The Barber of Seville at the Lyric Opera

Rossini’s The Barber of Seville certainly is a popular opera.  Since Lyric Opera of Chicago’s 1954 inception, the comedy has been performed in 14 seasons, more often than such favorites as Rigoletto, Carmen, Lucia, and Aida.  The story revolves around the matchmaking machinations of a fellow (Figaro) who has a day job as a barber, as he tries to link up his rich patron, a count, with his young inamorata Rosina, who is the ward of an elderly doctor who also has designs on her.  

The opera is an enjoyable comedy, easy to understand, and enduringly popular as a respite from the tragic, and often excessively melodramatic, staples of the repertory.  It’s a visual delight and the audience was certainly entertained.  Musically though the opera does not have the memorable, emotive arias, duets, and ensembles of dramatic opera, but it has plenty of melodic scenes with appealing harmonies.  The cast was terrific, and thankfully, the Lyric played it straight with the production, without any dysfunctional, annoying modern reinterpretations.

Some of my earliest exposure to opera and classical music came from Looney Tunes cartoons, and in my memory I can see and hear the parody of the Figaro, Figaro, Figaro riff that, as fact would have it, is sung in the opera by Figaro himself.  Sitting there taking in The Barber, I was distracted in my mind’s eye by images of Bugs Bunny singing the piece on stage, outwitting Elmer Fudd while the annoyed audience throws produce at him.

R Balsamo

Our Lyric Season Closes with Old Favorites Traviata and Boheme

Here’s a belated note about two wonderful operas we saw, moreover heard, this past winter (which only ended the day before yesterday, hence I didn’t realize I was so dilatory in posting).  Actually, some recent Lyric Opera promotional materials spurred me to write.  The Lyric, understandably needing to promote itself these days perhaps more than ever before, markets itself as providing beautiful musical art that everyday people can (and should) enjoy while simultaneously casting itself as a vehicle for a more rarefied opera lifestyle.  High-definition DVDs played on big screens with surround sound and an ever more-juvenile pop culture are taking their toll.

Verdi’s La Traviata and Puccini’s La Boheme have of course some great similarities.  Each is a story centered on a Parisian woman who wins and then loses at love, only to be reunited with her lover just before dying from tuberculosis.  Each opera is its composer’s most popular – and not for nothing is that true, as they are so full of beautiful music each is the equivalent of a greatest hits album. 

The Traviata production featured Albina Shagimuratova as Violetta, Giorgio Berrugi as her lover Alfredo, and Zeljko Lucic and his father Germont.  In recent years Lyric patrons have heard the wonderful voices, and seen the wonderful acting, of Shagimuratova and Lucic, while Berrugi was very strong in his Lyric debut.  Boheme starred Maria Agresta as the ill-fated Mimi, Michael Fabiano as her lover Rudolfo, Ann Toomey as her friend Musetta, and Zachary Nelson as his friend Marcello.  Agresta and Nelson were heard last season in Puccini’s Turandot. 

Both productions featured strong singing and acting, with sets that were visually traditional yet appealing to a more modern sensibility – no wacky reinterpretations here by self-centered directors.     

Lyric patrons won’t see these two gems for a while.  Traviata and Boheme were last produced in 2013, so it’s maybe a 5-6 year cycle.  Next year Luisa Miller and Madama Butterfly will provide our Verdi and Puccini fixes, spiced up with a production of selected scenes from Donizetti’s The Three Queens and Rossini’s Barber of Seville.  But for now Lyric patrons have warm weather to get through.

R Balsamo

Related posts on these operas:

https://criticalthoughtsblog.blogspot.com/2016/09/la-traviata-at-michigans-harbor-country.html

https://criticalthoughtsblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/la-boheme-at-lyric.html

The End of England, Exhibit 937: English Police Ignore Ongoing Rape Gangs to Focus on Real Crime – Misgendering Language

In Britain in recent years there have been a number of horrific scandals in which police and community leaders ignored organized, continuous rape of young English girls by gangs of Muslim men, primarily of Pakistani origin.  As these scandals finally have come to light, the shocking and pathetic excuse given by the police and others is that they feared being charged with anti-Muslim bias and racism if they exposed the rape gangs.

The rape gangs activity in Rotherham, England, is just one of these scandals, but the most infamous.  The section below is from Wikipedia (link), with emphases mine.  Note the self-censorship – the absence of the word “Muslim” in this explanation that fear of anti-Muslim bias caused the ethnic English authorities to allow the Muslim gang rape gangs to rape their own children, and the euphemism “British-Pakistani” for Pakistani men then living in England. 

The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal consisted of the organised child sexual abuse that occurred in the northern English town of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, from the late 1980s until the 2010s and the failure of local authorities to act on reports of the abuse throughout most of that period. ....  From at least 2001, multiple reports passed names of alleged perpetrators, several from one family, to the police and Rotherham Council.  The first group conviction took place in 2010, when five British-Pakistani men were convicted of sexual offences against girls aged 12–16.  From January 2011 Andrew Norfolk of The Times pressed the issue, reporting in 2012 that the abuse in the town was widespread, and that the police and council had known about it for over ten years.

In August 2014 the Jay report concluded that an estimated 1,400 children, most of them white girls, had been sexually abused in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013 by predominantly British-Pakistani men.  A "common thread" was that taxi drivers had been picking the children up for sex from care homes and schools.

The abuse included gang rape, forcing children to watch rape, dousing them with petrol and threatening to set them on fire, threatening to rape their mothers and younger sisters, and trafficking them to other towns.  There were pregnancies—one at age 12—terminations, miscarriages, babies raised by their mothers, and babies removed, causing further trauma. .... 

The failure to address the abuse was attributed to a combination of factors [including] fear that the perpetrators' ethnicity would trigger allegations of racism and damage community relations [and] the Labour council's reluctance to challenge a Labour-voting ethnic minority....

Shocking beyond words: “the Labour council's reluctance to challenge a Labour-voting ethnic minority” – the English men and women of the left-wing Labour Party allowed their own young English girls to be raped over and over again because to even call attention to it might cause the Muslims not to vote for them in future elections.   

So what in God’s name have the British police been doing with their time, if not arresting gang rapists of their own children?  Answer – sending teams of investigators to check out any allegation of “misgendering” and arresting young English mothers suspected of using incorrect language.  Here’s the recent news (link) out of the land of Winston Churchill (emphases mine):

A British mother was arrested and incarcerated for referring to a transgendered woman as a man in online communication.  Kate Scottow revealed Saturday that police came to her home, brought her to the local police station for questioning and left her in a cell for seven hours while her children watched, The Daily Mail reports.  Scottow had been engaged in a Twitter dispute with a transgender activist over “deadnaming,” or denying the gender that someone believes he or she actually is.  News of the arrest follows another incident in the UK, when 74-year-old Margaret Nelson was questioned by Suffolk police about her social media comments on transgendered people.

Scottow is still under investigation by police — who took her photographs, fingerprints and a DNA sample after arresting her.  They also took the woman’s mobile phone and laptop computer and haven’t given it back since Scottow was taken into custody on Dec. 1, 2018.  “I was arrested in my home by three officers.... for harassment and malicious communications because I called someone out and misgendered them on Twitter.”

Hayden’s complaints prompted both the police to arrest Scottow and a judge to deliver an injunction against her, according to The Mail.

English politicians and police allow Muslim rape gangs to rape their children while they spend their time quashing "misgendering" language.  Millions of men and women died in living memory to save England.  For this?  Dear God, what has become of these people? 

R Balsamo

Director John Ford at 125

John Ford

I’ve loved movies from as far back as I can remember, and my favorites growing up were filled with action and adventure.  When as a young adult I finally began paying attention to directors, I discovered that many of the films I admired most were made by John Ford.  Today is his 125^th birthday.

Ford was a prolific director, even by the higher-output standards of his time, and he had astonishing breadth in subject matter.  He won four Academy Awards for Best Director, more than anyone else.  But although those four films were all non-westerns, Ford is best known today for his magnificent Westerns.  

Harry Carey Sr, Ward Bond, Victor McLaglen, Henry Fonda (in his early days), and especially John Wayne, whom Ford made a star in his 1939 film Stagecoach, are just some of the actors particularly associated with Ford.  In fact, he cast in supporting roles a large group of regulars that became known as the Ford Stock Company.

Ford was admired for his genius, both in narrative and in technique.  But he was a gruff, often-unpleasant man, and at times mean and vindictive – especially when drunk.  Given his personality, Ford had a poor and unsatisfying family life, but in his films he seems almost obsessed with the rituals of community and domestic life.  Many of his best films center on family – some of his earlier ones, like Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley, can seem overly-sentimental and mannered today, but some that came later are personal favorites – The Quiet Man and Donovan’s Reef.  Other non-Westerns that I particularly enjoy include What Price Glory, The Horse Soldiers, Drums Along the Mohawk, and The Last Hurrah.

Ford's Westerns stand out, many of them filmed in Monument Valley (which he put on the map).  Stagecoach, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance are particularly noteworthy favorites.  And then there’s his masterpiece, The Searchers, which many film buffs consider perhaps the greatest Western and one of the best films ever made. 

There are certainly other directors who have made many great films; for me Billy Wilder particularly stands out in this regard.  But Ford had an extra dimension, a thread, in his films that is hard to identify or describe, but it’s there.  Once, as the story goes, Orson Welles, certainly no slouch himself as a filmmaker, was asked to name the directors he most admired, and he replied: "I like the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford."

R Balsamo  

In Key West "Remember the Maine"

Key West "Maine" Memorial

As I huddle indoors enduring the latest polar vortex that has brought record sub-zero temperatures to the Great Lakes, I warmly recall that I began this month in the Florida Keys.  Specifically in Key West, which isn’t all just sun and fun, boats, beaches, and bars.  There are some serious sights to see.

One notable place is the military section of the Key West cemetery.  It’s easy to get to, a moderate walk from most parts of the western, tourist side of the island.  Servicemen from many wars rest there, and not all American, but the prominent memorial is to the 19 sailors buried there after the explosion of the American Navy cruiser Maine in Havana harbor (most of the Maine dead were buried at Arlington National Cemetery).

The Maine was one of the very first American ironclad battleships, still featuring masts in case the steam engines failed.  Because of the nine years between design and completion, and the rapid advance of naval technology, Maine was obsolete when it entered service in 1895.  In January of 1898, it steamed from Key West to Havana to protect U.S. interests during the Cuban uprising against Spanish rule.  Just three weeks later, on February 15, an explosion sunk the ship in Havana harbor.  Over 266 American servicemen men died, while 89 survived.  In March, the U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry, sitting in Key West, declared that a naval mine had caused the blast.  This conclusion has been challenged, and it seems from my reading that most knowledgeable observers today think that a spontaneous internal coal fire ignited the magazines (the Navy brain trust had the Maine using, for ships, a non-standard type of coal, which burned hotter but was prone to producing combustible gases).  

At the time, the sinking of Maine became a rallying cry ("Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!") of those who wanted the US to declare war on Spain.  The warmongers soon got their wish, and after a short war the US emerged victorious and the new ruler of Puerto Rico and the Philippines (and some other places like Wake Island and Guam).  The Spanish-American War at the time was viewed as a great American victory, but actually it is one of the great American misadventures.

Maine sat on the harbor floor until 1911, when the US built a temporary dam around it and patched up the hull.  What was left of the ship was then floated, towed out to sea, and re-sunk some miles off the Cuban coast.  It was a sad ending to a misbegotten ship that was poorly-designed and poorly operated in its power plant, leading to the deaths of nearly 300 young American men in the bloom of youth.  To compound the tragedy, Maine’s destruction was used to start a war absurdly costly in blood and treasure, and whose sequelae burden the United States to this very day. 

And far from tropical Havana, in north-central Illinois, there is this:

A memorial to those who died in the Spanish-American War, in Ottawa, a town in north-central Illinois.
The second body of text begins with "USS Maine seaman Carlton H Jencks." 

The filaments of war reach far and wide.

R Balsamo

Rotting Out America – the Anti-Trump Political Scandal Percolates On

About one year ago I first commented on the great frame-up of Donald Trump, then after more than a year of unfruitful FBI and Department of Justice investigation.  Now one whole year later the witch hunt continues, as its perpetrators labor mightily to push their discreditable and shameful boulder up the hill, only to have it time and time again roll back to painfully crush a bone or two. 

But as facts are pried loose from the malefactors who fight hard to keep them all secret, the slow unveiling of the greatest scandal, by far, in American political history fitfully continues.  We see more and more, in drips and drabs, as time goes on.  We know indisputably that some Democrat Party senior officials in the Obama Administration’s national security team, in the Justice Department, in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and in the Clinton campaign, strongly aided by Democrat operatives in the media masquerading as journalists, all conspired to criminally sabotage Donald Trump, first in his presidential campaign and then in his presidency.  After the election, they deftly maneuvered around hapless Republicans to engineer the appointment of a special inquisitor of effectively all things Trump and in essence charged him with finding the crime.  The Democrat insiders have known from the jump that it was all a put on, but still today gullible, Trump-hating true believers, churlishly refusing to accept an election result, frantically grasp at illusory straws while specters of collusion dance in their fevered dreams. 

Even many so-called Republicans, those whose Democrat-lite political influence dissipated in the Trump wave or whose exploitation of cheap, illegal labor is threatened or whose lust for endless foreign wars is unrequited, have looked the other way at these Democrat depredations.  They myopically and delusionally make common cause with the Democrat crocodile while it rips away at some other Republican, thinking the beast will be forever satisfied with just Trump. 

In political depth and breath, and by the global stakes at hand, this may be the greatest nefarious frame-up in all political history.  It has severely corroded public trust in the FBI and the Justice Department, the two critical federal agencies once, naively in retrospect, thought fair and honest and above the political fray.  And senior leaders of the Democrat Party, actively and passively, have endorsed these affronts, and more (see their vicious, despicable behavior during the Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation process).  I fear that the evildoers who have betrayed America’s trust will never be held to account, making further damage to our polity much more likely, and that this horrific scandal is one giant step toward a very ugly political future. 

Romans, Egyptians, and British, to name just a few, at one time could not imagine that their great states, their great power, could ever collapse.  We know though that they first became hollowed out, until the shell that was left just collapsed.  Now, Americans can only hope that there is a “great deal of ruin in a nation.”  But should America die, how will it die?  Certainly slowly at first, politically rotting out behind the facades and underneath the flags, and then one day all of a sudden.  And then having sown the wind, the great destructors will reap the whirlwind.

R Balsamo

Related link:

https://criticalthoughtsblog.blogspot.com/2017/12/clinton-democrats-fbi-justice.html