Puccini's Turandot: The Met HD Transmissions Continue

This weekend's opera in the Metropolitan Opera's HD Transmission schedule is Giocamo Puccini's Turandot. This post includes links and other material that might give you some additional background to enjoy the broadcast if you're not already familiar with the opera.

This post is also in conjunction with my class tonight at HACC.

First of all, here are the theaters in Central Pennsylvania that will be showing this Saturday at 1:00 EST: in many theaters, there may be an encore presentation on Wednesday, Nov. 18th at 6:30 (check local listings, as they say).

Susquehanna 14 Harrisburg at 1500 Caughet Drive, Harrisburg PA 17110 (717-526-4981)

The Penn Cinema at 541 Airport Road, Lititz PA 17543

Majestic Theatre at 25 Carlisle Street, Gettysburg PA 17325

For all of my readers outside the area (both of you), you can follow this link to locate other American locations or in Canada and the Rest of the Known World.

If you can't make Saturday's transmission, there is an encore scheduled for Wednesday evening, Nov. 18th, at 6:30pm EST.

There are also two encore broadcasts of Verdi's Aida scheduled for Nov 11th and 12th.

Incidentally, this month, there are two operas being produced by local companies: Capital Opera Harrisburg presents Saint-Saens' Samson & Delilah in November with performances on the 12th, 13th and 14th (all at 7:30) and on Sunday the 15th (at 3pm), all at the auditorium of the William Penn Campus Auditorium. (Last month, it seemed some of the performances were going to be held elsewhere, but their up-dated website now indicates all performances will be taking place at the William Penn Campus.) They will be presenting two one-act operas from Puccini's Il Trittico - Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica - in April, 2010.


Center Stage Opera presents Puccini's Madame Butterfly this month as well with performances the 5th and 7th at 7:30 and 8th at 3pm at Camp Hill United Methodist Church; again Nov. 13th at Hanover's Eichelberger Arts Center and on Nov. 14th at the Women's Club of York on E. Market Street, each at 7:30.

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The Cast for this Saturday's Met broadcast of Turandot includes Maria Guleghina as Turandot; Marina Poplavskaya as Liu; Marcello Giordani as Calaf, the Unknown Prince; and Samuel Ramey as Timur.

Andris Nelsons will be the conductor.

This is the classic production by Franco Zeffirelli – he designed the elaborate sets which were first seen in 1987. The sets have been criticized for being too elaborate, too gaudy and too gigantic, dwarfing the singers and relegating the chorus to actions on the side of the stage. I have never seen this production but many friends of mine who have either loved it or hated it. (When it was first seen, one review mentioned how many thousands of ping pong balls had been used to garnish the sets and costumes, appropriate for an opera with three charatcers named Ping, Pang and Pong...)

Given that the Met is systematically retiring other grand-scale Zeffirelli productions (his La Boheme and Tosca have now been replaced), I'm not sure if this one will survive past late-January when Turandot ends its run this current season.

You can read Anthony Tomassini's review in the New York Times here. After this season's opening performance, he wrote that “Ms. Guleghina sang at the dress rehearsal, but withdrew because of a lingering cold. If Ms. Lindstrom’s performance in the first 'Turandot' of the season was not a 'Star Is Born' triumph, she was dramatically alluring and vocally impressive, winning enthusiastic ovations from the audience.”

Turandot is a huge role even though she's not on stage all that much: basically, she has a walk-on in Act 1 but there's a major aria to sing (“In questa reggia”) and the Riddle Scene in Act 2 Scene 2 (essentially half-way through the opera when she finally does make her dramatic entrance) that demand great singing without much chance to warm up on stage beforehand. As a friend of mine said, “she has to come out and essentially blast you right between the eyes from her entrance.” It's not as easy as it sounds.

Here, you can read the Met's essay about two great spectacles – Verdi's Aida and Puccini's Turandot – complete with photos from the Met's productions. Both are among the grandest of Grand Operas – huge sets, large casts and needing some of the greatest singers around to pull it off.

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The story for the opera originates in one of the tales by the 18th Century Italian writer, Carlo Gozzi, who created a number of works inspired by the characters and conventions of the old Italian Commedia del Arte. His works also inspired writers like E.T.A. Hoffmann (both a famous writer, composer and himself a source for an opera plot in Jacques Offenbach's “Tales of Hoffmann”) and Edgar Allen Poe (who references one of Gozzi's tales in “The Raven”) and supplied stories for operas by Prokofiev (“The Love for Three Oranges”), Hans Werner Henze (“King Stag”) and Richard Wagner's first opera (a long-forgotten thing called “Die Feen” or “The Fairies”) including Puccini's first opera (“Le villi,” about some other evil spirits) as well as his last opera, “Turandot.”

There are actually several settings of “Turandot.” Carl Maria von Weber wrote incidental music for Friedrich Schiller's dramatic adaptation of the story (1809) and Paul Hindemith used some of the pseudo-Chinese tunes Weber used for a movement from his 1943 work, “Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes by Carl Maria von Weber” (you can hear Weber's “Turandot” Overture and March here; here is a performance recorded in 1947 with Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic. Here is another performance of Hindemith's “Turandot” Scherzo.

Turandot was set by five other opera composers during the 19th Century, including Puccini's own teacher in 1867. Ferruccio Busoni set it in 1917 before Puccini began composing his in 1920 or so.

The story originally came to Gozzi by way of Persia though it originated in China before the days of Marco Polo who wrote about his travels there in the late 13th Century. He recounts a similar tale in which a princess, something of an amazon, would only marry a man who could defeat her in combat.

To summarize Puccini's plot, set in ancient China, Turandot is a princess who has sworn to revenge the rape and murder of her ancestor, the Princess Lo-u-Ling by the invading Tartars: any man who seeks to marry her will be challenged to three riddles and if he fails to answer them correctly, he will be executed and his severed head placed on a spike overlooking the gate to the Imperial Capital of Peking (now Beijing). As the opera opens, the latest prince has just failed his test and is scheduled to be executed at moon-rise. The people of Peking are restless waiting for the execution. There is a stampede and an old man is trampled. He is being helped by his slave-girl, Liu, and then is helped by a stranger.

It turns out the old man is Timur, the former King of the Tartars, wandering in exile. More incredible is the coincidence that the stranger who helps him is his long-lost son, Calaf, also wandering in exile. Liu has stayed by her master out of gratitude and has been in love with Calaf ever since, one day long ago, he had smiled at her in the palace.

The chorus calls for blood as the moon begins to rise. The Prince of Persia is led off to be beheaded. Princess Turandot appears briefly and gives the order to cut off his head. Immediately, Calaf has fallen under Turandot's spell and vows that he will solve the three riddles and win her hand. Timur and Liu try to dissuade him as do three ministers, named Ping, Pang and Pong (they are like clowns straight out of the old Commedia del Arte) but Calaf rushes forward to sound the gong that announces the arrival of another suitor.

In the first scene of Act 2, in a room in the palace, Ping, Pang and Pong commiserate over the fate of China: the old emperor, Altoum, is ineffective as a ruler and Turandot's killing off any available prince interested in marrying her has steeped the country in bloodshed (by various counts, she has killed 13; by others, 99). They dream longingly of their country homes and their own families when the people begin gathering to hear the newest challenger fail to answer the princess' riddles.

In the 2nd scene, set on the steps of the Imperial Palace, the old emperor attempts to dissuade this Unknown Prince from seeking Turandot's hand, but he insists on proceeding. She comes out, sings her aria “In questa reggia” (In this kingdom) explaining her revenge on all men. (You can hear the great Birgit Nilsson, of the great Turandots of the 1960s and '70s, sing the area in a TV concert broadcast, here.)

She then asks him the three riddles:

What is born each night but dies with each dawn?

The prince answers “Hope.” The wise men acknowledge he is correct.

What flickers red like a flame but isn't a flame?

The prince answers “Blood.” Again, he is deemed correct.

What is like ice but burns?

Momentarily stumped, the prince finally answers “Turandot!”

The wise men acknowledge he is indeed correct. The emperor commands his daughter to marry the victorious Unknown Prince. She essentially throws a tantrum but the emperor is stern.

Instead, the Prince offers her a riddle and if she can answer it by sunrise, he will forfeit his life.

Since he is only known as “The Unknown Prince,” he asks her “What is my real name?”

During the 3rd Act, Turandot's ministers and police are trying to find anyone who knows his real name: no one will sleep tonight. In response, the prince sings his aria, “Nessun dorma” in which he is secure of his victory. (This famous aria, the opera's 'greatest hit,' has recently become the Tenor's National Anthem: this performance was recorded at a concert in Los Angeles in 1994 with Luciano Pavarotti.)
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Ping, Pang and Pong try to persuade him to give up and just leave the city, but he refuses.

People have reported he had been seen earlier with the old blind man and his slave-girl. They are arrested and Liu is tortured but she will not reveal his name. Instead, she takes a dagger from one of the soldiers and stabs herself, saying that she would rather die for love rather than betray him. Soldiers carry her body off and old Timur follows her.

Everyone is very moved but still, the answer must be found. Finally, the prince kisses Turandot and then tells her his name: if she chooses to reveal the name, then he will die.

Everyone is once again assembled on the Imperial Steps. Turandot in fact does reveal his true identity: his name is Love. The chorus sings lines from Nessun Dorma and the couple, now happy together, will be married before the Old Emperor.

Gozzi's tale is a little different: there is no Liu – she is an invention of Puccini's, the faithful servant and the “antidote” to Turnadot's iciness. Turandot's servant Adelma is deleted in Puccini's opera: her brother had been one of Turandot's would be suitors and her father declared war on China. Defeated, she was captured and forced to be Turandot's servant. As it happened, she had once been in love with Calaf and recognized him but offers to help him escape from Turandot if he will marry her instead. Calaf is not interested. She's the one who actually tells Turandot the prince's real name: when Calaf goes to stab himself, Adelma takes the dagger from him and tries to stab herself but Turandot intervenes and agrees to the marriage. Calaf implores the old emperor to restore Adelma's lost kingdom which then neatly wraps up the various sub-plots.

One item is left unanswered: when Timur leaves, following the body of Liu, he is never seen or mentioned again. If he is Calaf's father, you would think he would be present at his son's victory. If he had been killed or tortured by Turandot's soldiers, you'd think that would be mentioned. Instead, he just walks off at the end of the scene and disappears. Not a very tidy wrapping-up, there.

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There is one really messy detail, though.

Puccini had become ill while he was working on the opera, diagnosed with throat cancer (he did love his cigars). In 1924, he agreed to have a special new kind of operation involving radiation treatment, then very new, but unfortunately there were complications and he died a few days later of a blood clot which caused a heart attack.

Turandot had been left incomplete and because the illness was not considered “that serious,” the only provision Puccini had made “just in case” was to ask to have Riccardo Zandonai to complete the opera from the 30-some pages of sketches he had made. But Puccini's son disagreed with this, knowing his father had not cared much for Zandonai's music besides not trusting himself to finish it according to the composer's wishes.

After asking Vincenzo Tommassini (who had just finished another opera left incomplete when Arrigo Boito died) and Pietro Mascagni – or they were rejected by Puccini's publisher – it was decided Franco Alfano should be entrusted with the sketches, since he had just completed an opera on an Asian story and his style was very similar to Puccini's in Turandot.

Unfortunately, there wasn't that much to go on. Some of the libretto had not been worked out (Puccini often changed things and added lines) and he was apparently planning on adding a big duet for Calaf and Turandot “like Tristan,” as he had written in the margin. Unfortunately, nobody knew what that meant. It is possible that the loose end with Timur's disappearance might have been solved, too.

He had written to a friend that he needed something big and dramatic to balance the end of Act 2's riddle scene. “It must be a great duet. These two almost superhuman beings descend through love to the level of mankind, and this love must at the end take possession of the whole stage in a great orchestral peroration.”

Instead of a duet, Alfano wrote a three-minute “orchestral peroration” after Calaf kisses Turandot: rather than singing about the change in her feelings, we hear her “melting” in this long interlude but with no “great duet.” The ending seems rather truncated and awkward, unbalanced compared to the 2nd Act's conclusion. Most people felt that Puccini would have done something different than bring in the chorus at the end to reprise some of the music from the tenor's aria, “Nessun dorma.”

As recently as 2001, Italian composer Luciano Berio wrote a completely different ending which is now being used in many new productions (not, as I understand it, by the Met in this production). Friends who've seen it – it's also available on at least one DVD of the opera – say it is immensely superior, both musically and dramatically, to Alfano's solution.

Curiously, at the world premiere, Toscanini, a close-friend of Puccini's and not fond of Alfano's ending, chose to stop the performance at the point where Puccini stopped composing – the music right after's Liu's body is carried off the stage – and turned to the audience and announced, “And here, the maestro put down his pen” (or, as others remember it, “Here, the opera ends because this is where the composer died”).

There are actually two versions of Alfano's ending: before the premiere, Toscanini found the first one insufficient and so Alfano reworked it to create a slightly different one, cutting out a short aria for Turnadot. Though Toscanini never conducted the opera again, other conductors usually use “Alfano 2” but some have taken the better points of each to create a third.

When the publisher allowed other composers to see Puccini's original unfinished sketches, it's apparent Alfano paid very little attention to them. Now, after more than 75 years of familiarity with Alfano's version, it is difficult for some people to accept Berio's darker, less sympathetic version, though others have said it is actually closer to what might have been Puccini's intent.

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The sound of Turandot is also something new and different. After his initial successes with Manon Lescaut (1893), La Boheme (1896), Tosca (1900), Madame Butterfly (1904) and then the less well-known operas, La fanciulla del West (The Girl from the Golden West) (1910), La Rondine (1917) and Il Trittico (1918), Puccini was taking more of an interest in what was going around him, familiarizing himself with new music being written by Schoenberg (Pierrot Lunaire, 1911) and Stravinsky (The Rite of Spring, 1913) among other composers of what was then being regarded as the “avant-garde.”

At points to emphasis Turandot's “reign of terror,” Puccini made a great deal of the interval, the tritone (“the devil in music”) though he had already exploited its character in the music associated with the evil Scarpia in Tosca. Stravinsky's harsh rhythms and use of polytonality (several keys played at once, a very unstable sound) underlined this same dramatic harshness with something musically harsh but appropriate.

In Madame Butterfly, he paid little serious attention to actual Japanese music, using certain cliches to approximate the “idea” of its Japanese setting. In Turandot, set in China, he used three authentic Chinese folk-songs, taken from a music-box that played eight actual Chinese themes, given to him by a friend, Baron Fassini: for the children's chorus in Act 1 that introduces the execution procession of the Prince of Persia, a tune known as “Jasmine Flower;” music sung by the three ministers, Ping, Pang and Pong in Act 1, and then the Imperial Hymn. Elsewhere, he occasionally uses pentatonic themes (the five-note scale, comparable to the black keys on a piano) to give the coloration of Orientalism.

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Though it had no impact on Puccini's music, the tradition of Peking Opera which began in China around 1790 (though inspired by ancient theatrical traditions) is a major visual influence on many productions of Puccini's opera and quite possibly on the lavishness of costumes in Zeffirelli's production (fortunately not imitating the make-up, acting or singing style). Here are some photos from different productions of traditional Peking Opera.

This scene relies heavily on the acrobatic contingent of the theater which were often included in the story just as ballet was a regular part of many European operas. Still, amazing entertainment.

Here is a video of an actual performance of some "Peking Opera" - listen to the different sounds not only of the instruments but of the vocal production as well!


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While some people may dislike the hugeness of Zeffireli's production, take as an example of sheer silliness seen in this trailer for the English National Opera's 2009 production which appears to be set in a modern-day Chinese Restaurant, has pig-headed cooks, an Ice Princess who looks like she bought her costume at Wal-Mart's Wedding Boutique and there is even an Elvis Impersonator among the chorus... I laughed a lot when I watched this but was glad not to have purchased tickets to see it. (I mean, really... come on...)

- Dr. Dick

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The photographs of the Metropolitan Opera production by Franco Zeffireli are from the Met's website and are by Beth Bergman (2002).

Another Busy Weekend

It’s not that there’s been a lot going on – though this weekend will be busy – but I just haven’t gotten around to blogging about anything, even the Election which was a truly amazing experience to participate in and then “witness” on television (one of the few reasons I bothered watching TV since the debates).

(It amused me to see lines and lines of people going out to buy newspapers the next day to keep them for posterity, a souvenir of history: how many people went on-line to the New York Times website to take a screen-capture for their archives?)

Saturday afternoon, it’s the HD Transmission Live from the Metropolitan Opera of John Adams’ recent opera, Dr. Atomic, which I’d blogged about last month. It’s going to be showing at a theater just a couple of miles from my house, so I’m definitely going to be there for the 1pm ET broadcast. It’s being shown around the world as well, so maybe you can find a place near you (follow this link to find out). At many of these same locations, there’s an encore broadcast scheduled for Wednesday Nov. 19th at 7pm ET, for those of you who will miss this weekend’s transmission or who, like me, want to see it twice.

From there, it’s into the Forum for the second concert of the season by the Harrisburg Symphony which will feature principal oboist Alicia Chapman playing a delightful concerto by Bohuslav Martinu, a 20th Century Czech composer best described as “neo-classical” whose harmonic openness, rhythmic sense and folksy tunefulness remind me a bit of what Aaron Copland might have sounded like if Copland had been born in Prague, not Brooklyn. Martinu, born in the bell-tower of a small-town church, eventually became a more cosmopolitan composer, living much of his life in Paris and, during World War II, in the United States, absorbing along the way various trends, including jazz. Homesick while living here, he never returned to Czechoslovakia which had become a Communist state after the war. He wrote his Oboe Concerto in 1955 while in southern France, four years before he died in Switzerland. I’m looking forward to hearing Alicia again – I think this is the fourth time she’s been a soloist with the orchestra since I was the personnel manager back when the orchestra first hired her umpteen years ago!

One of the great and certainly one of the most popular symphonies in the repertoire concludes the program, Beethoven’s 7th Symphony – which I would love to write a few thousand words about but unfortunately I just don’t have the time these days, so I’ll settle for just 362.

Beethoven wrote his 7th and 8th symphonies together and always felt the 8th was the better piece but it was the 7th that became wildly popular with those interested in contemporary music around 1812. One of them was not Carl Maria von Weber who felt the repeated bass passage near the end of the first movement was evidence that Beethoven was “now ripe for the mad-house.” Beethoven’s tunes are less important that the rhythms behind them: they’re often built on repeating single notes or simple patterns but it’s the rhythm that becomes the main feature, propelling the whole symphony, even in the march-like slow movement which seems to have no tune at all. Richard Wagner later famously called it the “apotheosis of the dance” and, after writing that "if anyone plays the Seventh, tables and benches, cans and cups, the grandmother, the blind and the lame, aye, the children in the cradle fall to dancing," supposedly danced his own version of the symphony before friends with no less than Franz Liszt at the piano (now, THERE’S an image...).

Another interesting thing about Beethoven’s most joyful symphony – how can you not tap your foot and smile during this piece, especially in the frenzied abandon of the last movement? (okay, so Clara Schumann’s father thought Beethoven must’ve been drunk when he wrote it) – is putting the time it was written together with something else that was going on in his private life – his very private life. This is the episode of the “Immortal Beloved” to whom he wrote (but maybe never sent) that famous letter that was found in his desk after his death (perhaps he’d kept a rough draft of it?). We have no idea who she is, though most Beethoven scholars (and then some) have their own ideas – there was even a Hollywood film speculating about it, though one can be pretty sure she was not one of the film’s candidates, his sister-in-law!

So here was Beethoven, obviously very much in love and very secretive about it – why? – and writing this wildly happy, ecstatic, in-your-face joyful music so removed from the gentility of what music used to be a decade earlier. Just a thought...

A romantic secret – though ultimately revealed – is behind the other work on the orchestra’s program – originally chamber music by Arnold Schoenberg, written in 1899 but not premiered until three years later, making it, officially then, a 20th Century work (only barely). It was odd to have chamber music telling a story – and the program was a shocking one, inspired by a poem about a woman, walking in the moonlight with her lover, confessing to him she is going to have a child that has been fathered by another man, something her current lover accepts graciously, that her child will become their child and so both he and the child become transfigured - hence the title “Transfigured Night” or, in the original German “Verklärte Nacht.” But if Schoenberg, who was 25 when he wrote the work, had called it just “String Sextet,” he probably would have still ended up in a good deal of trouble.

For all the bad press that Schoenberg has gotten in his life-time and beyond (he is still the official whipping boy for those looking for someone to blame about the state of modern music even today), this piece may come as a surprise if you’re just discovering it. It is lush, romantic, melodic, densely harmonic full of rich triads that sound not very different from other music that was going on around the same time – think Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, descending from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. It is not traditionally tonal but it is by no means ATONAL, which implies there is no sense of harmonic resolution to a central structural key the way we think Beethoven writing in A Major. As chromatic as “Verklärte Nacht” is – chords that you expect to resolve one way veering off in different, unexpected directions until you have no idea where the original harmonies were headed – it uses real chords that real people would have been really familiar with... except one. It’s described as “an inverted ninth chord” but it doesn’t fit into any easily excusable dissonances like passing tones or deceptive resolutions (all of which Beethoven used and composers before him) – even Wagner’s “Tristan Chord” can be explained as the contrapuntal layering of dissonances eventually resolving to a less-dissonant dominant-7th chord – and so therefore listeners were outraged. Yes – outraged! “The pages of Tristan freshly smeared over.” Fistfights broke out. Huh...

Last season, PBS broadcast one of Rob Kapilow’s “What Makes It Great” programs involving his discussion of Schoenberg’s sextet complete with examples and his reading of the original poem line-by-line over the music it’s associated with, followed by a straight-through performance of the piece. It was called, humorously enough, I Can’t Believe It’s Schoenberg!

Today, the work is often heard in this original sextet version – in fact, Concertante will be playing it here in May, 2009 – but Schoenberg also transcribed it for string orchestra which makes the musical lushness more luscious, the romantic emotionalism more ardent. It is this more frequently heard version of the piece the Harrisburg Symphony will perform this weekend with Stuart Malina conducting – Saturday evening at 8pm and Sunday afternoon at 3pm. Timothy Dixon from Messiah College is scheduled to give the pre-concert talk an hour before each performance.

Then for me, on Sunday afternoon, it’s in for Theatre Harrisburg’s production of “The Sound of Music,” one of the most beloved of musicals which I’m looking forward to seeing because I know this company will present a marvelous production of it, but I know that I will need to get out lots of different CDs of mine to drum out all the ear-worms I’ll have stuck in my head for the rest of next week, tunes I don’t mind hearing during the course of the show but which, really, on their 1,000th repetition inside your head before 24 hours have passed, begin to get a little annoying. Still, any composer would envy the ability to creep into the audience’s subconscious like that, really...

Meanwhile, I’m trying to work on my novel for this year’s NaNoWriMo – since November is National Novel Writing Month and I’ve decided to take the challenge. During the first week so far, I’ve managed to reach 25% of the goal – a total of 50,000 words (not counting the 1,484 I’ve written so far for this post) – but I really do need to get back to it. It’s fascinating to discover how much easier it is to procrastinate while writing fiction than it was while composing music... sigh...

- Dr. Dick

Dr. Atomic at the Met - and Maybe a Theater Near You

Though the Metropolitan Opera’s new 125th Anniversary season began last month at their Lincoln Center home and the radio broadcasts do not begin until November 29th, the HD-Transmissions have already begun. These movie-broadcasts (perhaps not the most elegant way to refer to them) bring HD-quality live broadcasts directly to hundreds of movie theaters across the country and around the world.

The opening night Gala with reigning diva Renée Fleming (Eastman '83) was broadcast live on September 22nd - a young cellist whose blog I’ve been following responded enthusiastically to having seen it.

Richard Strauss’ Salome with Karita Matilla in the title role of this highly acclaimed production was broadcast last Saturday, October 11th. But in case you missed it, there is a rebroadcast on October 22nd!

When this opera was new in 1905, it became the greatest musical scandal of the age (at least until the Rite of Spring exploded in Paris in 1911). People thought it was disgusting (Salome kissing the lips of the severed head of John the Baptist), the music ear-wrenching. It was banned in London, it closed after a single performance in New York City at the Met and took 13 years before it censors finally allowed it to be performed in Vienna. The original Salome refused to do the now-famous “Dance of the Seven Veils” because she was “a decent woman,” and so began the tradition of having a ballet dancer (thereby implying she was not a decent woman but that was okay) who stepped in to dance it instead.

Things have changed. Karita Matilla not only did her own dance, she even, briefly after shedding the seventh veil, appeared nude on stage (though this was not to be included in the HD-Transmission, we were informed). Times change, in a mere 103 years...

The next transmission is a very special one – a new production of an opera still new, premiered only in 2005 in San Francisco and by one of the leading composers writing today. John Adams’ Dr. Atomic, like his earlier operas, explores more modern historical events than opera usually brings to the stage, but focusing on timeless conflicts: behind the story of the first atomic bomb is the personal struggle between science and spirituality.

There’s background information on-line here – on the opera itself, the libretto, even a rehearsal blog! The dress rehearsal was open to 1,000 high school and college students, many of them science majors for whom opera itself might have been a whole new experience – certainly the opera for all of them, even those familiar with opera as a musical medium, would’ve been new.

Meanwhile over at The Rest Is Noise – the book-of-the-same-name just came out in paperback, btw: if you haven’t read it already, what are you waiting for?? – Alex Ross posts a rehearsal clip with Gerald Finley singing Robert Oppenheimer’s pivotal aria quoting John Donne’s “Batter My Heart, Three-person’d God.”

The first Met performance is this weekend, Saturday evening, October 18th – but it’s on the HD Schedule for Saturday November 8th beginning at 1:00 EST, a live transmission of that day’s matinee performance – perhaps at a theater near you! Some of these may also be carrying an encore transmission on November 19th - I see my neighborhood cineplex is offering this one also, so maybe I’ll go see it twice!

Even though most of my readers at Thoughts on a Train are not just from Central Pennsylvania – unlike my previous, now-defunct station-related blog – I’ll mention that I’m going to go see the “movie broadcast” about 3 miles from my house. You can find out how to locate a theater in your area that might be close enough!

If you get a chance to see it live at the Met, it’s scheduled through November 13th, so there’s not much chance to wait and see it after the HD-transmission and you just have to see it live in the house...

Another reason to be excited about this performance of Dr. Atomic: it’s the first opportunity for many of us outside of New York and other symphonic hot-spots to see the young conductor Alan Gilbert who will become the new music director of the New York Philharmonic next season.

Then later in the month, on November 22nd, the next HD-transmission will bring you the Met’s staged production of Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust (I’m sure the proximity of these two stories is purely coincidental) which will also open the radio broadcast season on the 29th of November, guaranteed to brighten up the ol’ family gathering for your Thanksgiving Weekend.

For more information about the radio broadcasts, you can find a station in your area scheduled to broadcast the Saturday matinees. In Central Pennsylvania, that would be either WITF-FM (89.5) or WJAZ-FM (91.7). You can also listen to Met performances on Sirius satellite radio.

Highlights of the broadcast season will include an “archive” broadcast of Dr. Atomic in January, since the performance-run concludes before the broadcast season begins, and a complete cycle of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung beginning in March ‘09. I’m only sorry they didn’t offer The Ring in HD. But since they say this is going to be the last outing for its current production, perhaps they’re going to save the HD version for a new production already in the works?