A Night at the Opera

I didn´t know last night if I was going to an Opera or a Symphonic Tone Poem. Turned out it was sort of a hybrid of the two. It was billed as an opera, but was unlike any others I know. I guess I´d call it a tone poem with words.

Very early on I thought to myself that the singing wasn´t very good, but I thought maybe I should be more generous. Maybe it was just bad sound technology. At the intermission, the man sitting next to me said something which I took to be ``can you believe how hideous this is?´´ He continued talking about it and I explained that my Português wasn´t adequate for this discussion. He asked what language I preferred and, when I said English, that is what he started using. We trashed the performance for a while, and then he told me more about the composer, Carlos Gomes, who he said has been virutally ignored by opera companies since WWII even though he was once very popular.

At some point he asked if I was living here in São Paulo. He said ``I hate this city. I live in Rio.´´ Nice of him to say, don´t you think? That was about the time the 2nd act began. Now that we´d connected, so to speak, he would look at me and roll his eyes whenever the soprano was finished singing. When it was over, I said that I hoped he hadn´t come from Rio just to see this production. He chuckled and in a can-you-believe-how-stupid-I-am tone, he said that, yes, he had done exactly that. He had taken a 5.5 hour bus trip to come here, and was going to take a taxi back to the bus station and go home yet that night. He said this had been the 60th opera he had seen this year, and would have preferred to still be at 59.

And I was grateful it had only cost R$20.