Word: opera
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Lowell House Opera...
THOSE WHO WORRY about the future of opera look to film the way Great Britain viewed the United States during World War I--as a sleeping giant whose enlistment would surely break the stalemate. Harried impresarios hope filmed opera's wider audience will keep money flowing down the gaping drains of the world's international opera houses over the next decades, and end their financial stagnation. The more starry-eyed even suggest film will "restore opera to the masses" in the days of $50 tickets to the Metropolitan Opera...
...countryside around Vicenza. Never mind that Ingmar Bergman's 1975 version of Mozart's The Magic Flute showed what enchanting results a modest, studio-bound production could achieve. Never mind, too, that the locale of the Don Juan legend and the setting of Mozart's opera is not Italy but Spain. The real problem is that in taking the work out of the opera house, Losey has taken a lot of the opera out of the work...
...settings are truly lovely-symmetrical Palladian porticoes, marbled rooms with glowing frescoes and statuary, formal gardens opening on cypress-dotted vistas. Losey scatters the action of the opera over every photogenic square foot of them. Characters grope endlessly down pillared corridors, wander around outdoors and are unaccountably set afloat on gondolas. Consecutive scenes shift disconcertingly from nighttime to broad daylight and back again. Most of the music is lip-synched to a prerecorded track; inside or out, wind or rain, we hear the souped-up ambience of the recording studio. The result is that characters who ought to be interacting...
...Frau Ohne Schatten ("At last, a simple human being with every day problems, after always being a god dess or running around with somebody's cut-off head"). She will sing it for the first time in the U.S. next fall, with the San Francisco Opera. After that? Her one concession to the advancing years is that she is reluctant to make commitments very far ahead. "When managers ask me, I say I'd like to do such and such, provided I still have a voice," she says...