It's a mad week at the Met - 'Unhinged Mad Scenes'.
These were the infamous show-off scenes for (mostly) a diva soprano in Italian and French opera - mostly in the early decades of the nineteenth century. But Mozart did it (like so much else) earlier - the lineup this week includes Idomeneo with Elza van den Heever as a brilliant Elektra (above) maddened by her failure to win the love of our hero; (the tenor is Matthew Polenzani.) This was Mozart's first opera seria - aged 25. It's also possibly his strangest opera and regarded as his best choral work. Summary here. It screens Wednesday our time.
And Friday our time the Met offers lighter relief - Bellini’s La Sonnambula . The sleepwalker is Natalie Dessay, and the puzzled suitor Juan Diego Flórez. Here's a (pirate) extract from that production with the 'mad scene'. It's a pretty weird production but singing is marvelous.
You have to get through a lot of most of these operas to celebrate the dramatic moment of the mad scene. There's a terrific summary with links to performances of the great mad scenes of opera here.
Mad scenes faded as realism took over opera, and bel canto singing gave way to more natural cadences. A summary of mad scenes is here. But Britten continued it in Peter Grimes - for the disintegration of the tenor anti-hero. Here he is in the Met's production with Anthony Dean Griffey. Gilbert and Sullivan loved the mad scene, augmenting it with clever lyrics! - here's Mad Margaret from Ruddigore.
And then of course there are the madnesses in Shakespeare - and especially Hamlet - which in Thomas' version and more recently Brett Dean's could be summarized as one long mad scene. Here's our blog on Australian Dean's version of Hamlet.
The Met's offerings this week include Joan Sutherland's famous last Met production in 1982 of Lucia di Lamermoor.
As always the link to the Met timetable is here. And don't forget, the screenings are a day later for our time.
Lyn, 17/5/21
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