Opera's End Times (Preview)

On Substack, an essay on György Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre and its (semi-)staging at this year’s Musikfest Berlin. The link is here.Also in the essay (among others), an operatic cast of: Boulez, Berio, Ghelderode, Henze, Schönberg, Oliveros, Nono, Monk, Pousseur, Zimmermann.Subscribers of all kinds—but especially paying!—are welcomed. Here’s a quick preview: If love, even in its triumph, is sad rather than happy, what of the laughter that—far more than love—characterises this opera? Does it express joy, relief, release, or in itself a reaction to and of fear? Laughter, this escape valve and this trap, escapes easy definition. A reviewer at a website named ‘Wagner, Heavy Metal’ writes: “People laugh, but are not happy. People tell a joke, but are not funny. Here, irony strips satire of its various layers”. The opera’s absurdity is, Ligeti suggested, “more demonic than humorous”. Such humour celebrates misfortune and death, the satisfaction of individual appetite, the destruction…