But, when they should transform to newts, are naughty and erratic

[sovay]

Yesterday I felt optimistic enough about this cold to go out and meet ratatosk for lunch at Dave's Fresh Pasta and then hang out until the evening, trying not to cough on anyone too badly and mostly succeeding. (He has two books of Walter Garstang. I got to watch a puppet feed a cat. It was great.) Today I am back to drinking soup and sounding like a TB ward. Rabbit, rabbit. Other less festive noises. Links.

1. I didn't know anyone had written a revamp of Five Children and It. Can someone who isn't me read this first and tell me what on earth it's like?

2. I have tickets next week for Peter Maxwell Davies' The Lighthouse at the Boston Lyric Opera. I've never heard the opera, but it's based on the mystery of the Flannan Isles light (and I got a discount for being an ex-Opera Boston subscriber). I am looking forward.

3. I hope people do come to refer to this work, academically, as the Whoopensocker Dictionary.

4. cucumberseed: Cookiethulhu.

5. This documentary really sounds like porn for me.

Comments

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

2. Wow, I'd love to hear more about this - it could be the thing that gets me into opera at last.

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

Actually, I lie - have you heard Peter Hammill's opera of The House of Usher? Excellent, but very hard to find.

Also, I doubt you're into 70s prog-jazz, but there's also the 23 minute song Hammill did as Van der Graaf Generator: "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers". Superb, but best approached with caution.

- M

[sovay]

Wow, I'd love to hear more about this - it could be the thing that gets me into opera at last.

My two favorite twentieth-century operas are Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium (1947) and Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes (1945). I can tell you why I like them, if you think it will help.

(I can also tell you why I like more classical operas, but I assume you will have tried those already.)

Also, I doubt you're into 70s prog-jazz, but there's also the 23 minute song Hammill did as Van der Graaf Generator: "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers". Superb, but best approached with caution.

I'm already attracted by the (even misspelled) band name . . .

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

*I can tell you why I like them, if you think it will help.*

Please do, if it's not a pain.

[sovay]

Please do, if it's not a pain.

It's not a pain if I do it through music.

For years, my standard audition aria was a song called "The Black Swan." I heard it for the first time in high school; it gave me nightmares.

The sun has fallen and it lies in blood
The moon is weaving bandages of gold
O black swan, where, o where is my lover gone?
Torn and tattered is my bridal gown and my lamp is lost

With silver needles and with silver thread
The stars stitch a shroud for the dying sun
O black swan, where, o where has my lover gone?
I had given him a kiss of fire and a golden ring

Don't you hear your lover moan?
Eyes of glass and feet of stone
Shells for teeth and weeds for tongue
Deep, deep down in the river's bed, he's looking for the ring
Eyes wide open, never asleep, he's looking for the ring

The spools unravel and the needles break
The sun is buried and the stars weep
O black wave, o black wave, take me away with you
I will share with you my golden hair and my bridal crown

O take me down with you
Take me down to my wandering lover
With my child unborn

The title character of The Medium is a fraud. Her particular clientele are griefstricken parents, convinced that their dead children communicate with them through the vocal talents of Monica, Madame Flora's never-seen daughter, and the silent puppet-mastery of Toby, the mute, feral boy she took off the streets of Budapest one starving winter. The two of them are not much older than the ghosts they pretend to be; they play at love as if it is one more new trick and it is beginning to turn into the real thing—shy, capricious, cruel. Madame Flora drinks heavily, clutches her daughter like her rosary and beats Toby when the strange, wordless way he looks at her begins to trouble her conscience; they are used to her rages. What they are not used to her is her fear. At the seance, she felt something touch her: a cold, cold hand at her throat. Monica swears she saw nothing. Toby only stares, as uncanny a thing as one of his puppets. If she's lucky, she's only losing her mind to drink. She cannot shake the terror that for once in her false life, she called up something true—and it is not a plaintively singing daughter or a laughing infant boy. The first act closes as she shivers in her daughter's arms, praying while Monica sings a lullaby from her own not-so-long-ago childhood, to soothe her. Drowned lovers and dying suns. If the ghost in the opera is real, I don't think Madame Flora is the one who made it manifest.

[sovay]

I do not have the same history with the "Embroidery Aria," but I did perform it two years ago for a benefit in October, which is the season where it belongs.

Peter Grimes (1945), Benjamin Britten’s first full-length opera, takes place in the insular world of the Borough, a small coastal town in Suffolk near the beginning of the nineteenth century. The title character is an outsider among the fishermen: solitary, not much liked, an unpredictable mix of visionary and taciturn, with a brutal temper. It is widely believed that he murdered his first apprentice, although the coroner’s inquest cleared him. Now a second boy has gone missing and local opinion needs very little encouragement to turn ugly. Grimes’ sole ally in the Borough is the widow Ellen Orford, whom he dreams vaguely of marrying, respected and rich, safe. She knitted his new apprentice a jersey. It has been found washed up at the tide-line. Looking at the anchor she embroidered on it, Ellen tries not to admit what this discovery might mean.

Embroidery in childhood was
a luxury of idleness.
A coil of silken thread giving
dreams of a silk and satin life.
Now my broidery affords
the clue whose meaning we avoid.
My hand remembered its old skill—
these stitches tell a curious tale.
I remember I was brooding
on the fantasies of children
and dreamt that only by wishing
I could bring some silk into their lives.
Now my broidery affords
the clue whose meaning we avoid.

Its melody is like a needle dipping and sewing through cloth, its halting, half-beat rhythm the thought she cannot force herself away from. The whole opera is filled with the sea, the heave and drag of tides, the dazzle of light off the waves, undertows and murky swirls of storm. It is not an allegory; its antihero is too complicated for that. The sea outlives everything, but we remember and are scarred.

I hope that gives you some idea.

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

You are a star. Thank you.

[sovay]

You are a star. Thank you.

You're welcome. If you like the music, I will be glad to send you both operas entire.