Word: shepherdess
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When Handel composed Orlando in 1732, based on the Ariosto saga, his cast of characters consisted of the hero of the title, the Queen of Cathay, an African prince, a shepherdess, and a magician. The setting was simply a nameless forest. "Handel's audience didn't need to be told who Orlando was, as audiences today don't need to be told about Captain Kirk or Mr. Spock," Sellars writes in the production's program notes. "As soon as the characters appeared, the audience had a set of collective expectations, and was ready for action. Thus, I think the logical...
...setting becomes 20th century Florida--specifically 50 miles due east of Orlando, at the Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral. Orlando is an astronaut, of course; the queen is a high-strung debutante; the prince, an infantry soldier; the shepherdess, a funky beach-bunny; and the magician, a project supervisor at Mission Control...
Above all, Sellars's updating never interferes with the music. In fact, many of his innovations involve clever exploitation of the Handel score. The bouncy rhythms of Dorinda's first-act aria on the ineffable nature of love--she's the beach bunny, nee shepherdess--become the excuse for an hilarious mock-disco strut. Later in the opera, when Dorinda sings of love's bitterness, it is Sellars's inspiration that she pour herself a stiff drink between repetitions (all Orlando's arias consist of six or eight lines repeated again and again), with the result that her octave leaps...
...Pictures are made the way the prince gets children," Picasso remarked a little later, "with the shepherdess." In Marie-Thérèse, he found a shepherdess?a placid, ill-educated and wholly compliant blond, who had never heard of him or his work, and offered nothing that even Picasso's egotism could interpret as competition. She became an oasis of sexual comfort. His images of Marie-Thérèse reading, sleeping, contemplating her face in a mirror or posing (in the Vollard suite of etchings) for the Mediterranean artist-god, Picasso himself, have an extraordinarily inward quality, vegetative and abandoned...
What he craved was neither luxury nor the high rhetoric of history painting, but apprehensible truth, visible, familiar, open to touch and repetition. The truth about an onion could be tested again and again; the truth about a Versailles shepherdess was, to put it mildly, more labile...