It was really sad to see how tittery and worked-up people got when the women in the opera kissed each other. If one of the girls had been androgynous (since, you know, it’s supposed to be a boy), everyone would’ve been all, “Ew, gross! You guys can’t get married, and go back to Long Beach where you belong until Armageddon comes and you’re sucked into the bowels of fiery hell!” Yes, our country still revolves around the penis and what makes the penis happy, even in a city like LA with a large gay and lesbian population. Because people like the lesbians, but only when they’re pretty, lipsticky ones like in the ad. I don’t mind lesbianism, but since Octavian the character is a boy, it was misleading and seemed kind of like a shameless ploy to get people into the operahouse. LA Opera was really milking the estrogen-fest for all it was worth too all the ads for Rosenkavalier featured two women, all powdered white with red lips, on the verge of kissing one another. I definitely wasn’t looking forward to the estrogen-fest the only main male character is Baron Ochs, and he’s kind of a buffo character, so there would be no sexy baritoney-ness. There’s a whole farcical main action-plot, but the relationships between the Marschallin and Octavian, and Octavian and Sophie, form the major emotional plot. All I knew was that it’s about an older woman who’s screwing a young man (who’s played by a woman), and she ends up sacrificing her own happiness so he can go off with a girl his own age. I’ve never seen or even heard the opera before, so I don’t know what would be considered “correct”. It’s difficult to write a review of this Rosenkavalier because I have nothing to compare it with. His music is exactly who he is-loud, boisterous, attention-grabbing.
OK, I’m willing to accept that, especially since in Rosenkavalier the character who has the least internal, private emotions-Baron Ochs-is given the catchiest music. The program notes say that in Strauss, the music is given the responsibility of representing the private world that must be disguised in the public world of the stage. Either way, guy liked the sound of his own voice, coming out of other people.
With Wagner, you always get the feeling that he wrote these very long, quite repetitive librettos just so he could write more music. The music and the drama should feed off each other and push one another forward, which is probably why I dislike Wagner so much. Rosenkavalier probably has beautiful music (I can’t really remember any of it in spite of Strauss’s reputation for drowning out the singers, the music in Rosenkavalier is almost like a soundtrack), but it’s very talky, and for no real reason. It’s hard to feel anything better than ambivalence toward anything that’s four hours and twenty minutes long, unless it’s an extended edition of one of the Lord of the Rings movies.
Maybe it’s a problem with me and not with the performances, but I couldn’t muster up anything other than ambivalence for Falstaff two weeks ago and Der Rosenkavalier this past weekend. It started off with a.well, I actually can’t remember how it started, but it definitely ended with a whimper.
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