pathologicopera

[pathologicopera]

NOT A TREATMENT I.I: WHAT IS OPERA?

you know? opera. you probably have at least a vague idea about what opera is, especially if you’re following this blog, because i have not shut up about it since i was eight. i am, however, very aware that not everybody actually has a complete idea of what opera actually is, so while i’m not going to do a 101 because that would be annoying for both of us, i will take you through it in a level of detail.

the very short answer to the question of what opera is is, basically, opera is a story set to music. generally it will be sung through (no dialogue), but this isn’t a rule. most of the best known operas are in italian, german, french, and russian but there are some in english and czech that are quite well know. many different cultures have opera (or music-drama, or whatever you want to call it), etc.

the reason it’s quite difficult to pin down what an opera is is because opera is a similarly broad descriptor to, for example, “book”, or “game”. yes, there are broad strokes that will be carried across the entire genre of Opera or Book or Game, but replying to “what sort of thing do you like to read?” with “books” is unhelpful. likewise, replying to “what sort of entertainment do you like?” with “opera” is, while possibly helpful in the broadest sense, similarly useful and descriptive to describing “books” as your favourite form of literature.

for one thing, the fact that opera as a genre has spanned several centuries and been created by hundreds of cultures means that saying that opera is your favourite form of entertainment could mean virtually anything. do you mean, for example, chinese opera? or do you mean 17th century italian favola in musica such as l’orfeo? do you like 20th century english opera by composers such as benjamin britten, or perhaps comic operas like mozart’s, from the 18th century?

i, personally, really like giuseppe verdi, an italian composer from the 19th century. but some people can’t stand him and prefer the next Big Operatic School, verismo (small stories about ordinary people). opera has... shall we say an unfortunate reputation as something that’s really only for rich old white people that opera houses don’t really know how to combat (sidenote: i loved the “are you opera enough?” campaign from the lyric. i used to think i was opera enough, but now i’m not sure). i have opinions on what to do about that but i won’t get into it here.

the thing relevant to what i’m trying to get across here, though, that opera is, is the fact that opera can often be a way of telling stories about very large, overarching things with a fairly small number of people. an opera about, for example, the concept of religious repression, or even the idea of the spanish inquisition, would be at best unwieldy and at worst awful. verdi’s opera don carlo, on the other hand, manages to get the point across and is only preachy with it like... once, but i don’t mind.

[pathologicopera]

something akin to a treatment

 (this is probably an idea that needs in some way to be justified, so i ought, perhaps, to do that. here, in this series of posts, because breaking a large task down into several smaller tasks. i will be tagging it with not a treatment, because the double meaning pleases me, and breaking it down into parts.

these may change as i go on, and they obviously won’t all be essay-length but i need somewhere to write down my ideas. also as i write these i will link them back here so that you can peruse them at your leisure. there are probably also going to be other posts that are more me trying to work out where i’m going with this stuff, which i will probably tag as rubber duck.

PART ONE: BACKGROUND INFORMATION

what is opera?

what is pathologic?

okay. cool. finally: why pathologic and opera?

PART TWO: PRELIMINARY MUSICOLOGY AND STUFF

a hopefully at least fairly brief background on russian opera

(ludo)musicology for the uninitiated, via The Pathologics

there is very little research on music from where pathologic might be set but that isn’t stopping me

russian folk music and orthodox church music for the uninitiated

20th century russian musicology for the uninitiated

PART THREE: JUST EXPLAINING SOME POSSIBLE MUSICAL INFLUENCES THAT I HAVE IDENTIFIED

town vs. steppe

utopians vs. termites vs. humbles

what if the different parts of the town had different music?

PART FOUR: TONIGHT’S THEME IS... THEMES

what i’m going to be doing with this section

dmitri shostakovich and pavel chesnokov both had some parallels with pathologic

you’re in the story, so you can’t play by your own rules any more: verdi’s la forza del destino

he’s in the steppe, he’s miserable, he’s hallucinating, and he can’t leave: borodin’s prince igor

your parents had bad ideas that damaged you irrevocably: verdi’s il trovatore

religion is incomprehensible, elevating, edifying, and terrifying: szymanowski’s krol roger (amongst many other things)

[pathologicopera]

okay my special interests are coagulating in an interesting way again; time to make a post about the Pathologic Opera Playing Only In My Mind.

i’ve talked a bit about voice types, which i have admittedly revised in my head a bit as i go, but that’s not all i’ve thought about. here’s a bit about stage picture, themes, musical style, and directorial style.

there is a specific type of somewhat self-referential and self-aware art music dating all the way back to the baroque and before such as purcell’s come ye sons of art! and ode to st. cecilia that is either about music or specifically about performance. it isn’t actually a genre but it’s very much something that you’ll notice after a while. britten also got quite into it, again with some st. cecilia-related music (hymn thereto this time) but also with things like his cantata rejoice in the lamb. this also occurs to a lesser or greater extent in his opera, especially in gloriana thematically and in death in venice.

on a surface level there are a couple of references that you could make, that are just “this sounds like this”. pathologic is also very aware of its status as a game or as a play i always imagined that you would kill probably young vlad on-stage and have something akin to billy’s execution and the subsequent down all hands and see that they go chorus. as russian romantic opera is very much its own thing with its own traditions born out of centuries of russian history i would also be very inclined to lean on that. if you’re doing britten-inspired that could work pretty well – britten wrote arrangements of folk songs in his youth and retained that interest long into his career so it might be a little pulling around but also an interesting combination.

i keep updating the post with my pathologic playlist which now includes wond’rous machine (from purcell’s ode to st. cecilia) and for a reason separate to what i think about mark immortell, who just has the vibes of a countertenor and for whom i just like the irony of baroque, a very early genre which has a strong convention of historically informed practice, combined with a character who essentially represents pulling apart tradition. wond’rous machine is specifically about progress supplanting tradition – in this case through the lens of pipe organs supplanting the sorts of ensembles that composers such as monteverdi would have written for. so i’m also thinking that the plague gets a style similar to this.

this is the point at which i will tell you my Separate Thought About St. Cecilia And Potential Uses For Her, and that is basically that victoria snr. and capella both get the symbolism traditionally associated with her. st. cecilia is the patron saint of musicians – her feast day is actually britten’s birthday – and the story is that she was an avowed virgin who was forced to be married off to to a man that she didn’t love. at her wedding she sat apart and ‘sung to god in her heart’. the symbolism is broadly “it’s my opera so i get to decide on the religious symbolism” but the self-reference of the patron of musicians is. quite a delightful idea.

unfortunately we must now talk about religion, but don’t worry. we won’t talk about it very much, because tbh the end of Pathologic As An Opera is like… idk how you would even achieve that and that’s one of the two places where it comes into play and that’s more me noticing that the loading screen when you load a save in a game that you’ve finished in p2 reminds me of and i saw a new heaven than it is any particular informed statement. (to be honest the diurnal ending generally gives me those vibes.) i… struggle in vain mostly with clara because her symbolism is so deliberately mixed up even though she’s the most obviously religiously-themed character.

the other thing i was thinking was specifically artemy retrieving the living blood and that is a fairly straightforward “well that reminds me of the nunc dimittis”. there’s a famous russian (or old church slavonic) setting of that by rachmaninov with a very distinctive ending figure of a descending scale for the second basses going down to a Bb1 and referencing that at some point would probably make other people go “oh. ha. nunc dimittis”, which is… really all i would hope for.

anyway. direction. because pathologic is a rare case where regietheater doesn’t just work but is actually probably actively necessary. i have made the joke before that mark is probably a director who didn’t get booed at bayreuth and let it go to his head, but mark-as-character vs. mark-as-director could be an interesting idea dramatically speaking. i don’t really know how you would do that other than what i mentioned above with him singing in a baroque style.

finally, i need a whole section on wagner, despite not being too into wagner. this is purely because i want to discuss the parallel between artemy destroying the polyhedron brunnhilde destroying valhalla at the end of the ring, and also my Pet Thought about the fisher king narrative as it relates/could relate to pathologic. the latter of these i was originally planning to cover in zum raum wird but unfortunately i have adhd and cannot follow a project through to its end. (and i’m gonna rewrite it eventually.) this is… really a bit more regietheater because one could spin the end of the ring into what i mentioned before about wond’rous machine. it’s progress supplanting tradition, albeit in a very dramatic way. it also works equally well for daniil and artemy’s endings (or at least for the diurnal ending).

the fisher king thing is a bit more complicated because there are a lot of places that it applies, not all of which i think it would make sense to bring it up. looking at it thematically though the inheritance of a barren land theme and the progress/tradition theme could (ironically) coexist pretty well so… pointing to either clara’s ending or the nocturnal ending but i think clara’s probably works better with the original theming. idk this post got away from me and now i can’t get it back again. enjoy.

[pathologicopera]

Plagued by motifs, symbols, and most of all, by tiresome haunting refrains,

[pathologicopera]

Bertolt Brecht on casting a play.

[pathologicopera]

have had some further and somewhat contradictory thoughts about the Musical Language in the pathologic opera that exists only in my head, as well as about certain other Symbolic Aspects of the piece. so please excuse me while i try to figure those out. perhaps, even, in this poast.