I went to the opera for the first time in my life on friday night. I saw Puccini's, "La Rondine" (The Sparrow) at Capitol Theatre in Salt Lake City. The music was beautiful; there were spots where it gave me chills.The opera was sung in Italian and super-titled in English. My only complaint was that we were seated so far to the left that to read the super-titles (which were hung from from the underside of the mezzanine) you had to shift your focus away from the stage. This made it difficult to just get lost in the music. I was tempted a couple of times to just stop reading the super-titles, but in the end I was just too curious to know what was going on.
The heroine, Magda, is the kept woman of a rich and powerful man, Rambaldo. She dreams of finding true love. In an attempt to relive one of her fond childhood memories of being in love, she sneaks out of her house dressed as a grisette (a working class woman) and goes to Bulier's, a parisian night club. At Bulier's she is accidentally thrust into the arms of Ruggero, the son of a friend of Rambaldo. Although they come together accidentally they quickly fall in love and run off to the French Riviera together.
Magda never tells Ruggero anything about her past or who she really is. Just as Ruggero is (basically) proposing to her and speaking of their future together, Magda decides that she can't bear to live the lie anymore. But she also knows that if she were to tell Ruggero the truth that it would devastate and humiliate him. So, she tells Ruggero that they simply can't be together and that she must leave him for his own good. The opera ends with Magda leaving Ruggero; both of them broken hearted.
I was pretty disappointed by the ending. I'm not one of those people that needs a happy ending, but this just felt like the tragedy was invented. Ruggero was basically telling Magda that he didn't care about her past and that there was nothing that she could tell him that would make him not love her. I guess that the real tragedy was that Magda didn't have enough trust in Ruggero's love for her.
2 comments:
That's cool that you got to go, and that you enjoyed it so much. Who went with you, may I ask? And had they been to the opera before? What made you want to go?
I'm assuming you know (but maybe not) that I used to sing and studied under a woman that sang opera. I actually had a part in an opera once, as an understudy, and got to sing the part at one performance. The opera? - Hansel and Gretel. I sang the Sandman. I was about 15 years old then, I think. At the time, my ambition was to go to Germany to study. I took German in high school, and got as far as sending for applications to German schools of music. Obviously, my life went a different direction.
One thing about opera is that most of them were written a really long time ago when social standards were very different. Have you watched the movie "The Age of Innocence"? The whole plot revolves around the idea that a person cannot change their pre-destined social orientation w/o totally destroying their life. And there may be families now for whom that is still true. But...opera is cool. My favorite is Madam Butterfly. When I was learning piano eons ago (second grade was when I started)I had a lesson book that had basic melodies from great operas. It told the plot of the opera, and then explained where this song fit in. The music was really simple, one note for each hand. BUT...I was hooked. The song "Un Belle Di"--One Fine Day--from Madam Butterfly was so beautiful...I've seen the opera several times and it is really tragic, but the music always transports me.
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