#massenet

Nina Pinzarrone skating Méditation from Thaïs for her short program at the 2023 European and World Championships.

Yes I do! I don’t often post about opera on here only because they are long and discussing the plots and symbolism and themes can be daunting depending on the work…

[warning (?) longer post]

I’m not a big fan of Baroque operas, so my interest isn’t grabbed until the Classical era. I like and respect Gluck more than I love him, and I’ve enjoyed Orfeo ed Euridice but it isn’t a top favorite of mine.

More than him, I love Mozart’s operas, but especially his German ones, the Abduction from the Seraglio and the Magic Flute…I think that because these are someone more “populist” than the others, they have a lot of catchy melodies and cool moments. And the Magic Flute has a variety of orchestra colors and effects with the use of the glockenspiel and whistles and vocal demands. Historically it is also interesting acting as an allegory of Freemasons / Enlightenment Freethinkers against the Traditional Society (in this case, the Catholic Habsburgs).

I’ve been getting more interested in Rossini and the bel canto operas of Bellini and Donizetti. Maybe it was my own biased snobbery that dismissed Rossini as being insubstantial or too “popular” to take more seriously, but learning more about music history and culture of the 18th and 19th centuries has chanted my tune. I don’t love Rossini but he is entertaining and I like his orchestra writing too. Semiramide is interesting for being the last great “Baroque” opera, and La Cenerentola is a lot of fun. And from Bellini, I love Norma, mostly because I’m more familiar with how Liszt and Chopin had written homages to the work, with Liszt’s Réminiscences de Norma being his “best” opera fantasy (maybe alongside the Réminiscences de Don Juan).

Also from the early 19th century, I love Weber’s Der Freischütz, especially because of my own side interest in Gothic literature and horror movies…and I enjoy his imaginative sounds. I don’t love his other operas as much. There was a short period that I tried to get into French Grand Opera, and listened to Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable, Les Huguenots, and Le prophète. I appreicate them more for historic curiosity, but without the spectacle of the stage, the extremely long runtimes make them exhausting to listen to all at once, and without being trapped in the theater, it is too tempting to switch them off for something more immediately entertaining.

That is also an issue I tend to have with Wagner, whose music I sometimes love, sometimes hate. On the one hand he does have great orchestral textures and I love his harmonies and “floating tonality” where things transition seamlessly from one key to another, from one emotion to the next, and overall creating incredible spectacles of sound. On the other hand, Rossini made a quip about Wagner that I agree with, where “[he] has lovely moments, but awful quarters of an hour”. So many powerful moments act as islands in a sea of otherwise dull stretches music, and I spend time waiting to be carried to the next moment. He is good, but the time commitment makes it difficult for me to go out of my way to listen.

Disappointed to say that I don’t love Verdi as much, except for his three Shakespere operas. Macbeth, Otello, and Falstaff have great scores, with my preference going to Otello and Falstaff for being more mature, with the former being full of drama, and the latter being full of lightheartedness and winking, while also dazzling the audience with musical tricks the way Mozart used to do.

There are several operas of the 20th century that I love. Primarily I love the operas of Richard Strauss, and while he also has long runtimes, I think he does better at constantly having melodies and orchestral affects to keep my attention throughout. His early opera Feuersnot is still Wagnarian, but is enjoyable and has gorgeous powerful moments. Both Salome and Elektra are shocking to hear…Salome like a bowl of overripe fruit where Romantic music has so much chromatic saturation, the decadence becomes too much and everything sounds like it will fall apart or disintegrate. Elektra, I haven’t listened to in a long time, but it is like being struck by lightning over and over. But then Strauss steps away from this expressionism, and turns into the Post Romantic writing more lyrical works. Even with this backpeddling, I still love Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, and Daphne. All of his operas are full of great music…I don’t know, Strauss has become one of my top favorite composers as I get older, mostly because it feels like he has endless flows of music that can go on forever and ever, melody upon melody, which is probably how the 18th century reacted to Mozart (and why they would have died if they heard Strauss, like how a Victorian child would not survive a Monster Energy Drink)

The rest of my favorites tend to be one offs or operas by composers who didn’t only write opera. Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande bored me when I first listened to it, but my tastes have changed in favor of the subdued and nuanced and so I now love it a lot more. Ravel only has two operas (L'enfant et les sortilèges, and L'heure espagnole) and both are enjoyable, both have great orchestral writing (of course), and best of all they are both relatively short. I also love Szymanowski’s Krol Roger with his unusual harmonies and exoticisms, and the dark world of Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle. Stravinsky wrote a handful of operas, and while I appreciate Oedipus Rex for the kind of extremely Modern, extremely Meta commentary and presentation, I love his early opera The Nightingale a lot more…I think it has some of the best orchestral effects I’ve ever heard in an opera

Christian Dior Spring/Summer 1950 Haute Couture Collection "Massenet" wedding dress. Photo Willy Maywald.