I used to think I didn’t like opera.
I used to think that it was all about fat ladies dressed as Vikings wailing in German about long lost battles and lost loves.
That is of course until
agrajag_fur showed me the truth.
The truth being that it is varied, complex, beautiful and sublimely odd at times. In other words, everything I love, even more so when it is put on stage.
In the last year, I have seen two operas, both put on by the ENO, which bring my lifetime total up to… two.
The first of these was A Dog’s Heart, and opera based on the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov and scored by Alexander Raskatov. All of this meant nothing until I saw the show, and now those names are permanently etched into the inner surface of my skull. The story is something of an odd moral tale, part satire of the communist regime and part magical realist Frankenstein fable. We follow the story of a starving dog, dying on the streets of Moscow, who is rescued by a plastic surgeon who takes pity on him. Later, the surgeon grafts the testicles and pituitary gland of a drunk onto said dog and he begins to change, from a good dog into a bad man. From here onwards chaos ensues and the performance follows.
Everything about the show was mad and anarchic, wild music, stunning visuals and some remarkable puppetry. Oh, and the first half ends with a naked man standing on a table screaming ‘suck my cock’. Nice.
The second opera was the recent production of Berlioz ‘Faust’, directed by the master of the surreal, Terry Gilliam. This opera was apparently impossible to stage as the set pieces required are so vast and there isn’t much story, just loads of truly sublime music held together by a common thread. I believe the ‘impossible’ label has been applied to most of the things Gilliam has worked on.
The story of Faust is simple; he sells his soul to the devil and is damned for it. In Berlioz’s version this is to save the woman he loves from death, although the entire situation seems to be orchestrated by Mephistopheles in order to claim Faust’s soul. The opera is less a complete story and more a series of linked dramatic vignettes, and another story element is needed to hold it all together and fill the gaps. This production therefore, is set in pre-war Germany alongside the birth of Nazism. So, we have a stage show about a man selling his soul set against the First World War and rise of fascism, which was as heavy as it sounds.
The entire production was beautiful and shocking, with songs and monumental set pieces coming like hammer blows to the brain, full of bombast, symbolism, reference and explosive fury, done with some very clever tricks and devices. Particularly memorable for me was the image Europe being divided up, symbolised by the cutting of a giant cake and Faust’s ride to hell with Mephistopheles on a motorbike.
By the end of the first half we were all reeling and it only got worse in the second half where everything was turned up to previously unknown levels. We left the theatre in silence, shell-shocked and holding back tears.
~Theo