On Opera, Football, and Saying F It and Watching Netflix

In Giacomo Puccini's Tosca, Mario Cavaradossi explains to his friend, the escaped political prisoner Cesare Angelotti, that he has not told his girlfriend about hiding the prisoner because Tosca is devout, and keeps nothing back from the priest who hears her confession.

Fair enough. Tosca is deeply religious and has a trusting nature. She believes in the sanctity of the confessional. Her lover, Cavaradossi (who incidentally is easily the least interesting character in the opera and needs all the help he can get) tells us with this observation that he (1) accepts and loves Tosca's innocence, and (2) has a much deeper and more realistic understanding of the political situation in Napoleon-era Rome.

This ties in perfectly with the last act. Think about it!

So, when the Austin Lyric Opera decides to translate this line on the supertitles as "Tosca is a wonderful woman, but she can't keep a secret," they malign Tosca's character, refrain from telling us a key background/foreshadowing plot element, and deprive Cavaradossi of what little he's got going for him.

I guess that's the most concrete quibble I had with their production. The singing was quite good; the timing of the stage direction just didn't work - but most of my other objections would amount to artistic differences, and as long as I'm merely a member of the audience I probably just need to suck those up.

Except for the new trend - I don't know if this is ALO, or more probably just the Long Center's policy - of actually allowing food and beverage IN THE HOUSE DURING THE PERFORMANCE.

I mean, drinks would be one thing. They don't make noise, although one operagoer noisily kicked over an empty plastic cup while trying to make a discreet restroom exit. But plastic trays of crackers, cheese, and grapes? Cellulose bags of cookies? These things are loud!

Likewise, you can't blame ALO for the fact that audiences add stage-whispered commentary to the action ("YES!" hissed the woman behind me as Tosca snatched a knife from the floor - at the wrong time; I'll get into that in a bit) and are woefully ignorant of the proper use of "Bravo," "Brava," "Bravi," and "Brave" (that last pretty much never comes up except at performances of Suor Angelica).

They also dress abysmally. "Riff-raff!" exclaimed my boss, as I was trying to explain to him all my problems with the production. But, seriously. My parents took me to the opera frequently when I was a very little girl. Women wore long gowns, and men wore evening clothes. There was enough fur to re-introduce robust mink populations to the wild. And for Christ's sake you chugged the remnants of your wine in the lobby when the lights dimmed.

These days, jeans and Uggs apparently qualify as formal wear, as long as you pair them with a sparkly sweater.

And, finally, the timing issues: some appeared deliberate, as when Tosca picked up the knife before agreeing to give herself to Scarpia, which makes a significant difference. Having her make a few practice feints in the air as he's writing out the safe-passage just sells out a dark and tense scene for comic effect. And in fact there were far too many serious elements of the story played broadly for laughs in this production. Tosca's final stand before throwing herself off the Palazzo Farnese was slow, stiff, and awkward, though not intentionally played that way. The whole performance felt sluggish and poorly timed.

So, naturally, the audience gave it a standing ovation (which is now apparently the bare minimum expression of not completely loathing something) and then hastened out to their cars without a second curtain call. Do we need to give opera-going lessons here?

On a probably unrelated note, the Seattle Seahawks won the Superbowl (or superb owl) tonight, and I was pleased, inasmuch as I found Seattle to be a highly agreeable city on my recent visit. Mind you, I've been to Boulder as well, and it's nothing to sneeze at. So I wouldn't have been in the least upset if the Broncos had won either, especially since Seattle's color scheme is dreadful; really, navy and lime green? Really?!

I tried drinking beer, but you can only watch so much football. We Netflixed Portlandia to pass the time between commercials. It's similar to Seattle.

But you have to hand it to East Rutherford, New Jersey. They got an actual opera singer to do the National Anthem. Bravi, Seahawks! I hope to tour Italy one day and maybe get my butt grabbed as much as Russell Wilson did tonight.

The 99% Likes Opera, Too

Is it just me, or is the basic message of "Die Zauberflöte" that women are dark, scheming and evil whereas men are wholesome, honest and good? Because Mozart can stick his magic flute where the sun don't shine, if you catch my drift. Or is that an awful, vengeful thing to say? Well, Bill Gates is paying a visit, so I can't be held accountable for my irrational female behavior.

I don't know if the Austin Lyric Opera will ever top their production of "The Bat," but their "Magic Flute" had some cute modern touches and very good singing, particularly by Sarastro and Pamina. The sets were overly minimalist, I thought - I mean, it's fine, it works, but you really should actually have a dragon of some kind onstage at the beginning. Even an extremely tacky rubber one would be acceptable. I did like the touch of having Tamino run out of arrows and, in desperation, heave his bow at the invisible beast.

Unfortunately, FunFunFunFest is also going on just across Riverside, and the Long Center is not completely soundproof. So at least on the very very back, top row, I was a little distracted by the deep bass thumping from outside shaking our seats - loud enough to drown out the Queen of the Night, who was more precise than powerful. It's a typically Austin experience but not necessarily a happy one, though I expect Mozart would have found himself more or less at home in a mosh pit drinking canned beer, the misogynistic bastard.

After the show, Katie and I teetered across Barton Springs to have Whataburger while the parking garage cleared out, and got made fun of by drunken 4F goers who may not have realized that we could hear them, inasmuch as they were the only ones shouting. (Katie pointed out that their tickets cost about twice what ours did.)

All that said, of course, any night you get to go to the opera is a good night - uncomfortable shoes and all. Going tonight was Katie's idea. That, coupled with the fact that today my son brought me a vanilla hazelnut latte from the coffeehouse where he works, gives me a sense that my decision to have children is beginning to bear fruit, so to speak.

Now if I can just bend them to my nefarious will.

By the Horns

My flight didn't get into Syracuse until just before midnight last night - not too bad for me, as that's just 11 p.m. my time and I'm a night owl anyway. But my dad normally goes to bed at a reasonable hour. Still he came to the airport to pick me up, and then we sat up talking until two.

Don't you just love flight crews with a sense of humor? I thought we might actually give our ATL-SYR flight attendants a round of applause for the safety demonstration. They were great fun, but definitely a little tired; the guy read off the wrong flight number when welcoming us aboard, briefly confusing a few of the passengers. "I'm sorry, that's the number of tomorrow morning's flight back to Atlanta," he explained, "I'm just looking forward to leaving Syracuse."

"Hey!" shouted someone from the back of the plane. And I understand. I'd rather be in Syracuse than Atlanta, too.

Perhaps the pilot was tired as well. "Please use caution in opening the overhead compartments as contents may have shifted," the flight attendant read off as we taxied to the terminal, adding after a moment's thought, "especially after that landing."

My dad and I talked about a little of this and a little of that, though somehow we ended up with the relative merits of Mahler vs. Wagner (not that there's really any comparison), as well as the relative attractiveness of Austin Lyric Opera company members to members of other opera companies, and especially to the great opera stars of the past, many of whom apparently never heard that trans fats should be avoided rather than, say, taken intravenously.

"Why is it," my dad wondered, "that Wagnerian sopranos always seemed to be so large?"

The answer popped into my head just as I said it. "They had to be," I said, "in order to make it all the way to the end of the opera without dying of starvation." You see, I don't know if any operagoer has ever maintained consciousness through the entire Ring Cycle - or even just "Götterdämmerung"* - but a little-known fact is that Kirsten Flagstad was always a size 2 by the time she'd finished a performance, and was forced to refuel on massive quantities of smorgasbord to get her ready for the following evening. The sacrifices people will make for their art!

And as I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep, and still much too keyed up, I started thinking what an excellent quick-weight-loss program this would make. The problem would be devoting your life to the study of music and singing so you could become good enough to join an opera company and be cast as Sieglinde or Brunnhilde or Senta or Elisabeth or whoever - and that would take many many years, and I'm sorry but you really need to have already started on it - and then only do one performance, retire from the stage forever, and go have a salad.

You can't do this program in the comfort of your own home. Your helmet would poke holes in the ceiling.

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*German for "That God damned ring"

Be What You're Like

Do you ever feel that you're doomed to miss your calling in life because your basic nature is fundamentally in contradiction to the things you're good at?

For example, I've often felt that my aptitude in the man department makes me a prime candidate for the convent; yet I'm not religious. It's sort of a shame really.

Today I had so much fun conducting my training class that I was wondering if I could make it as a professional speaker. But there's just no way: feel-good corporate motivational tripe makes me want to yarf. I could never pull it off with a straight face.

The only problem really with being a great opera singer is that it's a lot of work, and you often have to sing Verdi, which I really don't like very much - not to mention ear-splitting new works by such internationally renowned fruit bats as Phillip Glass.

I'd be a famous writer, but...

I do get to conduct another training session tomorrow. I wish you could come sit in. I could try being extra-perky and saying "absolutely" a lot. Maybe I'll make a motivational speaker one day after all.

Making Friends and Influencing People

A coworker of mine sent me an email yesterday evening about 6:30, and tried calling my desk, too.

Now let's get something straight here.

I'm a hard worker, right? And I do what it takes to get the job done, right?

But I'm still a state employee. And this means that, in the absence of a hurricane or any other official emergency - in fact the weather just now happens to be exceedingly pleasant - I take two "fifteen"-minute breaks a day, and I'm out the door like a shot at 5. Got it?

Apparently somebody doesn't have enough time on their hands.

This morning I attended a meeting downtown for employees who work with the legal process I dealt with extensively at my old job. I'm still somewhat involved in it at my new job, only in (of course) a different capacity. So my boss sent me off to the meeting; I took a shuttle and arrived to find the deputy director of my old division there with a couple of former coworkers.

And they laughed at me! "Thought you were done with this stuff, huh," they said.

Nonetheless, I sat with them and chit-chatted pleasantly enough through much of the meeting, in much the way I imagine eighteenth- and nineteenth-century operagoers visited and socialized during performances, the stage little more than a background diversion - which would explain why Mozart is so accurately skewered here; but I digress.

And afterwards, the deputy division director gave me a ride back to the office, several half-joking offers to come back to my old job tossed into the conversation. I was flattered, but not tempted. In the interest of fairness I had to admit that I am no longer allowed to wear flip-flops to work.

"You see?" he said, "you see what you're missing out on now?"

I didn't even bring up the cleavage issue.

Also at the meeting were several people I met while working hurricanes, and a few other folks I've gotten to know in the last seven months since taking my new job. It struck me as odd how quickly one's internal agency acquaintance can increase - only not, I have to say, in the old place. Maybe it is just a matter of footwear. Or something.

I worked a little past 5 today. Who knows where hard work will get me?

Little Voices

This started out as an email to a friend, but got much too convoluted, and decided it had better be a blog post instead. Well, my friend will read it...

I went in this evening for an audition for the Austin Lyric Opera Chorus, right? And I was in for just long enough to sing my two arias (actually, a Schubert art song and an aria from the Bach Magnificat in D) and be told thank you, we'll be sending emails to everyone who auditioned on September 12, and go on my way. Feeling awful - do not feel bad about this, okay? Because it's fine, that's just how I felt as I was leaving - and I was completely, 100% sure that I sucked. With a capital S and hey, what the hell, a capital UCKED thrown in for good measure. Perhaps I even bit. Nibbled, if you will.

And it's got me to thinking about how impossible it is to judge yourself. Not only in this. Tonight I have chemicals coursing through my brain - all natural, biological ones, I'll have you know - but don't think you can't get royally fucked up on adrenaline and endorphines and I don't know what all else goes rampaging through your system when you've really built something up into a big deal. Do you know, I've dreamed of being an opera singer all my life, and like many other things I've desperately wanted, I've avoided pursuing it because to try and fail is such a shattering prospect. Longing for something unattainable, from afar, is easy.

Mind you, I never intended to be some low-ranking singer, some chorister, some foot soldier. I was going to be the real thing, a prima donna, a grande dame, a diva! All, in short, or nothing at all. So the idea of trying out for a third-tier (sorry Austin, you know I love you) opera company's chorus, and not being good enough, kind of shakes to the foundations of the foundations, everything I ever wanted to believe about myself, ever since infancy, really. I coulda been somebody. I coulda been a contender! Or not.

I went in tonight, and I sang. I did not do nearly as badly as I should have, either, for as little preparation as I did. My voice didn't crack on the high notes (it did, in practice). I sang two pieces today with accompaniment for the first time, from memory, without looking at the music, and I made only one slip in the second aria - picked up quickly enough, and went on. Stage presence I emphatically did NOT have, and they are looking for that. I was extremely and obviously nervous. My voice is not unpretty, but I bet there are a lot of not-unpretty voices auditioning for Chorus spots. Austin isn't at all short on musical talent. (Does that make up for the third-tier remark?)

I don't really know how I did. Probably not as badly as I thought I did. Or maybe not as well. It's a bit shocking how little position I'm in to be able to say. But it doesn't matter - I wouldn't have done this at all, except that a friend strongly encouraged me to, and even if I did indeed suck as badly as I'm scared I might have, my friend has done something that's brought my perceptions and actions a little more closely in line with whatever reality might happen to be.

This is actually not an insignificant gift. It's just that if I didn't suck as much as I think I may have, the wrapping is prettier.

But actually I feel pretty good about the whole thing, now, either way. Maybe it's the wine I'm sipping on. Helps out the endorphines.

Do You Speak Opera?

"Quanto?" ("Okay, you vicious, power-mad sleazebag, how much do I have to fork over?")

"Quanto?" ("What do you mean, how much? I don't know what you're talking about. Nice tits, by the way. Mua ha ha ha ha.")

"Il prezzo!" ("Don't play dumb with me! How much do I have to bribe you not to have my lover killed, you evil, corrupt pervert I'd rather do off-Broadway than go to bed with, even though your menacing charm and your dark, intense musical motif actually make you extremely sexy in a villainous way, and the tenor is probably gay anyhow.")

If there's one thing I've learned from opera, it's how to read between the lines.

Listening to opera is a good hobby to revisit when home alone. Not that I don't enjoy sharing it with other people, it's just that nobody else in my house likes it. So this weekend I sat and listened through my CDs of "Tosca," "Turandot," and "Don Giovanni." The intrigue! The passion! The despair! Grand opera still gives me goosebumps. I ate, slept and breathed this stuff when I was growing up. I used to wander around the house warbling "Caro Nome." I dreamed of being Mimi, Isolde, Carmen, Senta, Baby Doe.

My stepfather also had grand operatic aspirations, though he'd already found a calling as a computer jock: perhaps not as glamorous, but a better fit in that it doesn't involve so much singing. He used to wander around the house warbling "Che Gelida Manina" or "Nessun Dorma." But he'd generally stop when you covered your ears and dove under the furniture.

I really miss that aspect of my childhood. My whole family loved opera. And when I was little and we didn't have such newfangled devices as the VCR, or cable, it was a major occasion when the local PBS affiliate would air a performance: it would be simulcast on the radio and we'd all gather around and watch together and it was wonderful, just wonderful, except for my stepfather's singing.

My kids never caught the bug. It's sad. They could learn all the major European languages; they could study Italian for years. They could even grow up and move off to Florence or Venice or Milan. But they'll never understand what "E avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma!" means.

It means, "Who's your mama, BIATCH!"