Opera

[lovingboth]

That's lost most of you :)

An unexpected opportunity to go out yesterday meant I got to see ENO's new production of A Masked Ball before the more usual having to leave it to the last performance.

It's the 'controversial' one, opening with a row of men sitting on the toilet. (Despite my row D seat, I couldn't see if they were wearing two pairs of underpants.) You can get an idea of the content by the way that I missed all but the last second of the simulated oral sex in the background of one scene because of the simulated intercourse (and this time you could see everything) at the front.

Unlike the director's dire attempt at Don Giovanni last autumn, this one works. As ever, if the characters were poly, the plot would fall over... but it does have an interesting plot unlike some. And being Verdi, the songs have tunes.

Tickets start at £3, how can you say no?

Comments

[inquis.livejournal.com]

How can you say no? Easily. It's English National Opera. And personally, I have a moral issue with people who destroy operas by translating them into English. Maybe I am coming from too musical a background, but when you translate, you lose vital elements of the original text. And its interplay with the music. Yuk. I saw this opera in its proper Italian form, and it was one of the things that converted me to being an opera liker, rather than an opera hater. It's a good opera. But in English? Ewwww. :o)

[lovingboth]

Ah yes, the original language debate.

Surely getting a bunch of singers, none of whom can speak Czech, to sing A Cunning Little Vixen (I forget the Czech title) in Czech to an audience which doesn't speak Czech is a bit... well... silly.

And it's certainly not the way to get a new audience for what is one of the greatest of art forms. They think opera's irrelevant, a group of fat women singing in German about trolls to a bunch of rich people.

Surtitles are no solution - what happens is that the audience reacts to them rather than what's being sung at the time. It also distracts from what's happening on stage - you're looking up at the surtitles.

As far as I'm concerned, you either do it exactly as the original production a la D'Orly Carte productions of Gilbert & Sullivan's until the copyright ran out -- that includes keeping the 'nigger's in The Mikardo, which even they changed, despite it being what Gilbert wrote. No modern dress, no modern sets, I'm even tempted to say no spotlights...

... or you accept that Don Giovanni, for example, remains great even if you translate de Ponte's lyrics, just as it can look better if you light it with technology unavailable to Mozart's producer.

Get the right translation, and it can even be better.

Does this mean I didn't see Opera North's original language production sans surtitles last year? No.

Does this mean I don't like, say, Mory Kante's Yeke Yeke because I'm not even sure what language it's in, never mind understand the lyrics? No.

Does this mean I don't like going to the Royal Opera House? YES - and not just because to get seats of the quality of ENO in terms of view, distance and audibility costs far more.

Their obsession with names means you get charged a premium to watch Pavarotti waddle across the stage and sing -- in a language you don't understand -- the part sitting down for most of the time rather than see someone act at the same time as sing words that you do.

The definitive example is when RoH cast non-English speakers in the title roles of English operas. In general, they can't hack it: Wilhelm Hartmann as Gawain will live in the memory for all the wrong reasons. And if non-English speakers can't do English operas well, why do we expect non-Czech speakers to be any different in Czech ones?

[aegidian]

That's lost most of you :)

Insulting? You? ;P

[lovingboth]

Moi? :)

Bet it has though - show an opera on TV and virtually all the audience prefers to do anything else. For some reason opera has a serious image problem.