don giovanni

so opera last night... AMAZING!

through 2002, prague had staged don giovanni in a traditional manner... we saw the new 3 year old staging, which is much less like your typical opera set. all the singers have elaborate costumes but the stage is blank otherwise, other than 3 soap boxes...... at the start of the play they say "vendetta", "love", and "death" on them in italian... and there are 3 elaborately dressed characters, one on each box, personifying each one. as the opera goes on, these three characters are on stage as appropriate, moving between characters that they tie together. (e.g. at a wedding, "amore" ties the couple together with white ribbons... when a character dies, "morte" dances all around him until he collapses,... when characters get upset, "vendetta" provides them with the weapons they need to move the plot along)... also, during the overture, a man dressed up as mozart showed up over the orchestra pit throwing papers at them... apparently during the 1787 premiere of don giovanni, in the very theater we saw it in last night, mozart provided the orchestra with a new overture, with the ink not yet dried, just as they were beginning... throughout the performance, the mozart wandered across the stage on occasion, slightly adjusting characters' costumes etc., and then running off again... at the start of act two, if you looked to the very edge of the stage, he was posing on "morte"'s soapbox, only the label had temporarily changed to "stupidita"... it was all highly amusing and full of music jokes.

as referenced, we saw the opera in the estates theater, which used to go by a different name, but is the theater where mozart himself conducted the premier of "don giovanni" in 1787... so that piece of history was highly interesting... although mozart lived in vienna mostly, the people of prague had a much greater affinity for his music... they loved him, and he loved prague; so he spent a bit of time here too, and his music has greater connection to prague and the czech people more or less take ownership of it now, even though mozart was austrian.

anyhow, an *amazing* evening. and the students who came with and had never been to opera before, were pleasantly surprised at how much they enjoyed it. :) i sat by katya, the slovenian girl here this week, who had seen opera before just like me, so we had a little more in common than "hmmm, so that's opera". :)

now, it looks like rain today which kinda puts a damper on my plan to go to one of the islands in the river and read... we'll see... we have an hour and a half math lecture first, so maybe the rain will go through during the talk?... i *don't* want to be back at the dorm this week... the norwegian delegation for the european youth congress has seriously taken over... they've flooded the place and already broken 1 of the 2 elevators (i live on the 11th floor... i will be *very* frustrated if they break both) that were fine before they arrived... on the whole they're fairly pleasant, there's just so many of them and they're incredibly loud... oi...

i finally fingured out how to qualify what it is i like about budapest even though parts of prague are incredibly beautiful beyond comparison... budapest has a way of absorbing its tourists... so even going to visit incredibly famous things, you're not stuck in this bubble of english speakers taking photos and being loud... you can see cool things, besides residential neighborhoods, and totally get absorbed in hungarian language and culture at the same time... prague doesn't absorb tourists and guests in the same way, so unless you go to the fringes of the city to residential districts, you're in the middle of tourist land a very large percent of the time... this annoys me... i want to get away from english speaking tourists and i can't do that as well here...

oh well...

time for math lecture of the day. :P

later dudes