The Breakfast Club (More Opera)

The 3 Rules of Opera–

1. It must be long, boring, and in an incomprehesible foreign language (even if that language is English).
2. The characters, especially the main ones, must be thoroughly unsympathetic and their activities horrid and callous.
3. Everyone must die, hopefully in an ironic and gruesome way.

Ballet is the same, but with more men in tights and without the superfluous singing.

My life is hardship and misery thanks to this opera. Everything about it is wrong for me.  (It is) totally at odds with all that I dream about, demanding a type of music that is alien to me.

Now to be fair, Debussy was talking about another opera he attempted but never finished- Rodrigue et Chimène, a sort of El Cid knockoff.

He was probably unhappy with the upbeat Hollywood ending where, mortally wounded, El Cid dies wishing only for one more crack at the Muslims so they (the Spanish) impale him on a stick like a corn dog, strap him to his horse, point him (the horse, El Cid is dead) at the Moors and give him a kick in the ass (the horse again, they could hardly give El Cid a kick there, that’s where the stick was).

From beyond the grave, El Cid tastes victory again, saving us from those civilized not us.  God and the Holy Roman Catholic Church be praised!

The fact is that his father was a greedy bastard and wanted some of that hot Opera money.  Our Claude however was all artsy-fartsy and gave it up as a bad job, opting instead for Pelléas et Mélisande.

Prince finds mysterious forest girl (that would be Mélisande) and marries her.  He brings her home and she falls in love with his brother (that would be Pelléas).  After years (maybe it only seems like years, it is Opera) of restraint and denial they confess their love in range of the stalking paranoid Prince who kills his brother Pelléas in a fit of jealousy.  Mélisande dies shortly after, in childbirth, never saying if the girl is from the Prince or Pelléas.

And how would she know anyway even if she’d been dinking them both?

As you see it has all the essential elements and sex besides.  You might expect it to be an unmitigated success but it took several years (1895 – 1902) to even find a venue and while regularly performed the reviews were mixed and the box office not boffo.  After the Great War it faded from public conciousness almost entirely.

The other thing about it is that it’s a conscious rebuke to Wagnerian bombast-

“It is customary, and in the main correct, to regard Pelléas et Mélisande as a monument to French operatic reaction to Wagner.”

…

Debussy strove to avoid excessive Wagnerian influence on Pelléas from the start. The love scene was the first music he composed but he scrapped his early drafts for being too conventional and because “worst of all, the ghost of old Klingsor, alias R.Wagner, kept appearing.”

…

(T)he way Debussy writes for the orchestra is completely different from Tristan, for example. In Grout’s words, “In most places the music is no more than an iridescent veil covering the text.” The emphasis is on quietness, subtlety and allowing the words of the libretto to be heard; there are only four fortissimos in the entire score. Debussy’s use of declamation is un-Wagnerian as he felt Wagnerian melody was unsuited to the French language. Instead, he stays close to the rhythms of natural speech, making Pelléas part of a tradition which goes back to the French Baroque tragédies en musique of Rameau and Lully as well as the experiments of the very founders of opera, Peri and Caccini.

Which is a big plus in my book.  Without further adieu-

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Obligatories

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

I would never make fun of LaEscapee or blame PhilJD.  And I am highly organized.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

–Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)

This Day in History

News

• The Closing of the Canadian Mind, By STEPHEN MARCHE, The New York Times
• US launches secret bid to stop release of hunger-striking Guantánamo detainee, by Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian
• Fired Los Angeles Times cartoonist hits back at newspaper for siding with LAPD, by Sam Thielman, The Guardian
• The workers catering to the Hamptons’ super-rich: ‘This is not paradise for me’, by Rupert Neate, The Guardian
• Jeremy Corbyn is most popular among voters from all parties, poll suggests, by  Rowena Mason, The Guardian
• Cubans stunned by Kerry speech, but skeptical of change, By Jaime Hamre, Reuters
• U.S. military looks into moving some Guantanamo detainees to military sites: media, by Lisa Lambert, Reuters
• With hundreds of thousands of new supporters, Labour is on the verge of something big – what a complete disaster!, by Mark Steel, The Independent
• VW Has Spent Two Years Trying to Hide a Big Security Flaw, by Olivia Solon, Bloomberg News
• Disguises, danger and celebrity affairs: my job as a private detective, Richard Martinez, The Guardian

Blogs

• U.S. Sidelines Its $500M Syrian Rebel Army, by Nancy A. Youssef, Daily Beast
• Japan Restarts Nuclear Reactor, 4 Years After Fukushima. What’s At Stake?, by Julie Makinen and Jake Adelstein, Los Angeles Times
• Sensing Keystone XL Rejection, TransCanada Scopes NAFTA Lawsuit, by Nadia Prupis, Common Dreams
• Schumer proves unworthy to lead Democrats, By Bill Press, The Hill
• Spain Hit by Trade Suits, a Bitter Foretaste of TTIP, By Don Quijones, Naked Capitalism
• R-E-S-P-E-C-T, by Paul Krugman, The New York Times
• Britain’s Bernie moment: Is an unlikely left-wing hero about to conquer the Labour Party?, by Andrew O’Hehir, Salon
• Bernie kicking into overdrive, By Daniel Strauss, Politico
• CIA Accidentally Releases Apology Letter It Wrote, But Never Sent To The Senate For Illegally Spying On It, by Tim Cushing, Tech Dirt
• Along with Outdated Toothpaste and Caitlin Jenner Covers, Manning in Trouble for Reading Torture Report, By emptywheel