I lay in bed last night listening* to Aethelstan playing chimney-pot rugby with his buds.  And today pretty much the entire Soggy Bottom road is under water, not just the bridge over the ford—and the lake at the Gormless Pettifogger** crossroads is back.  You can just turn around and go the other way, as some people do, and in another couple of inches I will too, but at the moment the small sea still passable by anyone who isn’t glamorously low-slung.  Wolfgang is neither glamorous nor low-slung.  So having ascertained there’s no one in the immediate vicinity who is going to plunge in before you, you take a deep breath, aim for the centre of the ominously shimmering water***, put your foot down and hold your nerve because your bow wave will briefly wipe out the view through your windscreen and if you stop you’ll stall.

Diane in MN

. . . Years ago, I took someone who didn’t have any experience of opera to see Butterfly, and it just about knocked her over. . . .

The first Butterfly I ever saw live, which was well into my opera-going career—largely because it wasn’t a favourite and so I wasn’t in any hurry to spend opera-ticket prices on it—included a Butterfly tittuping briskly onto the stage just before she sings Un bel di, wearing some kind of faux-Japanese footgear and . . . taking a spectacular header full length on the floor.  WHAM.  Ow.  Suzuki, who didn’t have a stage direction for this, just stood there with her mouth open†.  Butterfly, poor thing, pulled herself together, staggered to her feet . . . and sang.  In her defense, this was a touring company—I think it may have been the Met, back in the days when the Met still toured—so this was an unfamiliar stage with unknown hazards.   This sort of thing must happen to touring companies kind of a lot.  But I remember almost nothing else of the production—haven’t a clue who was singing, for example.

But opera doesn’t lend itself to realism (say I), it’s not what it’s for.

I think this is quite right. . . . I’ve always felt that the plots are secondary to the music anyway: the texts chosen by a composer might not hold up for a century or more, but the music is about emotional truth and that stays relevant and keeps us coming back.

Boldface mine.  TAKE THAT, RICHARD STRAUSS.  Yes.  Absolutely.  You can’t worship at—say—the Verdian shrine, which I do, faithfully, and maintain any dignity arguing in favour of equal textual validity.††  But the music is about emotional truth.  Yes.

Blondviolinist

. . . About ugly Americans and Kate showing up completely inappropriately off a US Navy warship… it’s an exotic opera, right? 19th (and early 20th) century Europe was obsessed with the Exotic Other… anyone outside the pale of “civilized” Europe. There are so many exotic tropes: childlike, naive (Butterfly) cruel, barbarian (Turandot), controlled by feelings more than reason (Butterfly and Turandot both), and over-sexualized (Pinkerton). The thing that’s hard to remember (at least if you’re American alive during US-as-world-superpower era) is that Pinkerton is every bit as exotic as Butterfly in that opera. It’s an Italian opera… Americans were exotic to Italians. So I don’t find it at all surprising that the librettist wouldn’t've checked his facts about who would’ve been allowed on a Navy warship: facts don’t matter when you’re writing about exotic peoples. They are the Other—we get to project on them whatever we want. . . .

I know you’re the professional musician with the PhD in music history and I’m not but . . . I don’t agree.  Or don’t accept this argument as adequate.  Chiefly for two reasons:  first.  Butterfly was written after the turn of the last century, and Puccini lived till the ‘20s.  I know they didn’t have the internet yet (!) but sheer bloody parochialism is always with us and is no excuse—just by the way, Americans are still exotic in, let’s say, rural Hampshire, England, in 2014, which blows my mind.  But a hundred years ago is not the Palaeolithic.  By 1900 you had precious little excuse for officially having no clue about the reality of other nations—or for not bothering to check big fat crude factoids like whether or not wives are permitted on US Navy warships.  Second.  These verismo bozos don’t get to have it both ways:  either there’s a veneer of genuine realism on their work or there isn’t.  I still call it a melodrama, not verismo†††, but part of what makes Butterfly both so effective and so infuriatingly manipulative is the gloss of ‘reality’.  The reason Butterfly works for me is because her role is so devastatingly magnificent:  her last aria, as she’s about to kill herself, is shattering.  And it carries me over seeing Kate trailing up the hill behind Pinkerton calling Butterfly!  Butterfly!  A lesser piece of work and Kate would throw me out of the story—and the agony—altogether.‡

I love Un Ballo in Maschera—which premiered the year after Puccini was born, in the mid-1800s—and that it’s supposedly laid in Puritan Boston doesn’t bother me in the slightest.  But, as I said about La Trav the other night, Verdi never wrote anything close to verismo as it’s usually defined:  he gets into people’s hearts amazingly‡‡ but most of his librettos are trash.  I’m also aware that Un Ballo got moved to a Boston locale for tricky European political reasons—speaking of exotic:  oh, the barbaric North Americans won’t care—but my point is it doesn’t matter.  It’s backdrop.  That’s all it is.  Fifty years later operas are beginning to be integrated into their storylines.  I know the march of progress isn’t a united front, but for example Jenufa was pretty much contemporary with Butterfly!!

And I’d better shut up before you get your PhD off the mantelpiece and wallop me with it. . . .

Bratsche

. . . my most common stabby thought while playing opera was always along the lines of “Can we PLEEEEASE stab the soprano now (maybe even by the end of the first act!) so we don’t have to play for her dying for the next 15 pages (exaggeration but not by all that much!)??” My biggest frustration with playing opera in general is that, yes, there are some absolutely ravishing parts of operas, but there is so much else that is just plain endurance on the part of the orchestra! At least the audience has the floor show (so to speak) to watch while the tenor or soprano repeats things over and over. . . .

NOOOOOOOO.  YOU ARE A PHILISTINE.  YOU ARE AN EVIL PHILISTINE RATBAG.  PUTTING MY FINGERS IN MY EARS SO I AM NOT HEARING YOU. LALALALALALALALALA.

Hey, that’s a thought.  It’s still (comparatively) early.  I could sing.

* * *

* ‘Sleeping’?  What would that be?

** Not my favourite pub.

*** Maybe it already is that extra couple of inches deep and I’m about to be very embarrassed and have to ring the RAC to send someone with chains and very high tailpipe clearance to rescue me.

† Not very living the role of her.

†† Ernani?  HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  Il Trovatore?  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. La Forza del Destino?  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. . . . Stop, stop, you’re killing me. . . .

††† Il Tabarro?  Verismo?  Oh, right, wrapping your wife’s lover, whom you’ve just murdered, up in your cloak, so you can have the big reveal and spook her the frell out^, YES.  VERY REALISTIC.  VERY, VERY REALISTIC.  Melodrama.  One of the things that bites me about this story is that you have that sad and touching (in that manipulative way Puccini is so good at) scene earlier where the jerk of a husband turns all wistful and says they used to be happy together before the baby died and you think, oh, poor them, no wonder they’re having problems . . . and I’d even go with the murder.  Unhappy husband presented with worst fear:  his wife’s much-younger lover.  I DO NOT GO WITH THE WRAPPING THE CORPSE IN HIS CLOAK.  Husband is still wearing the cloak, you understand.  GROSS ME THE FRELL OUT.  Melodrama.

^ How to ruin someone’s day big time

‡ I may also be a trifle preoccupied with what a thankless role Kate’s is as it’s usually presented.

‡‡ I will take one Verdi to seventeen Puccinis any day.  Just by the way.