Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center, Balcony (Seat F125,
$62.5).
Conductor – James Conlon; Oberon (King of the Fairies) –
Iestyn Davies, Tytania (Queen of the Fairies) – Kathleen Kim, Puck – Riley
Costello, Lysander – Joseph Kaiser, Hermia – Elizabeth DeShong, Demetrius –
Michael Todd Simpson, Helena – Erin Wall, Bottom – Matthew Rose, Quince –
Patrick Carfizzi, Flute – Barry Banks.
Story. Oberon and
Tytania argue about the fate of a boy under Tytania’s protection. Oberon sends Puck to fetch a magic flower
which when applied to a person’s eyelids will make her fall in love with the
first creature she sees. He plans to
steal the boy while Tytania is under the spell.
Meanwhile, the lovers Lysander and Hermia have escaped from Athens so
Hermia doesn’t have to by forced into marriage with Demetrius, who loves
her. Demetrius is in turn pursued by
Helena. After seeing what has happened,
Oberon asks Puck to make Demetrius fall in love with Helena. Puck mistakes Lysander for Demetrius, and
when Lysander sees Helena, he falls in love with her. When Tytania falls asleep, Oberon puts the
juice on her eyes, and when she wakes she sees Bottom, who has been transformed
into an ass. Bottom is one of six
working men rehearsing a play in the forest.
Tytania thus falls in love with Bottom.
When Oberon finds out the spell was put on the wrong person, he also
pours the juice on Demetrius’s eyes. The
result is both men are after Helena. She
thinks she is being mocked, and Hermia thinks she has been abandoned. After the four quarrel, they fall asleep, and
Puck fixes his errors with the antidote, and they reconcile. Oberon also releases Tytania from her spell,
and restores Bottom back to human. The
four lovers return to Athens, and after obtaining forgiveness, are married
together with Theseus and Hippolyta. The
working men put on the play. Afterwards,
the three couples retire to bed.
For someone who knows the story, my summary above makes
sense. For someone unfamiliar with it:
too bad. Even though the opera’s plot is
much simplified compared with the actual play, it is still quite
complicated. According to the Program
Notes, the opera cuts down the number of lines (over 2000) by half, and reduces
the number of acts from 5 to 3. The six
words that are added (“compelling thee to marry with Demetrius”) are sufficient
to dispense of the entire first act, set in Athens, wherein Hermia’s father
tries to force her into marriage. The
opera is sung in English, thus the Met titles are in Shakespearean language,
something not easy to understand at the first encounter. Fortunately the pace is reasonable, and being
a comedy there really is no need to get every word down; so I followed along
without too much difficulty. I was quite
sure I would find a couple of familiar quotes in the libretto, but to my
surprise I didn’t recognize any. A
search of the web for quotes from this play also yielded some obscure
references (e.g., “my soul is in the sky.”)
So much for the literary analysis. I bought a ticket for this opera mainly
because of the 25% discount offer I got in the mail. Also, I have enjoyed most of my prior
encounters with operas based on Shakespeare’s plays, so I regarded this as an
opportunity to learn another of his works.
A couple of years ago I saw The Enchanted Island, an amalgam of The
Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so I was curious what the latter play
really was about. Comedies (be they
plays, musicals, or operas) generally don’t work for me. I don’t find them particularly amusing
(perhaps timing is a real issue). I felt
the same way about Falstaff, and – alas – have similar feelings towards this
one, despite some clever, light-hearted moments in the plot.
But there are a lot of good things I can say about the
opera and the performance. First, the music was quite accessible. It isn’t as straightforward as the other
Britten opera I saw (The Rape of Lucretia, also based on a Shakespeare work),
and there is more “tune” to the sung parts, but not overly mysterious. The Program Notes also described the three
“tiers” of beings and their corresponding music: the world of the fairies with
high voices and harps, harpsichord, celesta, and percussions as the main
instruments; woodwinds and strings for the lovers; and lower brass for the
working men (rustics.) Reality is
slightly more complicated than that, but the guide helped me tremendously. The Notes also talked about parodies of
Donizetti’s mad scene, and that the play within the play also made fun of
various composers, including Britten himself.
That is something I wouldn’t have caught by myself. In any case, the mad scenes (e.g., where the
four lovers quarrel) were quite enjoyable, and they were not that long that I
felt embarrassed (as with the case of some Donizetti scenes.)
It was difficult for me to know if there were any
headliners from the Oberon, Tytiana, the four lovers, and several of the
rustics. In the cast of character above
I did add the role of Peter Quince who was not headlined in the Playbill. I thought his importance is comparable to the
other two that got mentioned. The only
artist I remember from my prior opera experience is Kathleen Kim, who sang the
role of Oscar in A Masked Ball. She did
very well here also. For once I wasn’t
too confused by a male role sung by a countertenor. Davies’s timbre was sufficiently different
from Kim’s that I could tell them apart even though I couldn’t see who was
doing the singing (given how far I was from the stage.)
As with Hamlet, I didn’t quite get why it was necessary
for a play within a play. To me it just
added some thirty minutes to the whole thing.
Speaking of which: the opera is about 3 hours in length, with two
intermissions the event lasted just short of 4 hours.
The staging is modernist and for most part is a stylized
depiction of the forest. The addition of
a crescent moon made the scene a realm of the forests.
Overall this was a pleasant experience. The Program Notes writer has a lot of great
things to say about the opera, and the New York Times review is glowing. I suspect I will only get to that level of
sophistication after a detailed study of the work, which I probably won’t get
to do.
I took the train in, and by the time I got home, it was
after 1 am.
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