Don Pasquale

Modern technology is a delight --- yesterday I watched the Zurich Opera's live performance of Don Pasquale. No passport, flight, train, or international travel required: I got to watch from here, where it was broadcast live in a fancy theater. (The crowd was even more homogeneous than usual: mostly gray- and white-haired. Whereas in the nosebleed seats where I dwell at the opera house, I have some coeval audience peers.)

The opera was a delight, too. Zero deaths! It featured many of the little flourishes that make opera buffo such a pleasure: eavesdropping servants in the corners of the stage, silly staging (trigger warning: teddy bear dismemberment and beheading), hiding in shrubberies to sneak to a midnight tryst. Pulling faces behind the patsy's back. The traditional cross-dressing was replaced by one woman pretending to be another woman, each with dramatically different personalities, wardrobe choices, and vocal flourishes. It ended with a wedding, of course, and a big chorus number. The incredible Aspetta, aspetta, cara sposina got cheered back onstage for a reprise before the opera proceeded to the next scene.

The set was a single, large rectangular building which rotated (silently! to not interfere with the ongoing music, even at pianissimo): recto, the titular character's house interior; verso, exterior. Various partial rotations were used for different exterior scenes, with cunning delivery of verdure and lawn furniture, as necessary. The rotating set was briefly used to break the fourth wall during the final scene, but otherwise not as fully, hypnotically used as the incredible set of this production of The Barber of Seville.

If I were in a student setting where an essay, of some literary and scholarly merit, were required of me (a hypothetical to which my brain is predisposed), my thesis would certainly concern the rotating set and the fourth wall. Characters occasionally made asides to the audience (whether in the libretto or at the director's choice), and the fact that the patsy Don Pasquale's house, as well as his interior monologue, intentions, and general mental and physical state, are entirely open to observation, criticism, and judgement --- not only from Ernesto and Norina, but also from the doctor, the servants, and of course the audience itself --- certainly lends itself to the kind of overreading and overwrought analysis in which I delight and (uselessly) excel. Further supporting this approach: the entire opera is staged to open with two characters literally unfurling the wings (walls) of the residence, unrolling them to reveal Don Pasquale's home (and personal state). Plus of course the staging, where certain colors, statues, teddy bears, clothing, and furniture are used as shorthand for his general mental state.

Basically, it's the same hypothesis and academic paper I always write: how form and structure, predict, shape, inform, etc. (your favorite and most pretentious verbs here!) meaning by controlling how, and in what ways, the audience interacts and engages with content.

Meta-essay. My brain always defaults to one level up the hierarchy; I am always in meta-mode. (Simply making this observation has bumped me even one step higher, to meta-meta-mode, which exceeds my late Friday afternoon brain sugar capacity for processing; plus the preceding phrase bounces me one level up the hierarchy, and this observation bounces me again, and again, and again..)


This post's theme word is iatrogenesis (n) or iatrogenic (adj), "an adverse effect resulting from medical advice." Don Pasquale's iatrogenic marital problems are neatly resolved by the end of Act III.

Phantom sock

A bland, mildly amusing, G-rated personal anecdote follows, ideally suited to a vanity blog like this one.

Several weeks ago, I lost a sock somewhere in my tiny apartment. Impossibly. I searched everywhere and couldn't find it. "Everywhere" includes moving all the furniture around to look underneath and behind; sorting through all clean and dirty laundry, unpacking and repacking all shelves. Checking jacket pockets. Rolling up the carpet to look underneath.

No sock was to be found.

No one entered or left the apartment during the period the sock was lost. My initial hypothesis was that the sock-stealing elves, frustrated by my laundromat vigilance, had made a risky foray up to my apartment for their denied booty (James Bond-style, scaling the building with suction cups).

Then tonight I found the second sock while shifting my wet laundry into the dryer. My modified hypothesis is that the sock got staticked and rolled up inside some other laundry. I was happy to be reunited with my prodigal sock, and I consigned it to the dryer secure in the knowledge that this sock would soon be cosy, dry, and reunited with its partner.

This sock is a renegade.

I have now folded, and re-folded, all of the laundry. The Prodigal Sock has not returned. It's not stuck to something. It's not still in the laundromat. It baulked at the prospect of reunion, and has made itself even scarcer than before.

Oh where, oh where could my sock have gone? Oh where, oh where could it be?

Further updates as the situation unfolds. (Hopefully the laundry won't. I've folded it twice now.)


This post's theme word is tmesis, "stuffing a word into the middle of another word." I un-fucking-believably lost the wily sock again.