Tag: opera

Art & Opera: A Day in Paris

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When I booked my ticket for Paris, there was one thing I knew that I wanted to do for sure: spend a day in the Musée d’Orsay and have lunch at the cafe inside. The Musée d’Orsay is one of the greatest art museums in the world, carved out of a hollowed-out train station that now houses some of the most famous art in the world. I have wanted to visit it since I knew it existed. Walking through it takes an entire day, so I planned on doing just about nothing else, wanting to feel like I had all of the time in the world.

My aunt and I met up and we walked the entirety of the museum. My father is the type of person who walks up to a painting, stares at it for twenty minutes, then backs away from it, and stares at it for another twenty minutes, studying every brushstroke and paint fleck. My aunt is not such a person. She could walk into a gallery, do a 360 turn, and then walk off, satisfied that she had gotten everything she needed from the paintings.

Like most people, I’m somewhere in the middle. 

We made it through the museum in record time in comparison to how my father would have done it, but I still felt like I savored all of the artwork. I saw all of the paintings that I wanted to see, starting with the “Birth of Venus” by Cabanel, which my parents have a print of hanging in their house. Seeing it in person is an entirely different experience, one that also makes you want to lay naked in the middle of the ocean with knee length hair while a bunch of cherubs careen over you. 

We checked out the Van Goghs, the Picassos, crossing off everything on my list except for Monet’s waterlilies (which weren’t on display and which I’d already seen). It was nothing but stunning paintings as far as the eye could see. 

We stopped to have lunch in a cafe that was behind a clock face that overlooked the Seine, sipping wine and chatting about the art that we had seen so far. 

After the Musée d’Orsay, I got ready to see the opera with Claire, one of my favorite people to go to the opera with. We saw Pelléas et Mélisande by Debussy, a French opera about…well, we weren’t quite sure what it was about. The show started and Claire and I promptly dozed off, taking high-priced naps at the Opéra Bastille. For me, it was jet-lag. For her, it was the rigors of being a full time law student. Either way, we were tired.

From what we did see of the performance, it was beautiful. There were loud, perfect voices ringing out towards the ceiling and actual children who could sing better than me. Nothing humbles me quite like going to the opera or ballet and seeing the talent of the stars on display, being made to look effortless.

After that, we called it a night.

Between the art museum and the opera I had the kind of day that most people expect to have when visiting Paris, one in which there is no shortage of art and culture. It was a blissful day of admiring some of the greatest artwork in the world, followed by the soothing tones of opera music.

Who can ask for a better day in Paris?

The Tragic Queen,

Raquel

P.S.: Check out how I spent my previous day in Paris

Carmen

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Great news people: I have once again gone to the opera.

Having gone and blogged about it four times, I know that this comes as a shock to you all, but nonetheless I did it. 

This time I went with my friend ​​Claire to see Carmen. Even if you haven’t seen Carmen, I can assure you that you have heard the music, as it has one of the most iconic scores of any opera, something that I didn’t know until I was sitting in my seat.

Despite it being a French opera taking place in Spain, The Met decided to set the production in the midwestern United States. I did not expect to see a production of Carmen in which the titular woman was wearing turquoise cowgirl boots and jorts while gyrating against a semi truck, but no judgment.

Perhaps there was some commentary in the sense that the story takes place outside of a gun manufacturing factory and they were commenting on the mass gun deaths in the US and/or the American military industrial complex. Either that or I just put more thought into it than they did. 

In the end, the story taking place in the midwest meant that when Carmen dances for her love interest she did so on top of a trash can at a gas station, which was a daring artistic choice. 

We then proceeded to witness the most toxic relationship known to man. There was a lot of “I have to be with you,” “I can’t be with you,” “you don’t love me,” “I can never be with you” “I can’t live without you” going on in the story. Then one of them died. 

In all honesty, as a chronically single person, that’s what just about a lot of you guys’s relationships look like to me. Carmen holds the record for quickest and most pointless death in an opera. 

At least she didn’t sing for half an hour about how she was dying. She didn’t even see it coming. 

For the opera, I kept it casual by wearing a floor length ball gown that I purchased at a consignment shop last semester. When I bought it, the sale’s woman to ask what I was buying it for. I answered “the opera.”

She asked, “oh when are you going to the opera?” and I had to admit that I had absolutely no idea. 

Sometimes, you have to buy the dress for the event that you have no prospects for. Likewise, I recently purchased a dress for the ballet, but have no idea when I’ll be going. I will keep you posted on how that’s going. 

Unfortunately, it would appear that while that conversation was taking place, the sales woman forgot to remove the plastic chip at the bottom of the dress, causing numerous people to stare at it at the Met Opera House. I tried to tell them with my eyes that I did not in fact shoplift my ball gown, but that is hard to communicate visually. 

The music was beautiful and so was the singing. Yes, I was occasionally distracted by the juxtaposition of a woman belting it in French, acting sexy against the chain-link fence of a weapons factory, while wearing a lab coat, but I still had a fantastic time at the opera. 

The Tragic Queen,

Raquel

P.S.: Check out my previous blog post about my royal portrait

Tchaikovsky and Pushkin: my last trip to the opera for a while

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It’s not over until the fat lady sings

“My dreams, my dreams! What has become of their sweetness? What indeed has become of my youth?”

― Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

I was given one last chance to see the opera again before my semester ended and at the risk of being predictable, I went to the opera yet again. This time the trip was to see “Eugene Onegin” with my Russian music theory class, having read the poetry-based novel for class.

 

It took me all day to get my hair curled without a curler so I walked around like this all day having also slept like this

The fantastic dress that I wore was made by my aunt several years ago, and is now officially mine. She would want me to mention the asymmetrical bodice of the dress, being an architect who knows and cares about such things as “asymmetry.” 

Regardless of how I actually looked in it, the dress made me feel regal. I wanted to look like Ava Gardner, or some other decadent Hollywood starlet from the Golden Age of Hollywood. It’s the opera: the time to bring the glamour. 

What I was going for
What I achieved

I wore the dress to class because I didn’t have time to change after class, or at least, that’s what I told myself. Then afterwards, there was the small business of getting into the city and into my seat in time for the curtain to rise. Time was already going to be tight since class got out only about an hour before the show started and with the 45 minute train ride, I was especially in a hurry. 

Just as I was leaving however, a storm blew in and nearly blew me away. Please note the green rain boots with the ball gown. The trendiness is next level. I spent the whole day doing my hair just for five minutes of rain to ruin it. I got off the train as planned and on schedule, but that’s about the last thing that went as planned. 

The obligatory Met Opera fit pick. Note the rainboats

I then learned the joys of trying to get a cab out in the rain, which apparently no one does and every New Yorker knows but me. One does not get a cab in the pouring rain. One does however stand on a street corner in the pouring rain with their arm in the air, getting frustrated.

The makeup end result. Devastating.

I weigh about 115 pounds soaking wet– which I happened to be at the time–so I’m sure that I was exactly the type of person you would want to pull on your bike if you had to. I don’t know what I expected of my night, but pulling up to the opera in a rickshaw, wearing a ball gown in the pouring rain, wasn’t it.  

I was in such a foul mood from getting rained on and not making it to the opera on time. I’m sure I had the same resting bitch face that my cat Calypso has at any given moment. 

Keeping with the old Hollywood theme, here is an accurate representation of how overdressed and bitch-faced I was when I rode up to the Met Opera House

As they say in the opera, “I’m suffering. I’m unhappy. I’m ready to weep.” In case you think that I’m being dramatic for saying that about showing up a few minutes late for the opera, after having seen a different opera a few weeks earlier, just know that the teenage character was saying that about falling in love and wanting to die.

When you show up late to the Metropolitan Opera House, they let you sit in a separate theater where you can watch what’s happening. I was seething inwardly and upset enough to make a scene, but took a deep breath and kept it inside of me. Dramatically making a scene at the opera seems a little too meta. 

When I was finally let in, the show was phenomenal. The lighting for the opera was better than any other show I’d ever seen. It was beautiful, not just because of the costumes, the singing, or the music, but because of the story. Onegin is based on poetry, not tragedy, and like most poetry it has a clear theme of love and some heartbreak but does not end with the woman dying. Instead, the woman ends up married to someone royal after being rejected by the titular character and even though he asks for her back in the end, she now rejects him, staying married and amazing.

Poetic justice.

 

Having read the novel, I enjoyed hearing the people behind me discuss it. 

“So she told me that this is based on a novel by Pushkin.”

“Why is it called Eugene Onegin when it’s more about her?”

“Eugene is the worst.”

It was all almost good enough for me to ignore the fact that I was freezing cold from the rain. Following the opera, my friends and I raced through the subway to get back to campus before the last train left, basically the thing that I hadn’t done to get to the opera in the first place. At about one in the morning, I was back in my dorm room, enjoying having been to the Met one last time. Between next semester when I’m in Florence and this summer when I’m all over the place, I’m not sure when I’ll next be at the Metropolitan Opera House, but with Eugene Onegin, I ended on a high note.

The Tragic Queen,

Raquel