The Art-Music, Literature and Linguistics Forum
March 28, 2024, 10:33:12 pm
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?

Login with username, password and session length
News: Here you may discover hundreds of little-known composers, hear thousands of long-forgotten compositions, contribute your own rare recordings, and discuss the Arts, Literature and Linguistics in an erudite and decorous atmosphere full of freedom and delight.
 
  Home Help Search Gallery Staff List Login Register  

sci-fi operas

Pages: [1]   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: sci-fi operas  (Read 287 times)
0 Members and 2 Guests are viewing this topic.
Neil McGowan
Level 7
*******

Times thanked: 79
Offline Offline

Posts: 1336



View Profile
« on: January 17, 2012, 07:22:01 pm »

One of the more amiable and advanced members of Another Messageboard posits questions about the cross-over between the genres of Science Fiction and Opera.

Since opera formerly fulfilled the social role now filled by cinema, it's not surprising that there might be more examples of crossover than at first supposed :)  Remove the requirement for space travel (by no means an essential ingredient of sci-fi) and the number of works set in strange and foreign worlds quickly tots-up. Baroque audiences were greatly given to this kind of escapism - especially if it offered a chance for a lot of wacky costumes and exciting stage machinery :)  The French repertoire has any number of pieces set in mythical worlds and kingdoms...  Rameau's Les Boréades and Les Paladins.  Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' is already a prototypical sci-fi piece, and thus the (many) operatic versions have risen to the challenge... Purcell, Ades, etc. Cavalli's Calisto is transformed into a star at the end.  Handel's "magic" operas (there are only four of them) mostly fit the sci-fi genre...  most obviously 'Alcina'... a sorceress on a strange island abducts earthlings for her sexual pleasure. But once they fail to satisfy her needs, she turns them into garden items. Only the girlfriend of one of the abductees is brave enough to reach the planet island and succeed in finding her stolen lover... plus his dad (who's been turned into bush, then a lion). In fact a whole island-full of victims are restored to human form once Alcina's power is symbolically smashed.

 


There are several more C20th sci-fi operas worth a mention - including Jonathan Dove's "Man On The Moon", and the Triffid-inspired "Help! Help! The Globolinks!" by Gian Carlo Menotti.  (The Globolinks are vanquished by the High School Band - they hate music, and it drives them potty.  The band are mustered by a Russian Operatic Soprano who teaches at the school  :o ).

But wasn't it perhaps the Age Of Enlightenment that most dearly needed to establish the superiority of the Rational Mind Of Man over every kind of savagery and depravity?  There's Mozart's opera "Bastien & Bastienne", in which the magic powers of the supernatural Colas place Bastien under his control ("Ziggy! Zaggy! Diggy! Daggy!") - whilst he hypnotises Bastienne into behaviour-patterns more calculated to help her hang onto her man.


And there's "Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail' in which a shipwreck maroons our four lovable young ghostcatchers visitors and their loyal dog Scooby in a strange land where everything is different to where they come from.  They get captured and tied up - and nearly executed...  but good triumphs in the end.  And Osmin would have got away with it too, if it hadn't been for those kids and their darn dog...


Of course there's also the one about the beautiful Princess who's been abducted by a bizarre cult organisation, and the young hero who falls in love with her portrait and endures all kinds of Trials in order to rescue her...  (using the Secret Powers which he always had, but didn't know how to use...)


Or how about the one about the seducer with supernatural powers, whose lists of seductions run to thousands... chased by numerous former victims, including a noblewoman and her nerdy useless boyfriend... who is finally brought to justice and despatched to oblivion?


I see you shiver in anticip



Report Spam   Logged

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter

Neil McGowan
Level 7
*******

Times thanked: 79
Offline Offline

Posts: 1336



View Profile
« Reply #1 on: January 17, 2012, 07:23:13 pm »

ation.

Report Spam   Logged
Neil McGowan
Level 7
*******

Times thanked: 79
Offline Offline

Posts: 1336



View Profile
« Reply #2 on: January 18, 2012, 08:40:34 am »

Discussion elsewhere continues.  Doubt is expressed that sci-fi might be a basis for successful operas at all?

The entire genre of drama (and indeed, most of fiction) is based on a single premise - to make an experimental test-bed to see what might happen if a certain hypothetical scenario were to come about in reality.  Or - if set in the past - what may have happened in circumstances so long forgotten that we can only guess at the details.

Opera has always imagined unreal and hypothetical situations.  There is nothing more absurd about imagining ourselves exploring other worlds (something which mankind is indeed doing right now) that's less credible than C18th castrated Italians portraying the emperors and tyrants of classical antiquity :)
Report Spam   Logged
Neil McGowan
Level 7
*******

Times thanked: 79
Offline Offline

Posts: 1336



View Profile
« Reply #3 on: January 18, 2012, 11:12:47 pm »

Another major sci-fi opera is THE MAKROPOULOS FORMULA, of course.  And it has nothing whatsoever to do with any spacecraft - despite the obsession with such on another messageboard  8)

A mad scientist tries out the Secret Formula For Eternal Life on his own daughter - but instead sends her into a coma, prompting his royal patron to have him put to death.  But the daughter survives, and roams Dr-Who-like through time, in a succession of fresh identities.  And if that isn't sci-fi, then I don't know what is!  The Capek brothers specialised in sci-fi, almost always using it as a mirror to make uncomfortable comments about our own earthly lives...  ROSSUMS REMARKABLE ROBOTS and WAR WITH THE NEWTS are other main sci-fi pieces. Although my favourite Capek piece - THE INSECT PLAY - isn't really sci-fi in any strict sense (but the closing section about the Ants comes quite close).


Emilia Marty - Natasha Zagorinskaya, Krista - Svetlana Rossiyskaya
Report Spam   Logged

Pages: [1]   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by EzPortal
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum


Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy