La Juive

Saturday.....I tooled around until I headed off to the opera to see La Juive. I met Mike in line...we talked and gabbed and bitched for a while......When we got up to our spots in the Galerie, we saw Jess and Becky (my friends who live upstairs) and Emmy, whom Mike and I had met at the opera a week or so ago. Anyway, we went down to Anker to get pre-opera snackies, and then headed back up. It was interesting....except for the spotty reviews I had received from a few friends, I had no idea what to expect about the plot, the music, the production, anything. La Juive means "The Jewess," and is appropriately about a Jewish woman who is being courted by this guy named Samuel who turns out to actually be a prince or emporer or something. Now, this is a 19th-century French opera, and was set somewhere (I can't remember) where the Jews were being persecuted. (narrows it down, doesn't it?) Musically the opera was great.....I'd never heard of the composer (Malévy) but some of the music was just stunning. Eleázar's last aria was heart-wrenchingly beautiful, and all of the roles were exquisitely sung. Plotwise is was a bit strange....there's an interesting little twist which makes me unsure how I feel about the whole plot. It was interesting in that it manages not to put either the Jews or the Christians in a bad light, or make one look evil or anything....basically everyone gets fucked in the end, so the moral of the story is just "hate is bad." Rachel's father is a bit of a money-grubbing Jewish stereotype, but it wasn't awful (I think). What was interesting, however, was that in this production all the chorus members (who basically only sing about wanting to kill the jews etc.) were all wearing Lederhosen and the little hats with the big paint-brush-things......they were very clearly supposed to be alpine Germanic people, if not just downright Austrian. That sort of caught me off-guard, but whatever. The audience really loved it, though....it's been a while since I've heard such a long ovation for something there......well, that was that!