So I went to the Opera the other day. I saw a performance of Nelligan, about the Québecois poet. And, I must say, I didn't enjoy it as much as I had expected to. The plot can be summed up as follows: young poet prances around dreaming to the disapproval of his father, young poet worries his mother, young poet argues with poet friends about who's more bourgeois, young poet goes downhill, young poet produces seminal opus, young poet goes even more downhill and starts committing depraved acts, young poet is committed to an institution, young/old poet is dying alone.
The imagery and casting were both very good - young Nelligan was appropriately naive and desperate and windswept and even received a sort of sympathy, and old Nelligan was perfectly beaten down and dark. The evocative and aesthetically pleasing lighting and set design cast the scene into a very dramatic view. However, I had several issues with the production, quite possibly because I am Uncultured. Firstly - the plot was awful. It was predictable in its steady downward crawl. There were no truly ecstatic (or even moderately happy) moments - even the celebration of Nelligan's opus didn't reach the heights that creating one's greatest work merits! This may have been the point, and it's a bit much to ask for running around being a pirate and seducing maidens and bullfights and swashbuckling and fairies and water spirits and lanterns in a Serious Work, but it still doesn't make the viewing inherently joyful. Secondly - on a purely aesthetic level, the often banal dialogue in operas sounds better when it's in a language that I can't understand. Though the writers used an interesting mix of English and French to bring to the forefront the bilingual tensions that would have been evident in Montréal at the time, (Nelligan's father was Irish and dissaproved of his passionately French output), things like "A poet! A poet! Anything but a poet!" repeated over and over are perceived better when one can dissociate their sound from their meaning. My final complaint would be that it was a bit drawn out. Maybe I, a product of the Internet generation, just have a short attention span, but a descent into madness that lasts more than two hours simply doesn't capture my imagination as vividly. However, the opera was still interesting and definitely exposed me to a poet that I had never previously taken the time to learn about.
Amusing fact: Emile Nelligan lived on the same street that my boyfriend lives on today, making them spatiotemporal neighbours!
