Yesterday I went to my first opera, hence the title of this post. Amazing as it was, I was a bit disappointed that a few stereotypes were not fulfilled. No female member of the cast was fat (although a few of the men were quite толстый), the sets were rather minimalist, and the death by shooting didn't involve a big red handkerchief to represent the blood. I mean, in general, all of those things would be great, but for my first opera, I kind of wanted the stereotype.
The show we saw was Evgeniy Onegin, an opera written by Tchaikovsky based on the poem/book by Pushkin. I read the wikipedia article for both (in English and Russian) before watching the opera, so I had a vague idea of the storyline, but I think that to be an educated Slavic Studies major I'm going to have to read the original text at some point. When I have the language skills.
Overall I enjoyed the opera, but there were several scenes that were really boring. I much preferred the big crowd scenes to the monologues/dialogues that dominated the piece. The famous letter scene involves the main female character singing by herself for like 20 minutes. After about 3 I was ready for her to be done. There was actually a point about halfway through the piece where there was a pause in the music and everyone thought that the song was over, so they started clapping. The actress, however, remained in place with her arms raised, props in hand, and the lights didn't change so after a minute people got the hint. And the aria continued for another ten minutes.
My favorite scene was the ball in the third act, but my favorite moment was at the top of the final scene, at a serious, romantic moment, a gel fell out of a light above the stage. (For those who don't know, a lighting gel is the little piece of colored plastic placed in front of a light tint it.) I doubt that I was the only one who noticed it, but I suspect that most other spectators either thought it was done on purpose or didn't know how important the tiny piece of plastic actually was. Somebody got yelled at after the performance, for sure. Perhaps several someones.
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In other news, today is the final day of Maslenitsa. For all of you non-Slavists out there, Maslenitsa is a very old pagan celebration that originally lasted 14 days, but has since been shortened to 7. When Christianity came to Russia, the peasants continued most of their pagan traditions, sometimes with a new Christian twist to it. In general, though, the holiday maintains its pagan feel. No need for me to say all here, if you're interested do an internet search (the wikipedia article is sadly lacking, FYI).
In honor of the holiday, my program took us to the Russian equivalent of Sturbridge village/ Plymouth plantation to learn about old Russian traditions and how to properly celebrate the week. Which included, among other things, a couple of informative talks (that I mostly understood), several games, a drunken man in a bear costume who played the games with us, traditional dances, eating blini (they represent the sun--eating them is supposed to make spring come faster, though I'm still a little fuzzy on the logic of that), and sledding.
OK, so the sledding isn't really a part of the holiday, but it was really fun. As I keep saying, being a low-level language student and living in Russia, in many ways I've regressed to childhood. Field trips, class discussions of simple/everyday topics, grammar lessons, being told I need to bundle up more, having people worry about where I am if I don't call, etc.
Today I also got to watch a rehearsal at the Comedy Theater, but this blog post is long enough that I'd better save that story for another time.
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