1/ I’ve fessed up in recent opera posts that I’ve made out like a bandit (Ernani? Dick Johnson? Johnson, for me) during the virus bc of these free webcasts, getting to know operas I didn’t already know and might not have been motivated to go to the local Bijou and...
https://twitter.com/MetOpera/status/1320124707014889476
2/ plunk down $20 for, per me disgrazia. One of these is Rossini’s comedy LE COMTE ORY. He spent his later years in Paris and some of his operas, both comedy and “seria,” are in French. I have reason to believe ORY is a about a naughty nobleman, not to different in that...
3/ regard from last night’s FALSTAFF, except that whereas Falstaff sought his happy hunting grounds among bourgeois married ladies, Ory does so among aristocratic ladies awaiting their husbands’ return from a crusade. He too gets his comeuppance.
4/ No lib, Rossini had written an opera 3 yrs earlier to celebrate the coronation of France’s Charles X: IL VIAGGIO A RHEIMS. Then he borrowed material from VIAGGIO for COMTE D’ORY. The prolific composers of the Bel Canto era cd do that.
4/ This production, from 2011, was the Met premiere of this work, 183 years after its world premiere in Paris. I was present at the “Virginia premiere” prodns of DIE WALKÜRE, TRISTAN, and ELEKTRA: they had long b4 then been performed in DC, but never b4 in the Старие Государство,
4c/ as we sometimes call the Old Dominion!
5/ Tenor Juan Diego Flórez, as Ory, is greatly helped here, tho not nec in his other roles, by his phenomenal resemblance to Sasha Baron Cohen.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
