Simon Boccanegra
I often resolve to at least note the performances I go to. Between punk shows and the opera and other stuff it is a super fun ride. And posting a bit helps me remember my feelings and reactions!
I got a comped ticket to the (new, postponed) opening night of Simon Boccanegra Tuesday, going in fairly ignorant though I listened to it with half an ear earlier in the day and also knew it was about a politician who had been shipwrecked or something and spanned some sort of tragedy or fuckup in his youth and then he was going to get a comeuppance later in life. Not much to go on. I was also warned it would be confusing and that there would be a giant meteor lowering onto the stage over the evening.
TL;DR the music was lovely, conducting great (so skilled and nuanced), and the singers were consistently amazing!!!! and the staging had interesting parts but was where I had the most criticism.
There was a giant replica of a meteor in the lobby that everyone was signing in silver paint pen.
The opening had a fantastic tableaux of people in grey suits surrounding our hero (i assumed correctly) on the ground in Renaissance attitudes of consternation and concern. I wished I could take a picture! No idea how the transition happened. Great singing, great music, an air of solemnity, a giant painting on the wall, or was it a screen, or wait, was it a window? It took me a while to decide what I was looking at. I liked it generally though a) a bit too much returning to the (projected?) image of the shipwreck scene which we never really HEARD about but which I guess was supposed to indicate his alienation from his past/ origins ( a privateer?)
I could see just a hint of giant meteor looming overhead , while underneath it was sort of a pattern of angled shapes in the floor that I figure were its shadow, as every time the curtain fell we got more shapes added. (But the meteor didn’t gradually lower alas, it just suddenly appeared near the end of the opera, maybe a mistake, because everyone around me giggled)
Who is this girl doing the stately walk across the stage looking stricken? OK … a love story? No wait, she’s in prison? So confusing. She’s pregnant? Spoiler, she was pregnant and died giving birth. Sadness!
Eun-Sun Kim was fantastic as usual. I could see her conducting if I sat forward a bit in my dress circle front row and I loved how it was like she wrung every possible bit of earnest tenderness out of something that could have been syrupy or corny. Instead it had lovely sublime moments. Sometimes very delicate and light like everyone was floating between notes in the score. Love that.
The music itself, I like Verdi in general and can (very badly) yodel along to all of La Traviata when no one is listening. So the music wasn’t CATCHY in that way, but it was good, beautiful, and also did this incredible thing where with a pause and then just a few notes of the orchestra starting a new song I would feel locked in like I could tell a giant emotion was about to happen and where it was going. I wonder how culturally specific that is. Does a person raised listening to a different musical tradition feel that? Attention! You are about to feel a Thing!!! Here it comes! Then, it actually comes and I actually would feel it. The singers, what can I say, they were fantastic and I often got shivers all over. Simon – amazing. A++. Amelia – her voice was so pure and perfect and effortless. But they were all A+. including the emotions they got across in every way.
Anyway! I was confused whether Simon was hanging out with his younger self (I think so) There was a politician, a patrician who Simon hated (Paolo) who was machinating to get him elected Doge of Genoa. I gathered the city states or whatever of Italy were warring in whatever historical period this was supposed to be. And an older guy who was Maria’s dad Fiesco (hates Simon).
Simon reveals that his and Maria’s daughter survived but he lost her when her caretaker died. No one knows where she is.
I became annoyed that the patricians and the common people were so hard to tell apart (even with my opera glasses) since they were all in minimalist grey. Patricians had things like ties on, Military had fancy hats and belts, commoners might be in overalls but all in the same damn color. Fine it’s a statement maybe but did we need to be looking at that statement the whole opera? Give us some cool ass costumes to look at please!
I had random thoughts about my own family history, and about Garibaldi and the unification of italy at times when the action was in a bit of a lull. Great unification, look where that fuckin’ got ya. (possibly part of the point of the relentless grey outfits)
We then see another (?) girl at a dinner table, I was a bit lost as to who she was. The daughter with her ghost mom symbolically? Adopted parents (I think this is correct) A young guy , her brother Or? who? This is where having non grey differentiated outfits would have really helped us out. But OK, I am good with not knowing and being uncertain till it becomes clear.
I did get confused about why the (adoptive) dad (Grimaldi) was really her grandfather (what? isn’t that Fiesco? who i forgot or never realized was in jail all this time? Are they the same guy? Maybe if they were WEARING NON GRAY…. Argh… but never mind…) Why did she never show her locket with her mom’s miniature to her adoptive parents? Or, maybe she did but it was so miniature that it looked like any old teenaged Italian girl (in grey). Amelia by the way loves Gabriele Adorno, who I don’t remember ever hearing about in the beginning but again never mind that, the singing is great and everyone is very intense.
Chorus was ALSO FANTASTIC and here is my other beef aside from the gray outfits. They were almost always off stage. I got the point of Simon being very alone and alienated in the big empty palace room that looked like a nightmarish conference hotel. But hello you have several MOB scenes with a giant warlike rebellion or revolt! A swirling mob is lovely on stage! Please do it there and not offstage! These chances were missed, I’m sure rejected for some artistic reason, but I am a lowbrow who wants a crowd scene, and since we do not have a ball or a drinking song, please put the riot front and center.
Instead we got a LOT of Stately Perambulating. Basically any time there was singing there was someone else Taking a Turn About the Room like Elizabeth Bennett and what’s her name. They were very good at it and pulled it off but I became inured to any meaning or interest after about the third Perambulating Episode and then ground my teeth a bit when the CROWD finally on stage did it too!!! (sometimes holding what might have been a brick and ceremoniously putting it down) There was quite a lot of Perambulating in Parsifal during the last season but there was an excuse since he was on a journey. Walking around very slowly – the new “CEO hands” of opera….
Simon is a good ruler (we gather from the fickle mob and his forgiveness of them) praising Peace and Love. and implicitly, Commerce (let’s focus off war with Venice and onto the nice trade deal!) He does mention torture and had Maria’s dad in prison tho. Young Gabriele decides to stop hating him, then suddenly hates him again and accuses Maria of being his mistress (THAT JERK) He is basically an idiot and doesn’t get to redeem himself in any way (he is just forgiven and gets to marry Amelia and become the next Doge)
That ending was annoying too. Though I had fun side thoughts about how usurpers get to just make up any old story about how the peasant girl they elevate to queen doge consort (Doge-ess) is really secretly noble and the old Doge’s daughter and he blessed everything with his dying breath. It comes off as a kind of political statement about how winners write heroic stories that are full of ridiculous lies. Did verdi mean any of that? No idea, probably not?
The meteor finally lands, when the guy next to me said he had no idea what that meteor was about I suggested that it was his inevitable looming fate because of his Sin (seducing Maria or maybe being a privateer aka a pirate, or both).
As I came out of the opera house, Tim Blevins was all set up and singing outside just past the steps, busking with fair success I think. He had a “THE GOAT” trophy set up in front of him and I gave him a flyer for our wheelchair repair workshop (GOAT space) since he was in a big old powerchair (not mentioned in the recent article about him)