The schedule of operas being streamed by the New York Metropolitan Opera company for the coming two weeks has been published. Yesterday I saw the 2007 production of The Barber of Seville. In the story of this opera, the title role is not that of the male romantic lead but rather of his wing man Figaro, who helps Count Almaviva win the heart of Rosina and help her escape the clutches of her much older guardian Dr. Bartolo who seeks to marry her.
Since this is a comedy, I thought that I would enjoy it even more than the tragedies that I had watched in the first week of shows but I did not. There was some nice music, some of which I was already familiar with, but the whole performance just did not grab me. The problem was more with the comedic elements than the music. There was quite a bit of mugging by the performers and some slapstick in order to generate laughs but to me it seemed jarring and not funny. Slapstick and mugging can be hilarious when done by the likes of the Marx brothers or Laurel and Hardy but it seemed out of place in the context of opera. Comedy is hard. You can get away with less-than-perfect dramatic acting but with comedy, you have to get it just right.
The stage set also seemed to me to be pretentious. As one example, they would have minor characters move things around while others were performing. As another example, they had extended the stage to go around the orchestra pit and the performers would often go around the perimeter of that circle while they sang. This brought them very close to the audience, so close that they could even touch the people in the first row if they wanted to but there did not seem to be any purpose served by this. I found all this distracting and taking me out of the moment. The designed less to provide a backdrop to the action and more to draw attention to itself and its designer with its avant garde nature. And it worked. If I were planning on producing an opera, I would definitely look up who was the set designer here to make sure I did not hire them.
I was also mystified by the fact at the very end of the performance, a real live donkey appeared on the stage with the chorus. It stayed there during the curtain call. I could not see any reason for it to be there.
Once again, I noted the odd choice of setting, something I commented about in Lucia di Lammermoor and La Traviata. Rossini is Italian, the opera is sung in Italian, the names are Italian, and yet the story is set in Seville, which is in Spain. The opera is based on a French play so that may explain it but I am still puzzled by the strong sense of fidelity that opera composers seem to have concerning the location of the source material while being willing to change pretty much every thing else.
The next operas I plan to watch are Verdi’s Don Carlo on Thursday and Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers (which happens to be set in ancient Sri Lanka) on Friday.
Mano
This https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x301k1t is a version starring Bugs Bunny.
It’s only 6 minutes long.
It’s basically up the librettist who writes the text, not the composer who writes the music. (As long as nobody else is exerting pressure, like authors, producers, censors, etc.)
It’s not surprising to me. The story can happen anywhere you want, or whatever was in the source material — France, perhaps. Sounds exciting enough, and it doesn’t make people too suspicious that you’re criticizing your government and/or the folks next door. (You probably are, but you need to be able to deny it.)
However, your very practical concerns about the language you’re going to put it in work in sort of the opposite way: you want to make sure your Italian-speaking audience can understand everything. That’s the one thing that you don’t want to be “foreign” about it, even if everything else is. (That might be hard to remember, when you were just watching it in a language you don’t speak, with the helpful subtitles they couldn’t have used back then….)
I’m sure you’ve seen tons of TV shows and movies that are in English which shouldn’t be. It’s really not that weird for us either. I guess in the US we’re sort of better about using foreign character names when appropriate, although it’s still often anglicized or is a relatively common/familiar choice. Of course, we also have a much less homogeneous society compared to Italy. If we all only lived and worked with people who had Italian names (or whatever), then I doubt it would be very different.
Also, in the stories we tend to tell, a foreign character usually doesn’t have a lead role. No matter if it happens in Africa or Asia or South America, you still usually put an American/European white guy in the lead somehow. If it’s somewhere in Europe, that’s already brimming with white guys who can have white guy names without anybody objecting. Give them an accent (or don’t), put them in the right costume with the right props, and that’s enough “realism” for your exotic location.
chigau @#1,
Thanks for that! I loved those old Looney Tunes cartoons.
consciousness razor @#2,
The idea that setting it in a foreign locale can provide some protection from political repercussions makes some sense to me.
Shakespeare set most of his plays in places other than England, yet they were performed in English by English actors. It may have been a way to treat playgoers to the mystique of a foreign land that most of them would never see, sort of like a virtual trip down the river on the African Queen. It’s not the setting that’s important, it’s the moral of the story.
publicola,
I am not disputing that authors set their stories in countries other than their own. The fact that the language of the play or opera is the language of their audience is also reasonable. I was just wondering why, if these opera composers gave their characters Italian names, they did not set the story in Italy. Or conversely, give the characters names appropriate to the location they set the story in. What you say about Shakespeare is true but he gave the characters names that were from the settings they were placed in.
It is the easily avoidable unnecessary incongruity that I was noting.
Mano @6:
Except when he didn’t. For example, a lot of the minor characters in Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream have English names (Gregory, Peter, Friar Laurence, Peter Quince, Nick Bottom, etc), and Montague and Juliet are Anglicized. Then there’s the curious case of Mark Antony in Julius Caesar. Why Marcus Brutus, but not Marcus Antonius?
Maybe some authors liked to include familiar names to make their audiences feel more “at home” in an exotic setting.
AFAIC, if it’s a good story, why would the names matter?
I agree it does not really matter. It is just an easily avoidable minor incongruity.