Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas TFSC readers!  My Christmas gift to you is a promise to post more, and be more interesting when I do post.  In return, you could comment on posts and stuff, right?  You don't even have to put a bow on it - just leave a few words or praise or criticism (or spelling corrections if, God forbid, I misspell something)!

Comfort Food

Sometimes, when it's nasty and gray out, and you haven't gotten much work done, and you feel listless, you just don't want to cook, right?  You're in the mood for something easy, something that will hit the spot, and something that requires very little effort.  If there were just a burger joint down the hall, you'd stop there, but getting fast food means leaving the apartment, and who wants to do that?  This can mean only one thing: it's time for comfort food.

It's even better if the food smiles at you, don't you think?

Wait a Minute - Czech Opera?

Did you know that there's such a thing as Czech opera?  No?  I didn't either, until my latest adventure to the Lyric.  I'm sure my brain hadn't ruled Czech opera out as a possibility; it's one of many things that might possibly occur somewhere in the world, but when you think opera you generally think Italy - or Germany, if you prefer Wagner - and then France.  Not the Czech Republic.  And technically that's not even correct, for although this opera is Czech, it's not from the Czech Republic, because the Czech Republic didn't exist at the time.  (History buffs will know that it was part of the Austrian and, later, the Austro-Hungarian Empire for much of modern history.)

(If you're curious, the picture is the vestibule at the Lyric, which is lit in much warmer tones than this picture suggests.  And that guy whose head you see at the bottom of the picture?  He's a bartender - I got him in the photo by mistake.)

In any case, if you aren't familiar with Czech opera, you won't know which opera I went to see (unless you've already checked the Lyric's schedule while reading through this paragraph above, in which case I salute your ability to multitask, even if I am slightly peeved that you multitask on top of my blog).  It was Leoš Janáček's Káťa Kabanová (that's ley-ohsh yah-NA-check, if you're curious about all those diacriticals over the composer's name.  The opera title is sometimes transliterated as Katya Kabanova and is sometimes just referred to as Katya). 

Still doesn't ring a bell?  I forgive you, because I had never heard of it either.  (I won't spoil the story or bore you with details about the composer, but if you like you can read about Janáček here and a synopsis of the opera here.)  Suffice it to say that Janáček was born in Moravia in the middle of the 19th century and was heavily influenced, like many of his historical and geographic contemporaries, by folk music.  The Czechs consider him of equal stature with Bedřich Smetana (composer of the opera The Bartered Bride and the symphonic cycle Má vlast (My Fatherland)) and Antonín Dvořák (known in this country for the New World Symphony), but he is not very well-known in the States.  In my humble opinion, he deserves to be.  Let me explain why.

Upon learning that Janáček wrote Katya in this '20s, I was a bit worried.  My impression of music from the 1920s was dissonant, atonal, unpleasant, and obtrusively modern - not the sort of thing I would want to sit through for a few hours.  But I was also drawn by the fact that I had never heard of either the composer or the opera, so I bought a ticket and went.  And I was happily surprised.  As I read in the program notes (and mentioned above), Janáček was influenced by his contemporaries of the late 1800s, including the great Russian Romantic (as in the period of music history, not the amorous tendency), Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.  Tchaikovsky, while definitely a departure from the Classical era, is most definitely not atonal, unpleasant, or modernist (he was also gay, but that's not relevant to this discussion).  Janáček's music is not unlike Tchaikovsky's, but with slightly more modern overtones and - because of the opera's subject - bleaker and harsher, well-suited to great rushes of emotion and the weight of enormous tragedy.  I liked it.

I promised not to give away the plot of Katya, and I won't, but I will say a little about it.  The title character is trapped in a marriage with Tichon, who is henpecked not by Katya, but by his mother Kabanicha, with whom he and his wife live.  The fourth member of this happy household is Varvara, a foundling adopted by Kabanicha who is just a bit younger that Katya.  Kabanicha is a domineering witch (figurative, not literal), and when Tichon leaves on business, Katya gets a chance at freedom, which she seizes with disastrous results.  For those of you interested in the technical side of this, Katya is a soprano, Kabanicha a contralto, Varvara a mezzo-soprano, and Tichon a tenor.  There are more characters and more voice parts (though the basses get a bit shortchanged), but to tell you who they are and why they're important would give away the story.

The music, as I've mentioned, was quite good, but what struck me the most, in a positive way, was the way this opera was staged.  In keeping with the idea of bleakness - the opera is set in a Russian village on the banks of the Volga - the vast expanse of stage was painted gray, and the entire rear wall was a film screen depicting the sky,  filled with clouds, which grew darker and more sinister as the opera progressed.  There were only two pieces of real set, Kabanicha's house and a ruined chapel.  Each stood in the middle of the stage during their respective scenes (never on stage together, of course), with the vast gray stage on each side and sweeping off to the horizon in back.  Kabanicha's house, cleverly, was cut in half and put on casters so it could be turned between scenes, so scenes outdoors would happen in front of Kabanicha's porch, and scenes inside the house would happen inside the house, which would be turned so we could see inside.  The ruined chapel, which we see in the penultimate scene of the opera, is appropriately cold and also gray.  In addition, all the supporting characters (not the six or seven named characters) were dressed in black, and even some of the named characters wore black or brown.  All in all the staging made a significant contribution to how I perceived the opera, and in this case, is worked very well.

I suppose now you're curious as to what happens in this opera that requires such bleakness, but it would be hard to retell - better to see it.  You won't be able to see it in Chicago, unfortunately - tonight was closing night.  Why not read the synopsis, and then add it to your "To See" list?

The View from My Window

In the tradition of Andrew Sullivan, who posts snapshots from his readers' windows under the title "The View from Your Window" (and his latest one makes me profoundly jealous), here's the view from my window, take at 3:40 this afternoon.

Nice, i'n'it?

This dreary weather is what I've been dealing with, off and on, for the past month.  Sometimes, like this morning, the sun comes out and lights up the entire apartment.  And heats it too, which I appreciate because the sun is considerably quieter than my radiators.  I spent the better part of Monday basking in all-natural sunlight while writing a paper, and believe me, it made writing the paper much easier.  Today I'm working on a different paper, and I've got different weather in which to do it.  Interestingly, this weather approximates quite succinctly how I feel about my current paper and the material about which I'm supposed to be writing (political economy - ugh).  Funny how that happens.

So, what's the view like from your window?

A Night at the Opera!

Having failed to grow up in one of the largest cities in the country, my only exposure to opera up until high school was through recordings, and while I'm sure they were very good recordings, opera takes place on a stage for a reason.  This does not come across on a CD, no matter how many pictures they've managed to cram into the little booklet inside the case.  I believe the first proper opera I ever saw was as a senior in high school, when our German teacher bought tickets for her senior class to see the local university's production of Engelbert Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel (which, because the university had an attached conservatory, was quite well done).  When I was an undergraduate there I went to the operas - one per year, except that one year when they did Sor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi in one performance, which was great, but still not an opera in an opera house with an opera company.  I did attend a performance of The Barber of Seville at our local performing arts center, which had brought in an opera company from Bulgaria (warning right there), but that performance - especially the bass who played Doctor Bartolo - was weaker than what I had heard at the university.  In short, I'd not been exposed to much proper opera before.

Then I moved to Chicago.

Lest that sound too much like Mecca, I will admit that Chicago is not exactly a world-renowned center for the operatic arts - that honor is reserved for places like New York and Milan - but it does have an opera house, with a resident opera company, and it performs regularly.  It also has a student rush ticket program by which a student can get tickets that don't sell for $20.  On the main floor.  So, naturally, I bit.

I went to see Giuseppe Verdi's Ernani, which is not a well-known opera, but I've always preferred the slightly less conventional.  So I bought my ticket a week or two in advance, dressed up (rocking the vest, as usual), and took the Metra downtown.  I managed to find the Civic Opera House (stage pictured above) and obtain my ticket with little difficulty.  I sat in row W, right side, on the main floor (that picture above is my view from that seat).  Not too shabby for $20.  Damned uncomfortable seat, though.  I suspect they're original to the building (1920s - and you think I'm kidding but I'm not).

As we waited for the first act to begin, I couldn't help but listen to the couple behind me (I was surrounded by couples, it seemed, and wished I had brought my other half along, but he wasn't interested in seeing Ernani).  The guy sitting behind me was Italian, the girl American, both obviously students who, like me, had gotten their tickets through the rush program, which is open to all the universities in Chicago (there are quite a few).  Although the girl sounded a bit ditzy, she was having a fairly intelligent conversation with her boyfriend (who, despite being Italian, had never been to an opera before) about opera and such.  But then the conversation turned to dancing and she mentioned that she had taken dance lessons at one point.  She had learned the samba, the rumba, the cha-cha, and the Vietnamese waltz.

"Vietnamese?" he asked.

Maybe it was Venetian, she mused.

He hadn't ever heard of a Venetian waltz either.

It was supposed to be very graceful and dignified, she said.

Silence.  Then: "Do you mean Viennese?"

And curtain.  (Except not really, because minutes later she tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I could take a picture of her and her boyfriend in their seats.  I gladly obliged, though I think they'll find that the dignity of being at the opera doesn't really come across in a poorly lit, over-flashed photo of two white people in dark clothing.  None of my business, though.)

At last the curtain rose, and Ernani began.  Two intermissions and three hours later I stumbled out into the night.  It was a fairly good performance.  The soprano who played Elvira (Sondra Radvanovsky, an American) was without a doubt the best part.  The central difficulty of opera - and the way in which, in my limited experience, I have seen the most opera performers fail - is that you have to sing and act.  Not one or the other, both.  Radvanovsky did it, and well - her three males counterparts were all rather wooden by comparison.  I won't presume to judge their singing, since I don't know the score well enough, but whenever Elvira was on stage I looked at her, even if someone else was singing, because she was the most interesting thing going on.  And the audience agreed with me - Ms. Radvanovsky got far more applause than any of the other performers.

Now the plot, in my humble opinion, is not terribly convincing - though I'll let you read the synopsis and decide for yourself - and I would have been perfectly happy had the entire fourth act been cut.  Ernani is one of Verdi's early operas, though I find fault not with the music (which was plenty interesting) but with the libretto, mainly some of the jumps in the plot.  We are forced to "suspend our disbelief" in places, and when you combine some singers who don't act very well with a plot that feels forced, you can have trouble.  But in any case, I can say I've seen Ernani, I've been to Chicago Civic Opera House, and I had a lovely time.  There are some excellent performances coming up in early 2010 - who wants to join me to see Faust?