#i should say that i am neither a composer nor a librettist

[stoportotouch]

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.

[infinitelytheheartexpands]

Vasco da Gama (Venice, 2013): Reactions, Part IV

Note: the following in no way is dunking on the performers or anyone else involved in this production, which was a perfectly good production/performance in my eyes. The Mixed Feelings I mentioned yesterday are in regards to the opera itself, and this is where I discuss them.

Anyway: why I have Mixed Feelings.

This is (mostly) not due to the music, which is overall very beautiful, and there are some really awesome moments in the score. Sélica, Nélusko, and Vasco’s big arias are all amazing, and I particularly enjoyed just about all the chorus scenes as well. And the final scene? I died. (Before you ask, yes, I do think Death By Toxic Flower Smell is dumb but yes, that was a wonderful death scene all the same.)

To my understanding, this performance was very cut (for instance, there was no ballet at all, and I’ve read that Sélica and Inès are actually supposed to have a confrontation duet in Act V before the latter leaves with Vasco, although there was no such duet here), which probably had some impact on my enjoyment of the overall opera, as it felt a little...rushed in places. The biggest example of this was the approximately three lines of recit that were all we got to explain that Sélica was reluctantly letting Vasco and Inès go.

But as I was saying, the disappointment for me came not from the music, but the story. Because this story is seriously messed up.

Now before I start, I want to make something clear: I am the last person to say that we should ignore or ‘cleanse’ history. History is messy. There’s a lot of moral and ethical problems you have to face when you really get into studying history, especially when studying historiography (the study of the study of history, or in this case, more the study of the presentation of history). I am all for studying these problems critically.

My main problem with Vasco da Gama is that it by and large has a lot of these moral and ethical problems to face— and it tries to avoid examining them, especially in regards to Vasco himself, who qualifies as one of the most asshole tenors I have EVER seen in an opera.

Specifically, the issues at hand are about racism, slavery, and colonialism. Much of the opera’s plot revolves around the fact that Sélica and Nélusko were taken by Vasco to not only be his slaves, but also essentially his main ‘evidence’ for his case that the Portuguese government should let him mount another expedition, displaying them like cattle in front of the governing council and pointing out their ‘unusual racial features’ as evidence that there are new undiscovered lands to explore. I’ll be completely honest: I almost decided to stop watching after that part in Act I, but decided to push on anyway.

Okay, also, I get that people are people and you can’t control who they fall in love with but OH MY GOD I HATED EVERYTHING ABOUT THE SÉLICA/VASCO RELATIONSHIP LIKE SERIOUSLY WHY. I mean, the idea of the slave falling in love with the very person who forcibly took her from her kingdom (remember, she’s a queen!), enslaved her, displayed her like chattel, CASUALLY GAVE HER TO HIS GIRLFRIEND BECAUSE HE WAS WORRIED SAID GIRLFRIEND WOULD BE JEALOUS OF HER, married her after losing his girlfriend (although she did kinda trap him into it a little— he had no initial intention of doing so— but more on that later), vowed to love her forever, and then LESS THAN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER abandoned her for another woman and just. left. And in return, Sélica...saved his life not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES. And that was before she let him get off scot-free with Inès and then brokenheartedly committed suicide because she loved him too much, I guess. It was a very, very little bit like the Énee/Didon relationship from Les Troyens, except a lot more toxic and with the addition of slavery.

The other huge problem I had with the story was Nélusko. Don’t get me wrong: great character, great music, love that he’s genuinely concerned about Sélica and her welfare and really truly loves her, also love that he’s the voice of reason in that he is the one character who points out how messed-up slavery and the whole situation are at every turn. He’d probably be the true hero of this story if it weren’t for one tiny detail:

He massacres virtually the entire Portuguese delegation.

And it’s not even one blow: first he causes two of the ships to wreck, then he leads a massacre of all the Portuguese men save Vasco on the last ship, then he wrecks said ship for good measure, and THEN he kills all the women except Inès and her companion because...reasons?

Anyway, it’s one of those moments where you love a character and then they turn around and disappoint you in such a huge way that you’re not really comfortable with them after that. And while I not only get his POV but also very much agree with it, dude, I feel like murdering all the Portuguese people was...a bit excessive, don’t you think?

I don’t know.

I feel like there’s a lot of room for interpretation and maybe it’s just the way I interpreted some things, like whether the opera is condoning or condemning colonialism. (I got mixed signals.) But in any case, the plot kinda just left a bad taste in my mouth. Also, with the exception of Sélica (and maybe the one dude who was hard-crushing on Vasco), everyone in this opera came off as either a) a complete and utter asshole, b) completely boring (sorry Inès), or c) some combination of a and b. Sometimes, an opera with a plot that...is kinda problematic can be redeemed if enough of its characters are interesting and complex. (Looking at you here, Jenufa.) This was not one of those cases. I’m not sure who the blame lies with on that one— especially because both its composer and librettist died before it premiered and as a result, the Paris Opéra felt freer to make a bunch of revisions— but in any case, neither the music nor the characters could save it.

TL;DR: Music good; plot is...pretty cringey; characters not very well-written either. Overall, tbh, I was kinda disappointed.