Today: Happiest Romance (Day Eighteen) and Most Visually Entertaining Opera (Day Nineteen).
Happiest Romance:
I have this feeling that if I keep bringing up Fidelio, people are going to start coming after me with sticks. So. While Leonore and Florestan are my first pics, for this post I am going to have to go with Tamino and Pamina from Mozart's Die Zauberflote.
They're young, they're idealistic, they're feisty. They do a lot of growing throughout their opera, and acquire eternal wisdom in the end. And I think that after all they go through together, they live happily ever after.
And then there's Papageno. I love him because he's hilarious, simple, and honest. All he wants is a good woman to marry and live happily ever after. Who needs enlightenment, he argues. I like that all of the couples in Zauberflote get what they want and deserve.
In terms of sheer musical silliness, this duet cannot be beat:
And that brings me to today's theme: Most Visually Entertaining Opera
Again, I'm going to go with Die Zauberflote. It's pure fantasy, so anything goes with it. Consequently there have been some very entertaining versions of it. I like the 2003 Covent Garden production (see video above), but in terms of sheer visual awesome, I have to go with Julie Taymor's production for the Met(even though it's in English. I do have issues with that):
2 comments:
Nice choices! I sympathize wholeheartedly with the Fidelio-temptation, but for in-opera happiness I think that Papageno and Papagena might have them beat.
I saw Taymor's production when the Met did Zauberfloete a few seasons ago in German and without cuts. Complaints that it dwarfs the singers are not unjustified, but it is definitely entertaining. I think my party of 6 twentysomethings may have giggled more than the nine-year-olds in front of us.
That's what I like about Zauberfloete: it's silly, as well as intense and mystical. I love looking at the singers in Taymor's production: the costumes make it really hard to identify them, especially Tamino. I saw pics of Kaufmann in this production and didn't even recognize him under his seventeen pounds of kabuki make-up.
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