Ten Operas

This is a list, and you know I love lists.  These 10 operas are all operas which I had never heard before I began blogging and have never seen a second time.  All stand out in my mind as outstanding memories.  None of them came to me by way of the Met and none are even close to the top 100.  I have listed them in order of their premier dates.  They cover the entire history of opera, and all of them deserve to be revived IMHO.

Francesco Cavalli's La Calisto (1651) in Italiian.  The musical style is late Monteverdi.  I acquired this from a pirated source in a production that involved René Jacobs.  I understand there is a legitimate DVD of this production that with some effort might be acquired.  This opera production seems to try to show us a true Venetian opera production with gods who descend through stage machinery and transform from baritones to sopranos.  I loved it for its sense of  fun.  Venice is the land of carnival so entertainment is the order of the day.  To present this opera you would need a baritone with a fabulous falsetto.

Jean-Philippe Rameau's Comédies lyriques Platée (1745) in French.  The musical style is French Baroque.  I saw this live at the Santa Fe Opera and thought it was great fun.  Since we are in France, the title character cross dresses from a male tenor to a female, instead the usual Italian arrangement at that time which involved mainly sopranos.  Maybe comedy is a theme for me.  I think perhaps operatic comedy was more significant in times gone by.  This plot is also about gods and magic beings. The title character is written for a French type of tenor called a haute-contre.  To present this opera you might need one.  He isn't falsetto.

Gioachino Antonio Rossini's Maometto Secondo (1820) in Italian. The musical style is early bel canto.  This was also seen live at the Santa Fe Opera with marvelous performances by Luca Pisaroni, Leah Crocetto and the rest of the cast.  It's a serious opera of great significance and an important political plot.  It's one of the operas composed for Isabella Colbran.  This needs to return, but to present it you might need someone who can be Isabella Colbran.

Heinrich Marschner's Der Vampyr (The Vampire) (1828) in German.  The musical style is German romantic.  I saw this live at the Komische Oper Berlin.  Is it a comedy, a tragedy, a soap opera, a horror movie?  What?  So Germans aren't as serious as we thought.  Who knew vampires were popular in the 1820s?  Our heroine is also a modern girl who dares all and triumphs in the end.  There's no cross-dressing.  There are no vocal oddities here or particularly difficult roles.  Present this in your local company.

Hector Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini (1838) in French.  The musical style is French romantic.  This is from a DVD from Salzburg that just happened to be in the opera shop in San Francisco when I was there.  The story takes place in Rome during carnival, creating many opportunities for frivolity. The title character is an actual historical figure, an artist from Florence who wrote a famous autobiography.  His bust is on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. The Pope is a character. Cellini gets into lots of trouble but always finds his way out.  I see no severe difficulties with presenting this opera and don't think it has to be comedy.  Of this set of operas this is the only one that appears in the Met On Demand.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's The Maid of Orleans(1881) in Russian.  The musical style is Russian post-romantic.  Perhaps the reason this opera is not popular is because it is in Russian.  The Verdi Joan of Arc is more popular, but I think this one is a better opera.  For one thing this plot is a lot less ridiculous than Verdi's.  I saw it live at the San Francisco Opera and loved it.  Joan is a mezzo.  Is that the problem?  The difficulty with presenting this opera would be finding a singer to be Joan.  Dolora Zajick might not be available.



Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Die Tote Stadt (1920) in German.   In this list I think it is the closest to standard repertoire and would be classified as post-romantic or what I have called post-Wagnerian.  I saw it live at the San Francisco Opera.  I sat next to someone at the Cosi HD who thought this was the opera she hated most.  The more repulsive parts of the story suit the world view of the early twentieth century.  Maybe you shouldn't revive this for your local company.

Gian Carlo Menotti's The Last Savage (1963) in English.  Menotti's musical style is closest to American musical, but here he approaches bel canto. Modernism makes an appearance.  I saw this live at the Santa Fe Opera.  The plot most resembles a Tarzan movie.  I don't know if you would want this without the production.  The voice parts are not unusual, but you need a baritone who can pass for Tarzan.  Try it.

Philip Glass's Orphée (1993) in French after the Cocteau film of the same name.  In fact the dialog comes from the movie.  The musical style is modified minimalism.  I saw this live at Glimmerglass where they advised that you first see the movie.  I did not.  It seems the most like a real opera of Glass's operas.  It is an angel of death plot, except the angel falls in love with a mortal and tries to cheat fate. I see no barrier to producing this opera.

Oswaldo Golijov's Ainadamar (2005) in Spanish.  The musical style is South American modernism.  I saw this live in San Francisco presented by Opera Parallèle.  It jumps the time frame a couple of times, a problem that was easily solved in this production by displaying the year in the super-titles.  It is a biography of the playwright Federico García Lorca.   The music is exciting and fun and incorporates dance genres.  You will need dancers.
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Eliogabalo

Conductor:  Leonardo García Alarcón
Production:  Thomas Jolly

Eliogabalo (Roman Emperor): Franco Fagioli (countertenor)
Alessandro Cesare (Eliogabalo's cousin): Paul Groves (tenor)
Flavia Gemmira (Alessandro's girlfriend): Nadine Sierra (soprano)
Giuliano Gordio (Flavia's brother): Valer Sabadus (countertenor)
Anicia Eritea (Giuliano's girlfriend): Elin Rombo (soprano)
Atilia Macrina: Mariana Flores (soprano)
Zotico: Matthew Newlin (tenor)
Lenia (old female servant): Emiliano Gonzalez Toro (tenor)
Nerbulone, Tiferne: Scott Conner (bass)

This performance from the Paris Opera of Eliogabalo by Cavalli in Italian with French subtitles is rather more cold than even I can tolerate.  I tried watching it without knowing anything, and this didn't work out for me.  For an excellent discussion of this production see The Idle Woman. It was composed for a Venetian carnival performance in 1668 which did not take place.  Many speculate why this would happen.  Cavalli was the most important Venetian opera composer but was coming to the end of his life.  It may also have been censors.  One writer suggests that it may have been too serious for carnival.  It's first performance was in 1999, then René Jacobs revived it in 2004, and it's played in several locations since.  A description of the plot can be found here.  View the stream here.

The music is clearly still in the style of the late operas of the great Monteverdi.  I am no longer "cold" in this aspect of the performance and enjoy it very much.

Act I

Campidoglio (the square on the capitol in Rome)
Emperor Eliogabalo has returned to Rome.  A rebellion by the Praetorian Guard has been put down.  The plot concerns itself primarily with his sexual interests.  He's no longer interested in Eretea and needs new women to harass.  There are frequent appearances of young men wearing only loin cloths, such as our Amor above.

I find the arias, especially by Nadine Sierra and Paul Groves, particularly beautiful.

Hall in the Senate
I've been in the Senate and there are no halls.  Women in tall hats are entering.  Eliogabalo has replaced the male Senate with an all female one.  Eliogabalo himself is dressed as a woman and sings their praises.  We can say already that this opera is about cross-dressing, mostly men dressing as women, such as Lenia who is a tenor.

The women cover their faces and are told to embrace one another.  The one who guesses who is touching them wins.  Atilia guesses and becomes a proconsul.  Flavia cannot guess when it is Eliogabalo and goes off embarrassed.

Act II

If you are tired of the impossible to stage da capo arias of Neapolitan opera, this may be just what you want.  This is from the era when the composers wrote their own recitative and regarded it as an important part of the work.  This opera is strangely relevant.  Who would have thought our own country would become something like this.

Nadine suddenly sings a very high note.  Fun.

The most shocking thing about this production is how not shocking it is.  Obviously Eliogabalo is a scandal.  How can such a dark and low key production express this scandal?

Eliogabalo prepares a banquet with two prominent pitchers.  Zotico and Lenia taint the pitchers--one is sleeping potion and the other poison.  Nerbulone drinks the sleeping potion.  Large black owls descend on the table, and the banquet is cancelled.  The owls dance.  Franco Fagioli is enjoying a peak in his career.  His countertenor is very robust.

Act III

I am a fan of Nadine Sierra and am happy to see her performance here.  Eliogabalo is the only character who gets interesting costumes.  He sticks his arms and feet into a bath and they come out covered in gold.  He gets in.  One of the people dressed in a loin cloth appears to be a girl.  He thinks about Flavia while everyone else thinks about killing him.  Eventually they succeed.

One would choose an opera about this particular Emperor for the debauchery, surely.  It was probably rejected for the seriousness.  I personally would have liked a less serious production.  The music is glorious but just a little long.

Circo Massimo
Everyone is at the games, but Eliogabalo does not arrive. Then it is reported that he is dead.  Flavia brings in his head and explains that the guards killed him when he broke into her room.  Alessandro becomes emperor, marries Flavia and everyone lives happily ever after.  This music is very beautiful, but I imagine the Venetians wanted more bang for their buck.

Babes of Opera

An article in the Daily Mail has come to my attention.  It says that "opera gets sexy."  I beg your pardon.  Opera has always been sexy.  There can be no question that our up-coming Partenope star, Danielle de Niese, is about as sexy as it gets.  She already appeared in our sexiest list here.

She is currently appearing at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich in La Calisto (see above), one of the sexiest operas ever. Here is Danielle in Giulio Cesare.  I also flagged her for a very sexy Poppea here.

Read the article for yourself.  The subject matter appears to be that Danielle has compared her own on stage sexiness (artistic integrity) with Miley Cyrus (sexuality for the wrong reasons).

This doesn't sound like an argument we wish to become involved in, but we do very much prefer Danielle to Miley.

Ercole Amante

No expense has been expended to explain the plot of Cavalli's Ercole Amante (1662).  Perhaps a dissertation would be required.

Here we go.  In Act II Scene 4 someone explains that:

"Hyllus [son of Ercole, Jeremy Overden] loves Iole and she loves him, but she hates Ercole [Luca Pisaroni] who loves her;  Nicander loves Licoris, and she loves Orestes who loves Olinda; Olinda and Celia love gold and jewels...."

Ercole is married to Deianira, mother of Hyllus, and Iole hates him because he killed her father.  Ercole thinks he should kill Deianira and Hyllus.  Apparently, explained in Act III, Iole's father promised her to Ercole.  Iole then talked him out of it, and Ercole killed him.  Ercole blames everything on her.

There is a lot of hanky-panky in this opera which was supposed to be given at the marriage of Louis XIV to Maria Theresa of Spain.  I'm not sure, but I think there is a confusion of Ercole with Louis.  It's a kind of Iron Man plot where as the king of France he is skinny like, well, like Luca Pisaroni, and then he puts on his muscle suit and turns into the super buff Hercules.  This suit doesn't help him fight crime, it's just for attracting women. 

Doesn't seem like a particularly suitable plot for a wedding celebration.  They could not perform the opera at the wedding in 1660 because the construction of the stage machinery was not complete.  I imagine things soaring through the air or flying down from above, things which don't seem to happen in modern productions.

This is all miserably hard to understand.  Much like in the Ring, there are gods littering the stage who take sides with the mortals.  Venus is with Ercole.  Juno [Anna Bonitatibus], naturally sides with Deianira and tells Iole how wonderfully virtuous she is.  Neptune and Juno advise Hyllus.  Oy.  It's exhausting.

The music is mostly Florentine recitative with arias and ballet interspersed.  Because it's meant for Paris, there is quite a lot of ballet.  There are some funny scenes.  The dialog refers to Atlas, so he appears holding up the world, which Ercole takes out of his arms and carries easily around before giving it back to Atlas.  The program notes call this an opera buffa, but we know that it is before the split into seria and buffa.  It can't be a buffa because there was at least one castrato who sang Juno.

In Act IV there are giant fish, boats and water for Neptune to rise out of.  They could have more successfully differentiated the gods from the humans.  But then what to do with Ercole who is some of each?  Luca is adorable in his muscle suit.

In the end Ercole becomes a god who marries Beauty.  In his guise as a god he goes back to resembling Louis XIV, a significantly thinner person who wears a sun crown.  
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La Calisto

They were cheap, so I bought a lot of DVDs from House of Opera, including Francesco Cavalli's La Calisto, a work from 1651 Venice. This is the version from Unter den Linden in Berlin, 2002, and is taped from Belgian television. This production is also mentioned in Eyewitness Companions: Opera .

These people are up to no good. I have a very deep feeling that this production will tell you more about Venetian opera than anything I could possibly write, or anything you will read in textbooks. Gods and goddesses come and go on bizarre stage machinery. Many claims of chastity are proclaimed, but none are actually maintained. Giove starts out as a baritone, and then makes a fabulous change over to falsetto in his disguise as Diana. There is wonderful coloratura throughout and a complete utter lack of pomposity.

I thought about listing off the cast, but they are no one you know. If you buy the DVD, it will list them at the beginning. The picture is good and the sound is adequate.

Viva Italia.
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