The opera astronauts strike again!

[nineveh_uk]

Or in this case, cosmonauts.*

Why? I really don't get it. There you are, a middle-aged Russian General singing about how your life has been transformed by your new wife, whom you adore, but instead of listening with rapt attention and anguished grief at the one who got away** Bo Skovhus is, quite understandably, staring at the random cosmonaut mannequins on the revolving stage. Given the random ballet dancers, people with sickles and red T-shirts, and vaguely Empire line clad women who are presumably meant to be in a Tolstoy novel, I think that they are meant to be some sort of representatives of Russian culture, but why?

Anyway, it is here:

Watch on YouTube

*Rants about random opera astronauts of the past are here.

**Or rather, the one he didn't care about until she was with someone else, which appears to be the story of Onegin's love life.

Comments

[tree_and_leaf]

I once went to see Schiller's "Robbers" in Hamburg, and there was a completely pointless tableaux with astronauts part way through.

Though that was still less bizarre than the prologue, which consisted of random chunks of TS Eliot translated into German... Admittedly, "Robbers" is a hard play to stage, but it really didn't help - German theatre is really rather tiresome at times.

[nineveh_uk]

Everything I hear about German theatre makes me feel it has a weary kind of devotion to being radically cutting-edge in a way that must get very tedious if you've simply come to see the play.

Perhaps this is why opera and musical remain popular. At least you know when you go that there won't be anything exciting and radical with barbed wire and tap-dancing mice.

[tree_and_leaf]

Indeed. Though opera isn't necessarily safe either - I remember a massive row at Bayreuth when the director decided to replace the dove which descends on Parsifal with a dead rabbit strung up in a noose, but at least they are unlikely to jam in a random bit of Kylie, so if the worst comes to the worst you can shut your eyes and just listen.

On the Hamburg occasion, I was sitting in front of a class of A-Level students, and occasionally heard their teacher hissing "Schiller didn't write that bit!" at them during the sillier moments.

[nineveh_uk]

Yes, on second thoughts I really shouldn't have included opera in there. Opera directors are notorious, though admittedly less likely to change the text. And even musicals aren't safe; Switzerland is currently staging a modern dress version of Tanz der Vampire set in a sanatorium (I really want to see it).

I feel for that teacher - taking pupils to the theatre is hard enough without getting unexpected Eliot in your Schiller!

[caulkhead]

I don't think I've ever seen an opera with random outbreaks of astronauts*. I am feeling rather shortchanged now.

*I emphatically do not count the musical we did at middle school, in which I played a Black Hole.

[nineveh_uk]

I don't think I've seen any live, but they seem to crop up with strange regularity on YouTube.

Black sheet/curtain lining with a hole in if for your head?

[antisoppist]

Everybody keeps turning round! Is it all supposed to symbolise the eternal turning of the years? Rather than the cosmonauts, and the ballerina and the bear (you did not mention the bear) actually bursting into "If you could turn back time".

Having investigated, I am relieved not to be translating Pushkin and his innovative and deeply meaningful Russian rhyme scheme.

Have you read the Eva Ibbotson short story where all the Russians are doomed and bewailing their fates and the English governess eventually has enough of all the tragedy and tells them all they don't actually have to do the things they don't want to do that they believe are their destiny and could do something else instead? It's great. But this sort of sensible approach would destroy all opera in Act 1.

[nineveh_uk]

Ah! The eternal turning of the years that cannot be turned back would definitely make sense as what they were going for, though I suspect that the audience in the moment were mostly thinking "WTF cosmonauts?"

I have read Onegin in translation, and even the introduction to my copy has a long translator's note about the approach he has tried to take, but the ultimate impossibility of the task. Along with the Bujold rock opera, it is the work I would most like to read Russian for*.

I have not read that Eva Ibbotson short story - I have not read any of her short stories - but I would like to. But you are right that it wouldn't do much for opera.

*Thanks to opera I know two words of Russian in addition to yes and no: three and love. Opera being opera, it can get you through a surprising amount.