Dialogues Better Left Unsung

Saturday evening Husband and Fiorella put on their glad rags and drove into town for the opera. The big slices of ice box pie they picked up at the Frisco after leaving between acts was the best part of the evening.

Opera is music THEATER. Fiorella wants good stories and interesting music, not a philosophical treatise punctuated by occasional squawks.

Dialogues of the Carmelites is about a young French aristocrat, Blanche, who seeks refuge from the uncertain world by entering a cloistered order. She flees when the Revolutionaries round up the nuns to be executed. However, ultimately she conquers her fear and joins them in death.

Goofy, I know, but Fio saw the last scene as an opera excerpt once and was eager and excited to be seeing the whole thing at last.

Excitement was not the name of the game. In fact, the opera was dull as dishwater, at least the first act--no fault of the singers, who heaved and shrieked as best they could through an actionless script. The main problem lies with the composer.
There was no balance in the voices: most of what we got were female voices in various registers, all singing wordy recitative-like arias and exchanges with occasional, and, after a while, predictable, squawk into the tops of their ranges. Call Fio retro, but she would have found it more interesting to hear some of the voices against each other in duets, trios, etc. And please--tempered by a few male voices in the mix. She could not help but think what a golden opportunity was missed for a peasant chorus to hover menacingly in the background, pitchforks at the ready.

The scenery was minimalist and the stage was static: dark and stark. The nuns, identically dressed, of course, were immobile, always kneeling or standing in a perfect row. Fio would guess this was supposed to focus attention on the vocalized angst of the lead, but continuous angst gets boring pretty fast.

Fiorella had no sympathy for the hypersensitive Blanche. Maybe it's the changing times--we expect women to be strong these days--but all Fio could think of was that a good dose of Prozac might have cleared up all of her problems. Husband's opinion was that what the tremulous virgin really needed was a good man. But then, that's a man's solution to everything.