Opera, Dickens, and the French Revolution

Since I'll be doing a (small) role in Dialogues of the Carmelites, I have been immersing myself in the French Revolution.

First, I bought a recording of the opera. I wasn't all that familiar with it, only having seen it once, at the Met, years ago in English.

I am going to be playing Mother Jeanne but since I had originally auditioned for Mother Marie, I want to sort of learn her part too (I don't really sightread, but I have a superb ear and can learn music pretty quickly if I listen to it over and over).

Well, after listening to the opera about 6 or 7 times I must say it really gave me the creeps! At the end you can hear the guillotine and at the very end it actually cuts someone off mid-sentence. Then there's just silence. Eerie.

To get myself in the mood I read a novel that I found in my laundry room (where there's a book freecycle) called A Place of Greater Safety. It's loooong, and huge sections were boring, but you really get the flavor of the period, including all the executions.

Then today I spoke to my mother (I'm glad we had a nice talk - we hadn't been getting along all that well, she's 93 and housebound but as domineering as ever) and she said the movie of A Tale of Two Cities was on tv so I turned it on and watched the end and cried buckets. I remember my mother taking me to see it when I was a teenager.

In fact before I fell in love with opera I fell in love with Dickens. It started with my seeing the musical Oliver! and then with my mother reading Oliver Twist to me when I was 12 and had the flu (with a very high fever). After that I read all of Dickens. I just loved the denseness of the plots, the mysteries, the secrets....so unlike my sterilized High Modernist life in a New York City apartment where what you saw was what you got, and where embarrassingly frank talk about everything from sex to politics showed that you were "enlightened".

Actually, Lady Dedlock in Bleak House would make a great operatic heroine. She sort of reminds me of Violetta but without the TB. Deeply depressed and disaffected because what? She had sex outside of marriage 20 years before the story began and had a child? That she was damaged goods. Sort of as if Violetta had married the Baron and lived sadly ever after.

Now I'm listening to Andrea Chenier just to continue the theme. It's got an execution at the end but it's not as gory as Carmelites.