First post. Something's gotta be first.

2005-03-30T21:33:00.000-08:00

Truth be told, these first couple of days are going to be scattershot. Bear with me, please; now that I've committed to myself to start doing this regularly, there's a backlog of thoughts I need to clear out. I live in Chicago, and it's Ring Season around here, so there's a review of Das Rheingold from last autumn that needs posting, plus a recent review of Götterdämmerung from two weekends ago, and a review of Die Walküre from last night (ie, March 30, 2005).

This year, I also saw Aida on the night before Thanksgiving, which also deserves a post-mortem.

I've also recently seen my first production at the Chicago Opera Theater, which was a new version of the rarely-seen La Resurrezione. That deserves a review, as does the relatively new theater in which they now live. I have season tickets, thanks to The Wife, so there's a review of Le Nozze di Fiagro and one of A Midsummer Night's Dream upcoming.

Okay, my first snotty assumption. Damn me. For those new to this:

The four operas which consist of Der Ring des Niebelungen [The Ring of the Trolls] were written by Richard (pronounced REEK-ard) Wagner (pronounced VAG-ner). Learn more about him here.

Aida was composed by Giuseppe (Italian for "Joe") Verdi (Italian for "Green"). It's pronounced "joo-SEP-ey VER-dee" but you'll feel less stress if you remember that in Italy, he's plain "Joe Green." Learn more about him here.

La Resurrezione was written by George Handel, of Messsiah fame. Officially, this isn't an opera, but rather an oratorio (which basically means an opera where no one is expected to interact or display any dramatic action).

Le Nozze di Figaro [The Marriage of Figaro] was written by a guy named Mozart. Most people have heard of him; if not, google.

Benjamin Britten wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream.

As the description tries to suggest, I mean to make this a toally accessible and occasionally snarky review of opera productions, recitals that I may be lucky enough to catch, DVDs, and CDs. I'll try to keep the technical terms to a minimum. I will always endeavor to be inclusive and encouraging to novices, as we were all novices once. Sadly, there seems to be a terrible overlap between wine snobbery and opera connoisseurship which strangles interest in the cradle. My wife and I have held a couple of wine tastings over the years. We do double-blind tastings, and it invariably turns out that there's a $6 bottle of wine that beats the $50 bottle. Would that this was possible with opera listenings, so that the "obscure recording" crowd would stop brow-beating the newly interested into submission because they dare comment on a singer without hearing a 1959 out-of-print recording by Corelli. If such ideology were stil in sway in the cinema, you couldn't praise Sean Penn without a chorus of howler monkeys complaining that anyone who liked Sean Penn clearly had never seen Montgomery Clift, and was therefore not worth listening to.

We were all young once, and thought that an actor like Tom Hanks was the Best Ever. With any luck, we found someone to broaden our tastes. If we were unlucky, someone attempted to shame us for our philistine taste, and we either lived in fear or defiance afterwards, neither of which lends itself to a more sophisticated aesthetic.

If there is an aesthetic sense that this blog will attempt to replicate, it is that of Pauline Kael: a heart-felt visceral sense of the artform. With more jokes about fat chicks and bodily secretions of all sorts.

Crimson Joy

First post. Something's gotta be first.