil's parting shrug is, "Many insist I do not exist / At times I wish I didn't."
What I don't understand, really, is how it took me until tonight to have a conversation about Good Omens (1990) in which somebody suggested Stephen Fry as Aziraphale, because that is obviously correct.
sharhaun and the philosopher who does not (as yet) have a livejournal, and we all went to hear The Rake's Progress at Emmanuel Music. I am interested by my reactions to it. The singers were excellent, at least two of them were actors into the bargain, and while this was a concert version, whoever was responsible for the direction contrived some staging that was both effective and very fun (the auction scene was the standout, making use of a stepladder, a lulav, a bronze Roman bust, a plushie fish, and some sort of taxidermied bird; it must have blown their props budget and it was worth it). And this may be the first time I've attended an opera where I liked the libretto better than the music. It's not that it was bad music. It was angular, tonal, modernist-with-eighteenth-century-touches Stravinsky. But it didn't fit the words, their rhythms or their weight, and the few scenes where they coincided (the auction, the roaring boys and their whores, the card trick for Tom Rakewell's soul) made the disjoints elsewhere all the more distracting. You were always having to hear through it for the story. I don't think it can just have been that English wasn't Stravinsky's first language; Latin wasn't, either, and his Oedipus rex (1927) is terrific. So I have to conclude that he wanted entirely different emotional effects out of Auden's text than it appeared to require, but mostly what this seemed to result in was a lot of unintentional Verfremdungseffekt. Nonetheless, I am somehow left with the prevailing opinion that what I saw was awesome, so maybe it's like Godard's Vivre sa vie (1962), it only clicks inside your head, in hindsight. Either that, or I just like morality plays where the Devil's parting shrug is, "Many insist I do not exist / At times I wish I didn't."What I don't understand, really, is how it took me until tonight to have a conversation about Good Omens (1990) in which somebody suggested Stephen Fry as Aziraphale, because that is obviously correct.
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I wouldn't cast him in that role, actually; I'm not entirely sure why, but I think I would prefer someone who looks more serpentine straight off. I'm very fond of him, though.
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I don't know if I would put it that strongly; I have very little idea of how the opera was written, so it may have come out sounding exactly the way Auden hoped. But I found myself wanting to read the libretto out loud, to make use of its shifting meters and rhythmic polyphony, and I think under these circumstances I am supposed to go home wanting to sing it.
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:P
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I believe you. I wish my memory still worked.
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*hugs* What do you want to do for our tenth anniversary? Sleep? Put on a culturally relevant film and sleep at it? Sleep over an artfully prepared risotto and some indifferent beaujolais nouveau?
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We could go for broke and sleep through a meteor shower.
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I figure we'll order Indian first: doze-as and mango lassitudes.
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