Hello to everybody!
I just joined the forum I found yesterday. I have been looking for a forum that would deal with opera on DVD, so I hope this is the place to be! I also spent a few hours screening through the messages sent so far to get an idea what has already been gone through.
But my first question is: how does one begin a new thread or do I always have to use the reply-button? I didn't find any option to start a new one, so how does this work? As one continuing discussion? No new threads for a new opera?
I trust that someone will give an answer to that. It seems that there aren't very many members, but the regular ones are all the more active. Suits me perfectly. It's not the quantity but the quality that matters and perusing the forum I have found many DVD:s that have wetted my appetite, the French Baroque operas e.g., none of which I have seen, or heard on CD, for that matter.
But let me begin with an opera I just finished watching: Leoš Janacek's From the House of the Dead. Not the jolliest work to begin with, it just happened to be the one I saw last. It's also the last collaboration with Boulez & Chéreau, whose Ring doesn't have many admirerers among the members, but we can leave that for later.
From the House of the Dead is indeed quite grim, based on a story by Dostoyevsky of a prison camp in Siberia in the nineteenth century and that was the context Janacek must have had in mind. Well, in Chéreau's production, Stalin's prison camps come to at least my mind, but what's the difference?
I would like to describe the opera as scenes from prison life in general, as there is not a single plot that would carry on through the opera. Some of the convicts tell their own tale about why they ended up in prison, there are disputes, fights, even deaths among them, the brutality of the guards. And there is even entertainment performed by the inmates for the inmates as pantomime. I am not sure if this kind of performances were in Janacek's mind (or Dostoyevsky's!), but I must warn you that it's openly sexual in nature, both male and female parts performed by the male prisoners. So, it may offend some watchers, although everyone knows what goes on in prisons. They certainly didn't have special visiting rooms for couples... There is only one role for a woman in the cast and she is described as a prostitute, and has a only a couple of lines to sing.
So far, this may not sound like an opera that one would like to see or hear. But, for me at least, Janacek's music redeems it all. At it's best the orchestral score is even beautiful, and if the overture includes rattling of chains, it's not inappropriate. There are no arias as such (nothing to whistle on your way to work or to set as a ringtone on your cellphone), but Janacek obviously had the same kind of talent to compose musical dialogue for singers as Puccini (I may be stoned for writing this!), tying the rhytm and line of speech together with the melodic line to achieve the effect that one is left wondering, why don't we always sing. In fact, Janacek died only four years after Puccini, and the opera was left unfinished (like Turandot!) and completed by his desciples. The singers are good, there are a couple of names you may be familiar with: Olaf Bär, Heinz Zednik, John Mark Ainsley.
I must admit that Janacek has other operas that may well be more easily to come to terms with: Jenufa, Katya Kabanova, Cunning Little Vixen. Jenufa and Katya are also very stark and violent, Vixen a little gem of a fairytale.
Summa summarum: I won't say that you should rush to the nearest record store to buy this one. You wouln't want to view it every other week. But, if you can find it at a library, you might give it a chance and decide for yourselves. How many novels and movies and TV serials (Prison Break was one of my favourites!) have dealt with life in prison? Why not operas? I wonder, when and by whom an opera depicting life in Guantánamo will appear.
P.S. This is not to mean that I wouldn't love the more classical repertoire! Quite the contrary! I love my Monteverdi, Mozart, Gluck, Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini and Strauss. It's only that I'm incurably curious, and if curiosity killed the cat, I seem to have survived - so far!