Sunday in the Rain (Dialogues of the Carmelites)

So the good news is that I have two people who are potentially interested in adopting the lil orange stray cat we met yesterday in the garden. The bad news is that when I went over there this morning, I couldn't find him, so maybe he went somewhere else or even returned to home (although he seemed a bit too skinny and needy for attention for me to think he was just lost for a day). Fingers crossed that he's okay! Anyway, I had the ladder out and took the opportunity to take some aerial shots of the garden in the rain.
This afternoon Stephen and I went to Juilliard to see 'The Dialogues of the Carmelites,' the 1957 opera by (non-heterosexual French composer) Francis Poulenc. I had never seen it, so was looking forward to what I had been told was one of the most shattering endings in opera, where a group of nuns (after being arrested in the course of the French Revolution) goes one by one to the guillotine. (One great thing about opera is that there are never really spoilers, because even when you know what's going to happen -- and in fact this is always advisable -- if the music and staging is working, it'll always blow your mind, which is why you can go see the same piece over and over and over again and theoretically never get tired of it, in a way that's very different -- at least in my experience -- than teevee or movies.) The production we saw this afternoon was great; it was a small theater and the singers and musicians all sounded like, well, Juilliard students (which is to say the stars of tomorrow, and perhaps five minutes from now), and the set and costumes were spare but elegant, so that you could really focus on the story.
After the opera, we went home and looked for the cat, but he was still nowhere to be found. As the opera demonstrated, so much in life is rooted in being in the right (or wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time, and it's up to us to create our destinies (even if it's death) out of these contingencies. (Even if you're a cat...)

Comments

[Edward S.]

I work at Juilliard and attended this performance on Friday night. I am so glad you liked it! The operas I see at Juilliard are frequently some of the highlights of my opera-going year, although Die Gezeichneten in L.A. last week was pretty high on the list....

When I was attending my first performance of Carmelites at the Met nearly two lustra ago, I was searching for information about this opera mostly unknown to me on Google. I found a page in French and clicked on "Translate this page." I then read: "This is one of the great works of the French dramatic stage. It concerns the tragic fate of sixteen chocolate eclairs...."

[Matthew Gallaway]

LOL -- thats a great story, Edward! But yes, I was really impressed by the performance--it was really very moving.