The opera ain’t over till the advanced interrogation ends
By Jim Heffernan
I’ve had a violent couple of weeks, aside from the violence we’ve all experienced in the news.
Mine has come in a pair of Puccini operas presented live by the Metropolitan Opera in New York and beamed to theaters around the world, including Duluth 10, on the waterfront.
People who have never seen an opera and think they’re, well, kind of snobby and boring, might change their minds watching “Tosca” and “Turandot,” the Puccini pair showing here recently.
While they are love stories, they prove once again that the road to love can be very bumpy indeed. Never bumpier than in some operas – especially these two.
Poor Floria Tosca, the title character in that one, set in Italy a couple-hundred years ago. She must endure untold indignities just to rescue her lover from what the most recent Bush administration called “enhanced interrogation” but what is known in the world of opera as “torture.” Lots of torture in the world of opera.
Tosca’s boyfriend undergoes any number of enhanced interrogation procedures, including a head-binding gadget that draws as much blood as a crown of thorns. This is before he is brought before a firing squad and shot.
“Tosca” is not for the faint-hearted. Nor is “Turandot,” the other in this pair of Metropolitan Opera screened offerings. This one is set in ancient China where nasty Princess Turandot reigns and is known for rebuffing prospective lovers by beheading them.
One of her suitors, the Prince of Persia, is quickly dispatched after failing to live up to her standards, nameless here for brevity’s sake. Wasn’t Iraq’s Saddam Hussein a lowercase prince of Persia? I believe he was before his neck was stretched. His fortunes and ill-tempered practices while he ruled would fit right in in the opera world.
In “Turandot,” adding insult to injury, the victims’ heads are put on poles for all the world to see, the ill-fated Persian prince’s the only body-less head we have seen alive one minute and dead the next. There’s more torture and threatened torture too, inflicted upon the opera’s most sympathetic character, a woman who under the pressure of her circumstances decides it’s better to kill herself with a guard’s dagger than continue. Goodbye to her.
Of course these goings-on in both operas are accompanied by some of the most glorious music in all of opera. It’s Puccini after all. “Turandot” features Luciano Pavarotti’s famous theme song, “Nessun Dorma.”
Still, despite the redeeming quality of the music, all of this torture had a familiar cast to it. Some things never change.
Showing posts with label violence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label violence. Show all posts
Monday, November 9, 2009
Monday, July 13, 2009
Bloody weekend with Dillinger, Salome and Duluth's Central Hillside
By Jim Heffernan
Let me tell you about my violent weekend.
First, I saw the movie “Public Enemies.” It’s interesting – all about the life and death of 1930s bank robber and killer John Dillinger.
Particularly interesting to me were the final scenes, when the FBI assassinated Dillinger as he left the Biograph Theater in Chicago after viewing a movie. On a visit when I was about 12, an uncle who lived in Chicago pointed the theater out to me as we drove past it. It made quite an impression on me, one that has lasted to this day.
The movie, starring Johnny Depp as Dillinger, portrays the outlaw’s demise very well, with the Biograph marquee looking like I remember it when I saw the theater some 17 years after Dillinger was killed there. Dillinger walks out of the theater with the two women who accompanied him, one of whom had betrayed him, moves down the street on a warm summer night, and a host of waiting FBI agents fills him full of lead.
They were as merciless as Dillinger and other members of his gang were portrayed as they roved around the Midwest robbing banks and breaking out of jails, sometimes killing innocent people in the process. There are a lot of dead bodies in “Public Enemies,” some of them crooks, some of them lawmen, some innocent bystanders. Violence galore. Blood galore.
And there’s torture to boot as the lawmen attempt to get captured crooks to reveal Dillinger’s whereabouts.
I have become increasingly disenchanted with so much violence in movies and on TV. One place you can usually avoid it is in church, which I attended the Sunday after seeing “Public Enemies” on Saturday night. But I was not to avoid more violence that weekend – not even in church.
The day’s gospel was from the New Testament book of Mark in which the story of the demise of John the Baptist – not to be confused with John the Dillinger -- is described in rather gory detail in the translation employed by the modern church.
It tells the tale of King Herod who marries his brother’s wife (well, ex-wife) and is criticized by John the Baptist for doing so. This inspires the enmity of Herod’s new wife, whose daughter Salome dances the dance of seven veils, which so inspires Herod he offers her half his kingdom or any other wish she might have. Salome discusses this with her mother, who tells her to ask for the severed head of John the Baptist on a platter.
So they decapitate John and deliver up his head, a scene portrayed in several movies – Rita Hayworth made a seductive Salome -- and even in opera.
Gruesome. So gruesome, in fact, that the minister apologized to the parents of young children in the congregation for preaching on this text. Of course, there’s as much violence in the Bible as there was in America 75-plus years ago (let’s not forget the St. Valentine’s Day massacre -- or maybe we should), and continues everywhere today.
Safe at home on Sunday night, we heard about a shooting in Duluth’s Central Hillside that we learned the next day resulted in the death of one man – bullet in the head – and injury to another – bullet in the thigh.
By then I was so inured to the weekend’s violence that I didn’t bat an eye.
Let me tell you about my violent weekend.
First, I saw the movie “Public Enemies.” It’s interesting – all about the life and death of 1930s bank robber and killer John Dillinger.
Particularly interesting to me were the final scenes, when the FBI assassinated Dillinger as he left the Biograph Theater in Chicago after viewing a movie. On a visit when I was about 12, an uncle who lived in Chicago pointed the theater out to me as we drove past it. It made quite an impression on me, one that has lasted to this day.
The movie, starring Johnny Depp as Dillinger, portrays the outlaw’s demise very well, with the Biograph marquee looking like I remember it when I saw the theater some 17 years after Dillinger was killed there. Dillinger walks out of the theater with the two women who accompanied him, one of whom had betrayed him, moves down the street on a warm summer night, and a host of waiting FBI agents fills him full of lead.
They were as merciless as Dillinger and other members of his gang were portrayed as they roved around the Midwest robbing banks and breaking out of jails, sometimes killing innocent people in the process. There are a lot of dead bodies in “Public Enemies,” some of them crooks, some of them lawmen, some innocent bystanders. Violence galore. Blood galore.
And there’s torture to boot as the lawmen attempt to get captured crooks to reveal Dillinger’s whereabouts.
I have become increasingly disenchanted with so much violence in movies and on TV. One place you can usually avoid it is in church, which I attended the Sunday after seeing “Public Enemies” on Saturday night. But I was not to avoid more violence that weekend – not even in church.
The day’s gospel was from the New Testament book of Mark in which the story of the demise of John the Baptist – not to be confused with John the Dillinger -- is described in rather gory detail in the translation employed by the modern church.
It tells the tale of King Herod who marries his brother’s wife (well, ex-wife) and is criticized by John the Baptist for doing so. This inspires the enmity of Herod’s new wife, whose daughter Salome dances the dance of seven veils, which so inspires Herod he offers her half his kingdom or any other wish she might have. Salome discusses this with her mother, who tells her to ask for the severed head of John the Baptist on a platter.
So they decapitate John and deliver up his head, a scene portrayed in several movies – Rita Hayworth made a seductive Salome -- and even in opera.
Gruesome. So gruesome, in fact, that the minister apologized to the parents of young children in the congregation for preaching on this text. Of course, there’s as much violence in the Bible as there was in America 75-plus years ago (let’s not forget the St. Valentine’s Day massacre -- or maybe we should), and continues everywhere today.
Safe at home on Sunday night, we heard about a shooting in Duluth’s Central Hillside that we learned the next day resulted in the death of one man – bullet in the head – and injury to another – bullet in the thigh.
By then I was so inured to the weekend’s violence that I didn’t bat an eye.
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