Too much too much

 

Okay.  Enough is enough IS ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.  I want thirty hours in a day and I want them NOW.*   Yesterday morning I had my osteopath appointment, during which I was beaten mercilessly and then made to pay for it.**  I then lurched and stumbled down to the mews (having thoughtfully hurtled hellhounds beforehand) and collapsed in a heap at the kitchen table where I attempted a little work and thereafter was BRIEFLY if dreadfully distracted by a book that had recently arrived in the post** and I was keeping an eye on the time I REALLY WAS but, see, I thought I remembered when the opera started.  It's a good thing I finally decided to check.  You'd be surprised how much difference half an hour makes†. . . . 

            . . . Especially if you're trying to park in the major local shopping town on a Saturday evening a fortnight before Christmas.  AAAAAUGH.  Since I do 90% of my gift-buying on-line any more, and because I am by now chiefly preoccupied with how much of the stuff I've already ordered will actually arrive††, I hadn't engaged with the likelihood of date-specific parking mayhem. 

            Our usual car park was full to the eyeballs.  So was our second.  So were the residential streets near the theatre.  I didn't want to park somewhere I wasn't sure about closing time, since some of the town-centre multi-storeys aren't open much past business hours—and you need to have Scott Summers' laser-gaze and a suspicious nature to penetrate all the rules on the average car park signboard.  I was at this point losing hope†††—we took another pass through the back streets and lo and behold there was a parking space, except I couldn't get into it because one of Hampshire's notorious flint walls is where the opposite shoulder of the road should be, and parallel parking—which when I'm not hysterical I'm generally not too bad at—requires that your nose swing out when your butt swings in.  Maybe all those other parked cars are British made and there's a secret bend switch under the dashboard, for the Parallel Park Wriggle in walled-in roads that are one and a half lanes wide??  Geez. 

            So we took one last despairing swing a little farther out through the back streets around the cinema and . . . yes.  Except we were now about a mile and a half from the theatre and we'd been late before we started. 

            By some pinching and yanking of the time stream by some goddess who, as soon as I learn her name, I will make a significant sacrifice to . . . we gasped our way to our seats as the ' . . . minutes till DON CARLO' on the screen clicked over to '1'.  I just had time to yank my pillows out of the tote bag and jam them against the back and bottom of my seat so I could lounge in comfort for the next five hours.

            Fortunately . . . it was fabulous.  I was about to say that it's one of Verdi's great ones, but for a besotted Verdi fan, among whose august number I would count myself, there are so many great ones.  There are also about six different versions of this particular opera—not just the Italian and the French but the early and the late, and the spaghetti carbonara and seven dwarves version, and the outtakes involving the lesser noctule and the superfluous soprano which some enterprising conductor has decided to drag out of the shadows and record, and the result for someone like me, with a vague fuzzy addiction to opera rather than a vicelike grip of the details, is that every time I see or hear a fresh DON CARLO(S) I think, uh, that's not how I remember it . . . and it isn't.  The vagaries of individual translations of the text don't help a whole lot either.

            I was originally going to give you the inimitable McKinley version of the plot but I still have to get some work done tonight so here's the official account:  http://www.metoperafamily.org/uploadedFiles/MetOpera/watch_and_listen/hd_events/DonCarlo_HD_synopsis.pdf and I'll just mention some highlights.  First, Elisabeth.  When Marina Poplavskaya first gallops on stage as the careless young flirtatious virgin you think, oh, yawn.  But her love-at-first-sight duet with Don Carlo, Roberto Alagna, wins you over:  it's one of those occasions when you forget that the soprano is not a lissom young virgin and the tenor is short, fat and bandy-legged, which all tenors are, it's in the contract.‡  And I've seen Elizabeth played as a dopey little-woman type, buffeted by the winds of cruel fate, for the entire course of the opera—but not here.  Elisabeth is the strong one, the one who stands up to her duty and claims it, and makes Carlo look like a whimpering boy.

            Second, Rodrigo.  Rodrigo is Carlo's best friend, and the homoeroticism of their relationship knocks me out every time.  I keep wondering, am I missing that these guys are Italian, culture gap and all that?  (It's just as bad in the French version, but Verdi was Italian.)  Can Verdi push it because part of the set up is that Carlo is helplessly in love with his stepmother?  Er—where does that leave Rodrigo?  Who, as Peter says, is a weirdly Iago figure, except he's a good guy.  But all that slightly-too-close-in and of dubious and opaque motivation is very Iago-ish.  Also the two of them have another of the most famous guy duets in opera‡‡—and Alagna and Simon Keenlyside really nail it. 

            Third, the princess Eboli.  Hers is a pretty thankless role—the rejected seductress who is used to having it her own way, and turns nasty—and Anna Smirnova isn't perhaps quite up to making her character plausible, if her character can be made plausible.  But her final aria, when first she confesses to Elisabeth what she's done—and then after Elisabeth says, you what? and storms out of the room, leaving her alone with her despair—is thrillingly convincing. 

            Fourth, King Philip.  That dog turd.  In the beginning of the fourth act (well, the fourth act in this version) he has another of those Most Famous Arias where he whinges about how his wife doesn't love him.  Well what do you think, you total jerk.  The plot hinges on the fact that Elisabeth and Carlo were engaged—er, have I mentioned that Carlo is Philip's son?—and then she gets given to Philip hey-presto instead.  Cue distraughtness and hair-tearing.  (This may also be the translation, or the context of Verdi's time and culture, but Elisabeth keeps getting referred to as Carlo's mother, to make the shock of their forbidden love more awful, but really.  She's not his mother, for pity's sake, she's his stepmother.  They met when they were both grown-ups.  And engaged to be married.  To each other.)  Philip is maniacally jealous of her . . . oh, and is also a corrupt tyrant, a short-tempered bully—and a whinger.  He does this whole poor-little-me-a-king-just-can't-trust-anybody-whiiiiiine to Rodrigo early on, right after he's sentenced another army to another bloodbath.  Hate Philip.  Hate Philip.  But lots of commentators go on about his secret tragedy blah blah blah loneliness and insecurity blah blah blah blah blah.  HATE PHILIP.  Ferruccio Furlanetto does a prime job, but it doesn't make me like him.‡‡‡

            But it's a great opera, full of goosebumpy, throat-catching moments.  The ending does kind of go off the rails—what?  He what? He what how?—but the parting duet between Carlo and Elisabeth is gloriously soppy.  And I personally felt it was totally worth five hours of a numb bum.  But then I did have my pillows this time.§

            . . . And then we had to race home and have supper at eleven o'clock at night and I had to go to bed pretty much while I was still chewing, and I don't know about you, but sleeping on a full stomach gives me very strange dreams.  And then not only did I have to ring bells at an ungodly hour this morning but there were only six of us and we were all method ringers so we had to ring methods, none of this going to sleep during some nice relaxing call changes for some how-glad-I-am-to-see-you beginner.  I survived a touch of Stedman doubles—on a Sunday morning!  On a Sunday morning on too little sleep with too many strange dreams!!—or rather, I survived it till somebody else went wrong which is good enough.§§

            And then there was Octopus and Chandelier rehearsal this afternoon.  And then I had to pelt home and phone down through my long list of possibles for our monthly practise at Old Eden tomorrow, and then . . .

            Thirty hours a day.  Now.            

* * *

* I also want the ME to go. away. forever.   Oh, and while I'm at it, I'd like PEGASUS to sell 70 million copies so I can buy a large field and put a deer-, rabbit- and hellhound-proof fence around it, grow a zillion roses along the edges and have room for hellhounds to hurtle their scariest without worrying about Evil Monster Dog from Arkham^ hoving round the hedgerow at us at an inconvenient moment.

^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkham , for you (astonishing) non-Lovecraft people out there.

** At least he didn't go on and on about the Ageing Body this time.  Gah.

*** This keeps happening to me.  Very sad.

† Okay, a lot of you have lives like mine.  Maybe you wouldn't be surprised. 

†† In time would be a bonus, but I don't want to appear greedy

††† And was also thinking irritably about the Rossini OTELLO I was missing at home on Radio 3's Saturday night opera.  Which, since all the Met Live HDs are on Saturday evening, is going to be regular problem.  I'm listening with both relief and pleasure to OTELLO on Radio 3's Listen Again right now, but copyright, that pesky little gremlin, means that a lot of stuff isn't available, and I guarantee it will include some frelling opera or other I really really wanted to hear.

‡ Except Juan Diego Flores.  Who can furthermore just about survive the awful things that zoom lenses do to singers.  Most singers are not beautiful when they sing:  their faces go into the most unlikely and unfortunate shapes.  I wonder how many tentative new opera goers are testing the waters with one of these cinema broadcasts, spend the evening turning purple with suppressed laughter and decide to stay home and watch their complete Blackadder DVDs after this.  I have problems with the camera close-ups and I've been going to live opera for getting on half a century.

‡‡ The other one that instantly comes to mind is from Bizet's Pearl Fishers, and is also madly homoerotic, although they're both in love with the same woman.  And, speaking of Italian culture, Bizet is French.

‡‡‡ After the my-wife-doesn't-love-me-boo-hoo aria there's this sick-makingly creepy scene with the Grand Inquisitor where Philip wants the GI to say it's okay that he offs his son for treason, and the GI says, hey, great, I love blood, I mean, I'm terribly religious, you should definitely execute your son, and, by the way, give me Rodrigo, I want to rend him limb from limb, slowly.  And Philip says, no way, you nasty old man!  Thanks for permission to kill my son but I'm going to keep Rodrigo!  —Ewwwwww.  I mean, it's supposed to be sick-making.  But I have never seen any reason to have any pity for Philip whatsoever.  I hope he has a whole regiment of dedicated demons keeping him company in a particularly nasty corner of some particularly nasty underworld. 

§ I'd better remember them for Die Walkurie which is even longer 

§§ And I haven't even told you about ringing a plain course of Cambridge minor without getting yelled at last Friday practise.  Well, actually, I did get yelled at once, but it wasn't me that was going wrong.^  And whoever it was found their line again and we made it through to the end. 

^ I would have given Colin a Wounded Glare only I was too busy