Rusalka (an opera review post)

When we think of fairy tales we think of what? Cinderella? Sleeping Beauty? The Little Mermaid? Sure, because those are fairy tales, and they come to mind, but they come to mind in their Disney versions. The versions where everything has a happy ending. In fact, we so much think of fairy tales these days in terms of Disney that people say things like wanting a fairy tale wedding or a fairy tale ending. All I have to say about that is, "Fuck that!"

I mean, have you even read fairy tales? Do you know what they're really like? The originals? Like, in Sleeping Beauty, part of that story has to do with the fact that she was impregnated while she slept. And The Little Mermaid? Dissolved into sea foam. Dissolved! And washed away because the prince decided to marry someone else because trying to get on with a girl who couldn't speak was too much for him. And don't even ask about Cinderella's stepsisters' feet.

Back in the day, fairy tales were cautionary.

Imagine taking a cautionary tale, one in which the protagonist dissolves into foam at the end, and turning it into an opera, a form already rife with tragedy! Yes, Rusalka is largely based on Hans Christian Andersen's mermaid story, though it draws inspiration from other sources as well, especially Wagner's Ring Cycle.

Rusalka's not a mermaid, though; she's a water nymph. Close enough, right? Her father is the Water Goblin; he seems to be the guy in charge of all the nymphs. Not that that's explained, but the opera opens with all of the other nymphs cavorting around and trying to gain the "favor" of the Water Goblin. All while Rusalka pines over the prince who can't see or hear her because she's a water nymph and lives down in a lake.

But I'm sure you know how the story goes.
Apart from the tragic ending, that is.

As is so often with SFO, the sets were amazing! I mean, really amazing. Maybe the best sets they've had that we've seen? I don't feel qualified to judge that, actually. What I really loved was that during the forest scenes, which were full of nymphs and fairy creatures, the trees moved around. It made it feel really magical to have the scenery shifting around during the action. The rest was really impressive, too.

As always, the performances were excellent. I think Rachel Willis-Sorensen was especially good as Rusalka. She brought an appropriate amount of longing and despair to the role. There's not a lot of joy for the character, only that brief moment when the prince notices her (after she's made her deal with the witch) and takes her to his castle. After that, the prince goes about flaunting another woman, basically, right in front of her. It doesn't get better from there. Willis-Sorensen does a pretty perfect job of channeling the character's grief.

I'm not saying this is one of my favorite operas, but I enjoyed this one more than my wife did, a rare occurrence for us since my wife starts out at a much higher love for any individual opera than I do. She's loved opera since she was a teenager, and I'm just learning it now. She felt the music was too slow in this one, and I can see that, but, thinking about it now, I might describe it as lush rather than slow. At any rate, it's definitely an opera I'd be open to seeing other iterations of.

One other thing of note: Rusalka is a Czech opera, as was The Makropulos Case, which I am still rather fascinated with and would like to see again. And it's from Czech theater that we get the word "robot." But Czech opera and theater hasn't been very popular outside of itself, mostly due to the difficult language, according to the experts. I'm intrigued enough that I want more.

Der Ring des Nibelungen (final thoughts)

The Ring of the Nibelung is a lot of opera; there's no denying that. Opera isn't like going to the movies, even if they are a similar form of entertainment, and they are a similar form of entertainment. However, it does require quite a bit more concentration to take in something that's in a different language. It can be challenging, especially with something this long.

However, I also think it's worth it. Of course, that's from the guy who will slog through books and movies that I know I'm not going to like just so that I will have the context of it. Or to prove that it's bad. Or whatever. You can take what I say about opera, then, with whatever kind of salt you need to use. But I do like opera, both in theory and in experience. I think it should be a more widespread form of entertainment, and it would be if it could break its bonds of tradition that old, white people have it chained to. Old white people like that opera is seen as some kind of elitist entertainment because it makes them feel superior to other people who don't see opera. But that's a different conversation.

The Ring is a significant achievement in opera-viewing. I didn't really appreciate the extent of that achievement until seeing it. I think it says something that I would be more than willing to see it again. In fact, I want to see it again. It's a complex story, and I think it needs another viewing.

Having said that, I am no "Wagnerian." I didn't find the opera to be any kind of "religious experience," as some people describe it. I've actually been having a hard time coming to terms with that viewpoint, in fact, but, then, some people view Game of Thrones that way and, by comparison, Thrones is so far inferior it's difficult to even call it a work of art.

Which is not to say that The Ring doesn't have its flaws. It actually has what I would consider some pretty significant flaws, the central one being the Ring itself. For a Ring of absolute power, it seems to do very little and fails to protect its wearer at every juncture during the opera. Of course, it's no different than the way magic is used by most authors: It only works when the author wants it to and, for whatever reason, fails the user at plot-opportune moments. So this isn't a just a problem I have with Wagner; it's a problem I tend to have with authors in general, especially when they don't follow the rules they themselves have set up for their work.

Based on the scant knowledge I have of Wagner, I'm going to say that the Ring is a metaphor for technology and that he represents himself within the opera through the character of Wotan. Wagner was not a fan of industrialization and viewed it as somewhat of a curse upon the world, the same way Wotan speaks of the Ring once he has resisted his own temptation to wield its power to control the world (which I found puzzling because Wotan was already in charge of the world, so to speak, so it seemed a bit odd to me that he would, then, feel like he needed the Ring to be in charge of it).

Wotan is a seeker of knowledge and spends lifetimes searching out all the secrets and hidden places of the world. And hatching schemes. Through the first part of the Cycle, Wotan's efforts are going toward building up Valhalla and, by extension, the world. It's his desire to bring into being a champion, a hero, who can wield the Ring and not be corrupted by it. Then, suddenly, at the beginning of Twilight of the Gods, we find that Wotan has retreated into Valhalla and locked all of the gods in with him and is waiting to burn it all down using the wood of what is the equivalent of the World Tree. There will be no escaping for the gods.

Maybe it's the events in The Valkyrie that push him in that direction. It's hard to say because he's still around meddling during the events in Siegfried, but his goals may have already shifted at that point. At any rate, I find the idea of the only way to save the world is to destroy it to be chilling, especially in our current political climate in which so many people actually believe that. The fanatical religious Right, as a group, believe in the apocalypse as a form of salvation and do more and more to usher in a destroyed world, which seems to have been Wagner's view based on the ending of The Ring.

Needless to say, I don't really understand this idea of destroying something in order to save it, but I suppose it is very Biblical. The Flood immediately comes to mind. And Sodom and Gomorrah. It's even a view echoed by the character Delores in Westworld. But I just don't think it's okay to make that decision for someone else. Why should you get to impose your view of whether something is broken or not onto me. Well, you shouldn't.

The question of burning the world down to purify it is particularly relevant today. Much to my horror. It's a little weird to experience that same kind of thought in a piece of work dating back 150 years. It's more than a little weird to find how close we are, right now, to fulfilling Wagner's vision.

Gotterdammerung (an opera review post)

My wife went to the opera, and all I got was this t-shirt...
Okay, well, that's not precisely true since I also went to the opera. In fact, I'm the one who wanted to go to this... exercise in endurance. Seriously, why does your butt hurt from sitting? Isn't that what it's made for?
Okay, maybe not.

But I digress...

For an opera named Twilight of the Gods, there are not a lot of gods in this one. In fact, an appearance by one lone Valkyrie is about as close to a god as we get, and the Valkyries, though immortal (other than Brunnhilde, who is no longer a Valkyrie), are not quite gods. It was kind of weird to not have Wotan show up at all, but he's gone and locked himself up inside of Valhalla -- along with all of the other gods -- and is waiting to burn it all down. Yeah, I'm not going to try to explain how we got to that point; you can go read a plot synopsis if you want to.

I think I should make it clear that Siegfried is an asshole. Sure, he's the greatest hero in the world, but that doesn't make it okay to be a blatant, flaming asshole. Which he is. Seriously. His go-to response to any and every situation, including just meeting someone, is, "Hey, I'm going to fight you!" Occasionally, he'd throw in, "...or we can be friends," but that isn't the norm.

And he's an abuser of women. Not like he beat them up or anything, but he definitely had that "I'm famous, so I can grab 'em by the pussy" attitude. At one point, the Rhinemaidens are trying to warn him that he needs to give up the Ring or he's going to be dead before the end of the day, and his response is, "I'll tell you what: Why don't all three of you have sex with me, then we can talk about the Ring." Of course, when they reject him, his response to that is, "Well, I'm faithful to my wife, anyway." His wife who is not Brunnhilde, because -- remember last post when I said he was stupid? -- he got tricked into drinking a potion that made him forget all about Brunnhilde, so he married someone else, a woman named Gutrune.

Toss into this mix Hagen. Hagen is the son of Alberich via the rape of Gutrune's mother and merely a tool of Alberich to try to reclaim the Ring. Because, evidently, that's the primary purpose of children: to be the tools by which you accomplish your own goals. At least that's what we can learn from Alberich, Mime, and Wotan. Oh, also, Hagen has a thing for his half-sister and keeps trying to put the moves on her.

It's all a very sordid affair and that's before Brunnhilde gets involved.

All of that to say that I didn't feel bad at all for Siegfried for what happens to him. Okay, maybe a little bad, but only because he has a moment of being horrified at what he's done to Brunnhilde once he regains his memory, just before he's... well, that would be telling. The problem is that he's regretful for the unintentional asshole move he made but, apparently, is perfectly okay with all of the other ways he's an asshole. Needless to say, Siegfried is a flawed hero, which is not a bad thing from a story perspective.

A thing I really liked in this production is the handling of the Rhine and the Rhinemaidens. Back in Das Rheingold when we first meet them, they are playing and cavorting in a pristine Rhine river. The world is young! Everything is fresh and good. But, when we find them again, here in Gotterdammerung, the Rhine is clogged with trash and pollution and the maidens seem to spend their time trying to get garbage out of their river. It was a very pointed touch, one I thought was great, especially now as we endure an administration that is doing everything it can to actively destroy the environment.

The most interesting aspect of Gotterdammerung is Brunnhilde's persistence in "punishing" Siegfried for the harm he did her even once she realizes it wasn't really his fault. But, then, some of what he did was because of whom he was as a person, which, as I've pointed out, wasn't all that great. So what wrongs does he do to Brunnhilde?
1. He compels her to have sex with him even after she has asked to remain pure. But she's cursed to obey his every order, so she can't actually turn him down when he presses the issue.
2. Once he's forgotten her, he enacts a subterfuge against her and gifts her to another man whom she is also compelled to obey through the curse on her.
3. You can surmise at that point that she has had to have sex with the second man, also against her will, though she would not have been able to actually tell him no. Thanks, Wotan!

The real tragedy in all of this is that Brunnhilde legitimately loves Siegfried. As she tells him, she loved him from before he was born. However, she doesn't let how she feels get in the way of what she feels is justice for his betrayal of her.

It was a good opera. All of them were.
I'd go back and do the 16 hours again. I think that says a lot.

Siegfried (an opera review post)

Ah, Siegfried, if only you had not been so stupid...
Perhaps.
But, then, opera contains a lot of tragedy, so maybe this was all inevitable.

However, it wasn't the dragon (pictured above) that will do him in, nor will he be done in in this opera.

You know, normally, battling a dragon isn't a thing you're going to see in a stage production. Normally, someone writing for a stage production, knowing how difficult it would be, is going to circumvent any dragon fighting on stage. Not Wagner. It makes me wonder how he staged this the first time it was performed. Not enough to do the research on it, but it does make me wonder. Of course, he did have a special theater built just for the Ring Cycle, so maybe I shouldn't wonder too hard.

Siegfried is the culmination of all of Wotan's meddling and impregnating women, the son of the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde. Maybe that accounts for his... lack... in the intellect department. Daniel Brenna does a great job with Siegfried's rather vacuous mode of being, a mode of being always looking for a fight, seemingly for no other reason than to fight. Maybe to prove that he's the best, but it seems he just approaches every situation with a "hey, let's fight" attitude. It doesn't hurt, I suppose, that he has a magic sword.

The fight with the dragon, Fafner, is important. Fafner is one of the giants from Das Rheingold; the one who ended up not dead and with the Ring. He's a dragon through the magic of the Tarnhelm, a shape he's taken to protect the Ring and his hoard of gold. So, just to be clear, Fafner has a ring which could allow him to rule the world and, yet, he's hiding in a cave in the form a dragon instead.

To flash back: Alberich, who forged the Ring, rather than using it to control the world, was busy using it to find more and more gold and amass it into a hoard, the hoard that Fafner is now protecting. At this point, I'm a bit hazy on what exactly the Ring does other than give the owner an extreme lust for gold.

Because it certainly doesn't save Fafner anymore than it saved Alberich from having Wotan cut it from his hand. But more on that later...

The best scene in this opera, possibly the best scene from the Cycle, happens just after Siegfried has defeated Fafner. See, Siegfried only fights the dragon because he was put up to it. Put up to it by his adopted father Mime, Alberich's brother, who lusts after the Ring and thinks he can outwit Siegfried to get the Ring if only Siegfried will kill the dragon. Honestly, this shouldn't have been very difficult to do but for one thing: Siegfried gains the temporary ability to hear Mime's thoughts and kills him instead. But David Cangelosi, as Mime, is fantastic in this scene. Every time he says something that comes out in words that reveal his true thoughts, his reaction is fabulous. It made me sad to see the character go.

But Mime is just another example of a "father" in this opera, using his "child" as a tool to achieve some selfish end. He needed to go.

Siegfried ends with Siegfried "rescuing" Brunnhilde, the former Valkyrie, from her "eternal" sleep, eternal being relative to however long it took a man to come along who was brave enough to walk through the flames to wake her with a kiss, so in this case about 20 years. Depending on how old Siegfried is. Of course, waking Brunnhilde just moves her along to the next portion of her punishment, the part where she has to marry the man who wakes and do whatever he commands of her.

So let's look back a moment:
Brunnhilde is Wotan's daughter, a previous immortal.
Siegfried is the grandson of Wotan twice over, since both of his parents were Wotan's kids. I believe that makes Brunnhilde Siegfried's aunt and, maybe, his cousin. It's actually a little confusing. At any rate, it's just a little more incest to add to the mix.
Oh, and, evidently, Brunnhilde is a virgin. At least, she goes on about how she's never been touched before for quite a while before she finally goes off with Siegfried to do the deed. What's a little incest among gods, um, ex-gods, right?

Just to be clear here, I'm leaving a lot of the plot out, because you can always look up the plot if you want to. My focus is on the production, themes, and pivotal moments. What I know for sure is that the Ring Cycle is a complex piece of work and I walked out of it, all 16 hours of it, being willing to go through that again for another viewing. There was no point where I was bored or felt like I was wasting my time.

Die Walkure (an opera review post)

"Ride of the Valkyries" is one of the most famous pieces of music in the world. It's entirely memorable, and it's been used in everything from Apocalypse Now to Looney Tunes, so it would be surprising if you've never heard it. I have to say, the arrival of the Valkyries in this production was amazing. They came in by parachute! Okay, not exactly literally, but they "fell from the sky." On parachutes. Amazing.

The Valkyrie is a jump ahead from The Rhinegold. Some unspecified amount of time jump. Long enough ahead that Wotan has a whole slew of kids, all grown up and immortal. Well, most of them are immortal. Two of them, twins, are the offspring of some mortal woman Wotan decided to have a fling with and are not, therefore, immortal. And they don't seem to have gained any specific benefits by having a god as a father, either. Fricka, Wotan's wife, isn't happy about any of Wotan's offspring, since none of them are hers, but she's especially not happy about Siegmund, one of the twins. He's Wotan's favorite and, evidently, the only male offspring Wotan has. At least, he's the only male mentioned.

Still, everything might have been fine except... well... Look, Siegmund and Sieglinde were separated as young children and hadn't seen each other in, like, two decades when they came across each other. It's not exactly their fault that it was love at first sight. Except that, after talking about their fathers, they come to realize it's the same father and realize they're twins and, instead of having an "ewww! gross!" response, they're like, "We're twins! Even better!" As my wife put it: twincest.

And thus ends Act One.

Which left us with a crawly feeling and me wondering if we were somehow watching Flowers in the Attic by mistake. I mean, was this a thing Wagner felt was okay?

But, no... Well, at least, maybe not. Act II does pick up with Fricka questioning the morality of twincest. Of course, she's using it as a ploy because she hates Siegmund, and Wotan defends the relationship because "they're in love." It's difficult to know where Wagner actually stood on the issue from the content of the opera (and I'm not going to go researching Wagner's life, at the moment; I don't care about it that much). At any rate, it's an interesting plot point for the opera, especially since everything that happens after could have been accomplished if the twins had, well, not been twins.

The real takeaway from Die Walkure is that Wotan is a horrible father. He abandoned Siegmund and Sieglinde before they were old enough to know who he was, and he doesn't have any care at all for Sieglinde. Siegmund might be his favorite, but it's only from a distance. His other children, the Valkyries, are just tools in his quest to fill Valhalla with heroes with which to defend it. Brunnhilde is the only one of his children with whom he has any kind of relationship, and he uses her more harshly than any of the rest, in the end stripping her of her immortality -- among other things -- and that was a punishment for her doing what it was that Wotan wanted her to do.

Yeah... Harsh.

Greer Grimsley is one of the best opera performers I've seen at this point. Wotan is an asshole. Wait. Wotan is an Asshole. And, yet, Grimsley manages to play the character in such a way so that he's also sympathetic. He's doing horrible things to people and manipulating... everything... and you feel bad for the guy. It's like in Infinity War when Thanos throws Gamora down in the pit as a sacrifice except Grimsley makes you feel bad for Wotan as he's cursing Brunnhilde. I never felt bad for Thanos. Huh. There's a lot in the whole Infinity War plot that very much resembles the Ring Cycle. What did I tell you about the influence on pop culture this piece has had?

Das Rheingold (an opera review post)

Let's start out be stealing a quote from a completely unrelated story:
"...this, like any other story worth telling, is all about a girl."
Or, in this case, three girls.
At least, that's where it starts.

Das Rheingold is interesting in that it was the last part of the story Wagner conceived. Actually, he worked his way backwards, having first thought of the arc's ultimate climax, then filling in the required backstory as he wrote. Das Rheingold is considered a prologue, so it's not entirely necessary to the rest of the arc, but it does provide some pretty interesting background.

The opera opens with the three Rhine maidens cavorting in a river, which, I suppose, is what Rhine maidens do. Their actual task is to guard the Rhine gold, but that seems to be a rather boring and thankless task, so they spend their time playing games in the water. This is what Alberich finds them doing when he stumbles upon them.

This is a recipe for conflict from the very beginning. See, Alberich is a dwarf from Nibelung, which is to say that Alberich is not handsome. That doesn't stop him from being smitten by the scantily clad water sprites playing in the river, and he decides he's going to catch one and make her his own. To say this is in direct conflict with the desires of the maidens is an understatement. Not only do they not wish to "be caught" by him but, upon noticing him and how ugly he is, they decide to have some "fun" with him, which is to say that they decide to torment him with their beauty.

There's a good analogy here for today's incel movement. Putting aside the fact that the maidens are deliberating torturing him through their flirtatious ways, Alberich has already decided that he deserves to have them. Or at least one of them. How they feel about it doesn't matter to him; he feels that he has been denied something his by right because none of the three want him.

But that would have been the end of it except for the Rhine gold.

The Rhine gold is not like normal gold. It has magical properties that can allow the possessor of the gold to forge a magic ring that will give him absolute power. The only catch is that, to forge the ring, the smith must curse love and forsake it forever. After his treatment at the hands of the maidens -- or his lack of treatment at their hands, if you know what I mean -- Alberich decides that's not such a bad deal, curses love, and steals the gold. Besides, once he's become king of the world, he can compel them to have sex with him, no love required.

This, also, sounds like the men of the incel movement. And here's where I point out that Alberich is the villain in this story. Or, at least, a villain. These guys are not heroes, no matter how wronged they feel they've been.

All of that is just the beginning, maybe the first 25 minutes or so, which is way more synopsis than I usually like to give, but I wanted to make a point. Needless to say, much of the rest of the action revolves around the Ring that Alberich forges.

This particular production was great, even better than the one I mentioned that we watched on dvd. The staging was better. The actors were better. The sets were better. In particular, the character of Loge (Loki) was better. I'm sure, at least in part, this was due to the actor, Stefan Margita, who is wonderful, but it's also choices of presentation of the character by the director, Francesca Zambello. Loge is definitely my favorite character in Das Rheingold. Greer Grimsley, as Wotan (Odin), is also a step up from the other production and is pretty amazing.

But, then, the San Francisco Opera can generally be counted on for delivering great performances.

Kill the Wabbit! or Anticipating The Ring

Opera...

Most people don't give opera a second thought. Or a first thought, for that matter. I mean, it's kind of a dead form of entertainment, right? That's certainly what I used to think about it. And you could make a case for that, I suppose, since it's a relatively limited form of entertainment. Not that it has to be that way, but it requires a lot of training and, well, there are all sorts of things I could get into about this, but none of it's what this post is about, so we can have that discussion some other time.

However, despite the fact that opera has become rather exclusive, it has influenced popular culture in ways people are unaware of and don't understand. Just the influence in music is unmistakable, and I don't even know that much about music or music history, but you can find pieces of opera music in, well, everything. Okay, maybe not everything, but it's fairly pervasive. But it's not just music, though I don't have the background (and am not going to do the research right now) to tell you how far the reach of opera is.

I do know enough, though, to be able to say that it's possible that Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle is the foundation of... well, a tremendous amount of our current pop culture. Or at least related to it.

Which brings me to the point: The San Francisco opera is doing the Ring Cycle! [Actually, by the time this posts, I will be in the middle of watching this, but, as I write this, I'm still a day away from Das Rheingold, the prologue to the cycle.] I'm very excited to see this. All 16 hours of it. Yeah, you heard me: 16 hours! Don't worry; it's divided into four operas presented on four, almost consecutive evenings (though there are opera houses who present the cycle in one marathon performance!).

In preparation for this (this is such a big deal, you have to buy tickets a year in advance!), my wife got me a copy of Das Rheingold for Christmas. It's a dvd of a revolutionary production of the cycle. We only just last week sat down and finally watched it, and the threads of influence are almost immediately apparent. I'll tell you the big three, which should be self-explanatory enough for you to get what I mean about it being foundational: The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Marvel Comics. Not to mention Bugs Bunny. It was well worth the watch even if I hadn't like it.

But I did like it! It was a good and interesting story and it's too bad that people are so unfamiliar with it these days.

One thing of note: The opera is done recitative. I'm pretty sure there are no arias in the entire thing. If you've followed my opera reviews at all, you'll know that I pretty typically do not like operas done entirely recitative. Generally speaking, this is due to the music more than the actual style. For some reason, post-Wagner operas done recitative tend to have very droning music with very little melody that -- for me, anyway -- makes it difficult to stay focused. It's like a very aggressive way to put people to sleep. But that wasn't the case with Das Rheingold. Despite the recitative quality, the music was very melodic, soaring in places, even. I wonder what changed with people after Wagner. Or maybe it's just a matter of skill? I don't know.

I do know, though, that I'm pretty sure that opera should not be a thing of the past.