I saw my first opera this evening. It was bizarre. The first act was called Mario and the Magician, an opera based on an anti-fascist story.
The weirdness started right away. The evil magician is entrancing a crowd, but the chorus had a strange assortment of characters. To wit, there were characters resembling Albert Einstein, the Joker, Lucius Malfoy, an alien, Superman (in a wheelchair no less), among others. The magician himself looked like Jesus Christ. The opera really gets weird when the magician confronts the hero, Mario. Presumably using evil magic, he dons a mask of Mario's lover's face, and seduces Mario in front of a crowd. And yes, Mario actually starts to kiss and lick the mask - at this point it was hard to take the opera seriously. Mario is of course embarrassed by the crowd, and he retaliates by shooting the magician. The magician conveniently is wearing a bulletproof vest, but it doesn't matter because in the end it turns out to be Mario's dream anyways.
As peculiar as it was, I suppose the opera was at least entertaining. The second act was more traditional opera, much more what I had expected. It's name is Prince Bluebeard, and follows a creepy old count and his newest wife. The singing and the orchestra were terrific. I'm not crazy about opera, but I can still appreciate it - I'm glad I went. Of course, Hungarian is an unusual language for operas, which made it more interesting. It was only 500 Forints ($2.25) anyways.
That morning, I also went on a tour around Budapest to learn about art nouveau. The architecture in Budapest is very old-fashioned, with lots of neo-gothic, neo-classical, neo-everything buildings. While it's charming, it can get a little bland because all the buildings look so similar. Art nouveau tries to buck the trend of slavishly copying the past. Here's some pictures. My favorite was when we got to look inside a high-end hotel.
No comments:
Post a Comment