Feast, Famine and the Opera

I've been awake since 4:00 am.

I wrested myself from bed in the darkness.

It's closing time at the bars, I thought.
Nevermind. Onto my exercise bike.

Since then, I've already taught two classes, graded a countless number of papers, and read an entire book on Italian fascism and the opera in addition to several articles. I've finished two cans of red bull, one liter of "smart water" and nothing else. I'm hungry and cranky and I'm only half way through my day. I don't have time for lunch, I'm unprepared for my presentation and I haven't finished grading the papers I promised my class I would return to them this evening.

Ah! Such is life at the end of the semester!

That said, I just encountered some interesting ideas about Puccini, a composer who has lingered in my mind a great deal over the past few weeks due to my recent re-obsession with La Boheme. (I also sang for my friends the other day one of my favorite arias EVER-- "Vissi d'arte" from Tosca. NDN calls it the "perche, perche Signor" aria.)

In reference to Tosca, Tambling writes: it is "'opera out of control, in which the orchestra screams the first thing that comes into its head...'Puccini's texts may be hysterical." (113)

"This hysteria is manifest in a particularly driven ambivalence about women--a need to destroy them but covertly identifying with them (115, Leicester)."

You can say the exact same thing about Boheme or Tosca.
Maybe that's why I like them so much. I've never thought about it in quite those terms before.

And on Turandot--
"In a pattern more...hysterical, he [Puccini] ended by retreating to an opera, Turandot, that is held to be almost wholly reactionary, detailing the ultimate male victory over the ultimate castrating woman and the triumphant instatement of a charismatic authoritarian hero: 'Calaf as a fantasy where Mussolini was the reality." (157, Tambling)

Interesting...

But that's all I have time for right now.

-dr. jekyll-

******************
--Tambling, Jeremy. Opera and the Culture of Fascism. The Clarendon Press, 1996.
--Leicester, H. Marshall, Review Article: "Opera and the Culture of Fascism," Cambridge Opera Journal, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Mar, 1998), 111-126.