Tosca and trampolines

This weekend I had a completely new experience; I went to my first opera. It's one of those things I've been meaning to do for quite awhile, mostly out of curiosity and partly because it just seems like something you should try once in your life. I ended up dragging my sister and brother-in-law with me to see Tosca, put on by the Minnesota Orchestra. (I figured that as music professors, bringing them was my best bet as to someone who would enjoy it!)

It was interesting. I'm glad I went to see an opera once, but based on this experience I would have to say that I definiely prefer musicals. For starters, while I appreciated the screen with some English translations to help me understand what was going on, I found it ended up being similar to watching TV with the closed captioning. I was so busy reading the words that I didn't notice nearly as much of the music or acting. Also, it drove me a little bit nuts when they would continue singing with no captions occasionally! I should have expected it to be depressing, I suppose, but I was still surprised by the complete pessimism of the story!

One of my favorite moments, however, had nothing to do with this particular show. A man sitting next to my sister shared an article he had printed off with her, about mishaps that have happened during other stagings of the opera. Without ruining too much (hopefully), there is a scene in the play when a main character is supposed to jump off a parapet to her death. In the past, apparently there have been a lot of accidents resulting in broken bones, but the article focused more on the funny mishaps. In one staging, they placed a trampoline to break this character's fall, so the dramatic suicide plunge was followed by several re-appearances over the wall. In another, soldier supposedly pursuing this character had simply been told to "exit with the principals" and so all threw themselves off the wall immediately afterwards. While the performance I went to was extremely well done (the music was beautifully done and the staging, while basic, was nice) there was a little bit of me that regretted our performance not going just a little bit wrong, in a similarly funny (and non-traumatic!) way.