Caption: SG Opera, 1989, Ramey
Arrigo Boito,
Mefistofele
(1868), was performed at the Kennedy Center in early 1996, with Samuel Ramey. Of course this is a well known setting on the Faust legend. The angelic chorus occurs early and it will as the climax, with triumphant effect, against Satan's whistles. (“The Lord of Heaven triumphs while Satan whistles.”) Back in the mid 1990s, I had my interpretation of all this, the percepetion of homosexuality (particularly for men) as a kind of Faustian fascination with self-perception through vicarious association, and an unwillingness to give up something of oneself in order to progress into higher “union” and procreation. The best of homosexual men - likable, athletic, gifted, and articulate, like so many in the military - are seen as clones of Mephistopheles, defying the commitments required to true “Christians,” like the character in Boito’s opera as he angrily whistles while Faust is taken from him up to heaven. (Indeed, the congenial Satan is covets personal control over “good and evil,” so that the “Witches’ Sabbath” is the opera’s best scene; indeed, Boito knew why today we would have “witch-hunts.”) The Mephistopheles and Faust story would occur in another famous opera by Charles Gounod, as well as choral symphonies by Franz Liszt ("A Faust Symphony" which ends in C Major with its stirring male chorus) and Gustav Mahler's Symphong #8 in E-flat, the "Symphony of a Thousand," in which the closing stanzas rise to "the eternal feminine." I heard that at the Minnesota Orchestra in early 2003caption: Beijing Opera, 1998
Giacomo Puccini,
Turandot
(1926) (based on libretto by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni) was presented in Dallas right after Ronald Reagan won the 1980 election, and it seemed like a diversion at the time. The music was completed by Franco Alfano, and tends to have a Mahlerian sound to it, compared to the operas that Puccini complete itself, especially in the thrilling final chorus. (We accept this opera as completed this way, with its triumphant concluding chorus in D Major, because we don't have a choice; the same is not true of the Bruckner 9th Sym.) The story is a parable: in ancient Mandarin China, to wed Turandot a man must solve three riddles. It is indeed an allegory on the obstacles men must pass to "pay their dues" on their way to proving that they deserve adult lives with honor, in patriarchal and authoritarian cultures which, after all, pretend that they can take care of everybody. Ferruccio Busoni wrote an opera by the same name.