Eliogabalo: eccomi trasformato

That Francesco Cavalli's Eliogabalo survives at all is something of a historical improbability. The experienced and popular operatic composer penned the work late in his career, but it was never performed. Was it too musically old-fashioned? Too politically subversive? Scholars have labored over these questions without achieving consensus (more information here.) It was this trail of scholarship that led Gotham Chamber Opera to the work, replete with erotic and political scandal, which is now being performed to capacity audiences at The Box. In other words, seventeenth-century Venice interpreting third-century Rome gets an environment strongly reminiscent of the seedy sensuality of Isherwood's Berlin. I was intrigued by the venture's approach to showing New York City audiences past decadence(s) through the venues and aesthetics of our own. The results of this enterprise, however, were mixed. The baroque-punk aesthetic of Mattie Ulrich's costumes (with more than a hint of burlesque about them) I thought inspired. James Marvel's direction of the on-stage antics, however, was crude and unsubtle, doing a disservice to Cavalli's sophisticated treatment of sexual power games played--often with desperation--by all of the characters. The burlesque dancers had, in fact, the choreography most expressive of eroticism and control. Almost completely lost in the indiscriminate lasciviousness was the debate, prominent in Aurelio Aureli's libretto as in its seventeenth-century context, on whether or not the iniquities of a tyrant ever absolved his subjects of their loyalty to the person of the king. (An honorable exception to this was the transformation of burlesque dancers into the Furies who haunt Alessandro as he meditates on the conflict between passion and duty, surrounded by the mockery of multiple mirrors.) Despite the largely two-dimensional direction, the singers performed with admirable commitment, although musical matters were also somewhat uneven. Still, caveats and cuts notwithstanding, I was glad for the chance to encounter this rarity of the operatic repertoire.

L'alto motore novo splendore a ciel prepara

Peter Paul Rubens, Jupiter and Callisto, 1613

Francesco Cavalli's 1651 opera Calisto has its origins in the mid-seventeenth century heyday of Venetian opera, when composers and librettists scrambled to keep up with the demands of a voracious public (recording here; synopsis here.) Its three-act structure was just becoming standardized; its libretto was the last of his long-term artistic partnership with Giovanni Faustini. Calisto intertwines mythological narratives in what Wendy Beth Heller has called the "essentially inaccessible... realms" of Arcadia and the cosmos, reimagining the Ovidian tale of Calisto as a parable of female desire, and staging the paradox of Diana in love. In Venice, it was not a success. In Brooklyn, however, with the Vertical Player Repertory performing in the shabby-romantic courtyard of Proteus Gowanus, it held its audience enthralled. Ably sung by a youthful and energetic cast, the opera also benefited from creative use of its space. A small ensemble of period instruments, led by Jennifer Peterson at the harpsichord, provided unexpectedly full sound. The comic tone chosen for the unfolding of the plot devices was in better keeping with the seventeenth-century spirit than my own, but the VPR's interpretation of the opera's fantastical elements was an admirable example of doing much with little. Arcadia was evoked by a profusion of potted plants; the gods descended from the heavens on an ancient fire escape; dancers embodied the stags of Diana and Juno's peacocks. On the whole, it all worked remarkably well.