…thanks
to a senior rush ticket that placed me at an ideal spot in center orchestra…
18 October
2014
At the San
Francisco Opera House, about to hear an opera, I looked at the gold masks
either side of the stage, the Mask of Tragedy and Mask of Comedy. I
noticed that in both masks the eyes were troubled. Tragedy’s eyes were
wide with horror. Comedy’s eyes winced with pain.
The San Francisco Giants won the pennant and the San Francisco Opera is
presenting Handel’s comic opera Partenope (“par-TEN-opee”), and for me, Travis
Ishikawa’s joyous final run around the base that won the Giants the pennant was
precisely echoed in counter tenor David Daniel vocally running the line in
Handel’s music.
Some
people find Handel not to their taste, and I imagine that they avoid attending
Handel operas. There are others who appear to come to hear Handel
specifically because they will be credited with acute taste when they complain
how much they dislike the opera they are hearing. One must put up with
their never varying remarks, or not enough tickets will be sold to assure
future productions of Handel.
The
woman who lectured before the opera understood how some cannot maintain
interest in a 3 or 4 hour opera, and reminded us that in Handel’s day people
often sat in boxes where they could draw curtains during that time, to
converse, dine, play cards, or make love so they did not find the opera going
on outside the box to be tedious.
I
don’t know if there are written records describing the physical direction and
staging of his comic operas, but I must assume that he wanted his comic operas
to be funny, and so I have to assume that we are cheated when the operas are
not directed as Christopher Alden directed this production – the endless run of
luscious arias, sung beautifully, punctuated with visual comedy that never interfered
with great singing – with special surprises, as when in Act One someone sang an
aria while hanging by his hands in mid-air. The cast met physical as well
as vocal challenges.
Central
in Act II was a bathroom, often open with someone sitting on the toilet.
(At the moment when a suitor is singing about his love for Partenope, she, in
the bathroom, flushes the toilet.) The longest applause of the evening
was for Emilio (Alek Shrader) after one of his long slapstick episodes that began
with his singing the most difficult section of an aria while balanced on his
stomach in the transom over the bathroom door (as he had been locked in).
Besides
many comical visual moments, there were all the usual Handel tricks – Partenope
singing of a butterfly on the air with an aria that sounds like a butterfly on
the air.
The
lecturer before the opera is from Naples that in B.C. was called Partenope, and
in A.D. became Naples, a contraction for Italian words meaning “New City.”
She
described the formula for these kinds of operas – one aria each for various
emotions or moods, no moods repeated immediately.
Even
the manner of singing – the show-off elaboration – could become comic, a
reflection of the vanity of the character. I am at the point in a James
Baldwin novel where people are trading sexual partners and being uncertain who
they love or don’t love, and that was precisely the subject of the opera, with
the various moods of love from foolish to pining, but whimsical and
sophisticated, with some wonderful slapstick.
Just
to overplay how whimsical the production was at times, in the last act someone
tap-danced while singing an aria.
Nevertheless,
only for those who love Handel.
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