Rossini's 1817 opera Armida is not widely staged these days--some would say with good reason. Based on Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered (1581), it features Armida, a princess (who just happens to be a sorceress), and Rinaldo, a Christian knight, one of the Crusaders who have come to free the city. What this means in casting is that there's one soprano and six tenors or basses, depending on who's available. The plot is risible: sorceress meets knight, sorceress enchants knight, carrying him off to a bower of bliss where they reiterate their undying love for each other; sorceress loses knight because two other knights rescue him from her spell, literally and symbolically, and the knight exits to fight the good fight. Armida gets the last word, or rather aria, surrounded by the fiends she's unleashed from hell, and she's really, really mad.
Soprano Renee Fleming has made the role of Armida her own, and in 2010 the Metropolitan Opera staged it, including a Live in HD broadcast shown in movie theatres on May 1, 2010, that I wasn't able to see at the time. Yesterday, I just happened to notice an announcement in the Ithaca Times that it was going to be re-broadcast for one performance at our local theatre chain. I enjoy opera in general but don't know a lot about it. I knew nothing about this opera. Armida is not worthy of notice in Dent's still useful survey Opera (1940), and what he does say about the composer Rossini is less than inspiring: "All the Italian operas of this period depended for their success on the singers. . . . The school of which Rossini is the head achieved their popularity not merely by the florid and showy music which they composed for all the voices, for tenors and basses as well as for sopranos and contraltos, but very largely by the adoption into serious opera of methods hitherto restricted to musical comedy." Then came the two lines that made me wonder whether it was worth seeing: "What the general public has always wanted was to hear the greatest singers in the most trivial music. Rossini had among his many gifts a genius for triviality."
Hmm, I thought, should I go or not? My tastes in opera are not so austere that I'd fail to enjoy "a genius for triviality," other things being equal. Rather than tossing a coin to decide, I suddenly recalled YouTube. Sure enough, there were lots of film clips of Fleming singing the opera's final aria, and she was wonderful. One I especially enjoyed and would recommend watching if you're at all interested has Fleming singing voice-over while Rossini's score flashes up on the screen. So many notes, one is tempted to exclaim, and so close together! Wow! That did it: off I went to take in the 2010 re-broadcast of Rossini's Armida.
Was it trivial? Certainly, in one sense: from Mary Zimmerman's production, no one would ever realize that the plot taken from Tasso embodies a Renaissance theme beloved by visual artists and neo-Platonic philosophers, the theme of Virtue Reconciled to Pleasure. As Edgar Wind pointed out in Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance (1958), the ultimate source for this topos was the myth about the adulterous love of Mars and Venus. From their union came a daughter, Harmony. Often, in fact, "harmony" was then viewed as the concord of otherwise discordant elements: when they are in balance, love ensues; when they are not, strife and hate. Painter after painter portrayed aspects of these opposing forces: Botticelli's Mars and Venus, Raphael's The Dream of Scipio, and Veronese's Mars and Venus, to cite only three of the ones Wind discusses. And in Antony and Cleopatra, even Shakespeare, popular dramatist though he was, includes aspects of this uneasy union. None of this, as far as I could tell on one viewing, was ever recognized, let alone included, in this Met production.
Was it florid? You bet. Showy? Except for the fiends encased in scaly body armor with long scaly tails, no, not really. Lawrence Brownlee, who portrays Rinaldo, is a more than competent actor with a wonderful voice, rich and almost as agile as Fleming's. Most of the opera was not showy (in fact, the ballet went on far too long), but when those two are on stage, which is the majority of the time, the music is spellbinding.
Would I go again tonight if I could? You better believe it. To quote someone perhaps more attuned to the pleasures of the senses than Professor Dent, "Too much of a good thing is wonderful."
Bottom line? A hit, a palpable hit. It can be seen on your computer or iPad with Met Opera on Demand (http://www.metoperafamily.org/ondemand/index.aspx?icamp=mood&iloc=wllgbucket).
Hits and Misses
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Sunday, July 7, 2013
Thingamabobbers
The longer I live--and I'm now in my 75th year--the more things seem to come around. I am not talking meta-revolutions here (the kind of biblical "To every thing there is a season" or Eliade's myth of eternal return) so much as mini-revolutions. Strike indicators provide one appropriately diminutive example.
When my father and I would go fishing together in New Canaan, CT, in the late 1940's, he'd leave his Leonard bamboo fly rod behind and instead take two bamboo poles about 10' long. These were more than twice my height as a nine-year-old. The rig was straightforward: tied to the tip of the pole was a hard-finished line, rather like a salt-water hand line, if those are still made, some 10-15 feet long, that was wound around the tip of the pole. A reel was therefore unnecessary. A length of monofilament perhaps three or four feet long was knotted to the line, and a cork was then sliced partway through and attached to the leader. I can't recall where Dad got the corks, but I suspect any wine or whiskey cork would have served. Three or so feet below the cork bobber was the hook. I believe these were snelled hooks with little barbs to help keep the worms on the hook. It was my job to dig the worms for bait and put them together in a can with some moist dirt (my mother always had a supply of cans from cooking in those days before home freezers and frozen food had become popular). The cork would be adjusted according to the estimated depth of the water where we fished: the idea was the cork would float on the surface and thereby keep the worm just off the bottom. When the bobber jiggled in the water, that meant a fish was biting the worm, so you'd strike and hook the fish.
Fully rigged, we'd walk off to a nearby pond. It's odd how habits get established: Dad always, always, carried his cane pole pointing forward; I, following behind, always carried mine pointing backwards. Even at age 9, I thought my carrying method superior: Dad had to thread his tip carefully through the brush and trees, while my method required no effort whatsoever. And to this day, I carry my fly rod with the tip pointing behind me.
All of these recollections came back to me a few days ago, when my fishing partner Jim Caldwell and I anchored his pontoon raft on the Big Horn River in MT and got out to fish from the bank. Our equipment was rather more advanced technologically than the cane poles my father and I took to a nearby pond--Jim prefers a Sage SP 5-wt with a Lamson reel, while I was using a Winston 6-wt with a Sage reel. (And, just in case anyone reading this does not know the difference between a fishing rod and fishing pole, it's about $500-600.)
But a foot or so down my leader was a white Thingamabobber. Below that was an AB size split shot (tin, not lead, I might add), and below that was a red annelid worm imitation, size 16, on a 4X tippet and below that a second fly even smaller, like a zebra midge or a sow bug, in size 18 or 20, tied to a 5X tippet. The casting was entirely different, of course. With a cane pole, you'd gently lob the worm out as far as you could. You had to be gentle, or the worm would fly off the hook. With the fly rod, you had much more freedom, not to mention relatively greater distance, but again, if the timing was too fast, you'd wind up with a ferocious tangle. Yet the principle was exactly the same. When the bobber moved, you struck. There's a lot of moss in the Big Horn, and one soon learns to distinguish the slight hesitation of the fly hooking the moss from the take of a fish. Among other differences, the take of the fish this trip was jolting to the point of being scary. Whether browns or rainbows, they would just smash the fly while you tried to hang on. That excitement was intense and gratifying. It was the reason we had driven up from Laramie, WY, to Fort Smith, MT, to drift the Big Horn. As I look back over the years, however, I'm not sure it was any more intense or gratifying than striking when that cork bobber moved so that the yellow perch or bluegill sailed out of the water in a symmetrical half circle to thump on the bank behind us.
When my father and I would go fishing together in New Canaan, CT, in the late 1940's, he'd leave his Leonard bamboo fly rod behind and instead take two bamboo poles about 10' long. These were more than twice my height as a nine-year-old. The rig was straightforward: tied to the tip of the pole was a hard-finished line, rather like a salt-water hand line, if those are still made, some 10-15 feet long, that was wound around the tip of the pole. A reel was therefore unnecessary. A length of monofilament perhaps three or four feet long was knotted to the line, and a cork was then sliced partway through and attached to the leader. I can't recall where Dad got the corks, but I suspect any wine or whiskey cork would have served. Three or so feet below the cork bobber was the hook. I believe these were snelled hooks with little barbs to help keep the worms on the hook. It was my job to dig the worms for bait and put them together in a can with some moist dirt (my mother always had a supply of cans from cooking in those days before home freezers and frozen food had become popular). The cork would be adjusted according to the estimated depth of the water where we fished: the idea was the cork would float on the surface and thereby keep the worm just off the bottom. When the bobber jiggled in the water, that meant a fish was biting the worm, so you'd strike and hook the fish.
Fully rigged, we'd walk off to a nearby pond. It's odd how habits get established: Dad always, always, carried his cane pole pointing forward; I, following behind, always carried mine pointing backwards. Even at age 9, I thought my carrying method superior: Dad had to thread his tip carefully through the brush and trees, while my method required no effort whatsoever. And to this day, I carry my fly rod with the tip pointing behind me.
All of these recollections came back to me a few days ago, when my fishing partner Jim Caldwell and I anchored his pontoon raft on the Big Horn River in MT and got out to fish from the bank. Our equipment was rather more advanced technologically than the cane poles my father and I took to a nearby pond--Jim prefers a Sage SP 5-wt with a Lamson reel, while I was using a Winston 6-wt with a Sage reel. (And, just in case anyone reading this does not know the difference between a fishing rod and fishing pole, it's about $500-600.)
But a foot or so down my leader was a white Thingamabobber. Below that was an AB size split shot (tin, not lead, I might add), and below that was a red annelid worm imitation, size 16, on a 4X tippet and below that a second fly even smaller, like a zebra midge or a sow bug, in size 18 or 20, tied to a 5X tippet. The casting was entirely different, of course. With a cane pole, you'd gently lob the worm out as far as you could. You had to be gentle, or the worm would fly off the hook. With the fly rod, you had much more freedom, not to mention relatively greater distance, but again, if the timing was too fast, you'd wind up with a ferocious tangle. Yet the principle was exactly the same. When the bobber moved, you struck. There's a lot of moss in the Big Horn, and one soon learns to distinguish the slight hesitation of the fly hooking the moss from the take of a fish. Among other differences, the take of the fish this trip was jolting to the point of being scary. Whether browns or rainbows, they would just smash the fly while you tried to hang on. That excitement was intense and gratifying. It was the reason we had driven up from Laramie, WY, to Fort Smith, MT, to drift the Big Horn. As I look back over the years, however, I'm not sure it was any more intense or gratifying than striking when that cork bobber moved so that the yellow perch or bluegill sailed out of the water in a symmetrical half circle to thump on the bank behind us.
Saturday, July 6, 2013
Big Horn Trip: Icy water and blistering hot days
 |
| Big Horn brown trout. |
Fish were pretty evenly divided between browns and rainbows. My partner the Old Gunkie landed the largest (a rainbow about 22"); the smallest was about 16". What they had in common regardless of species was a strike like a steelhead, ripping away through the water and, if a rainbow, jumping again and again. I lost one rainbow when the hook pulled out on its eighth jump.
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