Change in the air and another Strauss opera

More Strauss opera: this time Die Frau Ohne Schatten: The Woman without a Shadow. The kind of score that critics call sumptuous. An absolutely baffling plot - I would say Wagnerian with its strange characters from myth/folklore and symbolism but someone would contradict me (everything Wagnerian is highly circumscribed.)

The music is mesmerizing: an amazing soprano in the DVD I watch (from the Mariinsky). The voice somehow makes it clear that the theme is apparently - quite simply - about love blessed by the birth of children and the tragedy of love lost. 

So the golden falcons, souls turning to stone, Emperors in dark forests, sorcery and demon lovers are just a vehicle for something very straightforward. The end of Act 1, has a duet vocalising this - misunderstanding and longing.

Back on the beach, the sand (swept away by winter storms) has returned.

January 2014

March 2014

It's time to go back to London.
The camellias, I hope, will travel.

Elektra and a bloody pasty

Find the Sunday School book in Cornwall on a windy sunny afternoon. En route back from a shopping trip in Penzance, stop at a beach cafe in Marazion and buy a pasty to eat by the sea. The chapel on St Michael's Mount was of course a pilgrimage site (some people thought the Holy Grail was kept there). But I wasn't thinking of pilgrimage.

My thoughts in fact turned to Elektra - the play - that I'd been reading in the garden before I left. Since I saw the Covent Garden production of Richard Strausss' opera a few weeks ago I've not  been able to get crazed Elektra out of my mind. Other opera seems light-weight compared to this .

And then the pasty disintegrated in my hands: it must have been frozen but not fully thawed before being baked. The pastry was cooked on the ends but not the meat in the middle. Everything fell to the sand. Blood in my hands. A visual metaphor for the themes of the play....
Couldn't even bring myself to take it back to the cafe.

Later, en route to the Star Inn, Porkellis, listened to this on the car radio. Mary Coughlan.