Ariadne aux Naxos
This was an opera I went to see today with some friends. It wasn’t my favorite, but there were some parts I really liked. The whole first act was excellent. The conflict that the composer felt hit pretty close to home for me. He had written an opera about a woman who gets dumped by her boyfriend and went to live on a deserted island to wallow in misery, but the Majordomo ordered that the performance of a comedy troupe be mixed in with the performance of the opera. The composer is devastated, because he feels that the comedy troupe is a disgrace and such a performance would ruin the work that he has done.
He goes on to lament about it, saying that the world is not what he wanted it to be, and that he would rather burn the opera than see it performed like that. He’s the kind of person that expects too much out of the world and is way too dissapointed when it doesn’t turn out the way he expected it.
The second act of the opera had it’s moments of hilarity as the two stories were intertwined, which I appreciated immensely, but then the opera alone took charge and it was pretty boring from there. Still it was worth it for the good parts. Opera is just so interesting. The way these stories have been preserved for so long is great, because it’s a chance to see how people viewed storytelling in the past. Storytelling is such an intrinsic part of a culture, that an old opera like this one is a glimpse into the way the world was.