Eastern European Music: Executive Summary

Okay, so we’re back from Eastern Europe. It was a noisy excursion: 10 musical performances in 15 days, including eight operas in (let’s see) seven different venues, Probably the marquee item was a Tosca at the Vienna Staatsoper with Neil Shicoff as a dynamic Cavaradossi, at a ticket price about five times as great as we paid at Budapest, Prague or Bratislava. I'm not a red-hot Puccini fan (more of a Mozart man myself), and indeed, of Tosca, the long midsection where the title character offs the bad guy, is about enough for my taste, but this was, with qualification, a world-class production, well worth the price.

Five times as expensive as the rest. And five times as good? I wouldn’t go that far. Just a couple of nights before, we saw a Magic Flute in Budapest that was as cheerful and energetic as you could want—and in Hugarian, yet (a personal first). Back in Prague, we saw mostly-Czech casts in Czech theatres do Czech performances of Czech masterpieces – Janáček’s Jenůfa and Dvořák’s Rusalka—about as thorough a dose of the local culture as you’re likely to get. Also in Budapest, we saw Béla Bartók’s ballet, Wooden Prince, in the same city and I think maybe the same theatre as the one in which it was premiered.

Meanwhile in high-priced Vienna, we saw a Verdi Otello which, in spite of a superb Iago (Falk Struckmann), seemed never quite to jell. And over at the Vienna Philharmonic, we enjoyed superb acoustics to absorb what must have been the worst Beethoven Fifth Symphony we’ve ever heard, slack, sprawling and flaccid. “He conducts Beethoven as is if it were Brahms,” snarled Mrs. Buce, and it wasn’t a compliment. Wonderful hall, though. Insider tip: get seats near the back, in the parterre. Sound just caterwauls around you.

Coincidence or not: each of the two Vienna operas--Otello and Tosca--is a three-person show: in Otello, Otello, Iago and Desdemona; in Tosca, Tosca, Cavaradossi and Scarpia. In the Vienna performances, in each of the two all three roles were at least adequately cast, but in each, it was the singing in title role was the weakest. Probably just coincidence.

In Bratislava, we saw a cruelly misbegotten Carmen¸ with a Don Jose who looked to be about 60 years old, and who was fighting the flu (his understudy must have been chewing shoe leather). There was a voice-over announcement at the beginning of the performance which we couldn’t understand, but they seemed to be saying “please excuse the tenor, he is all that we can afford on this lousy budget.”

Side note: am I missing something, or is every Eastern European opera house built next to a steam laundry? Seems there were clouds, or fog, or smoke, or some such, on the stage in about two thirds of all our performances. Can the singers really tolerate this stuff? What about their insurance carriers?

Another side note: I really want to say something about the weird Hapsburg elegance of these Eastern European opera houses but I need to do a bit of research first. Just in case I don’t get around to it—believe me, they are weirdly elegant.