Echoes of its greatness could be heard in the wintery Brazilian July, and in the fall, when I was in Scotland, people still commented how greatβor heterodoxβit was.
While waiting for its positive result, she falls asleep and has an uncanny but realistic dream. Her dreams are about entering a new family, her inner desires and fears, and most importantly, about herself and how she fears to be perceived. There are many reasons why: it is cheap, cheesy, and lazy.
The quick escape to unreality is mostly an excuse to not think things through in the process of writing. We are presented with an infinitude of rooms, each one more exuberant than the last, and without ever being able to tell where the action will take us.
What once was a bathroom is transfigured into a Hitchcockian set of stairs or an abandoned swimming pool. The dream approach allows things to be simultaneously heard and unheard, emulating the eerie experience of a surreal dialogue. All these bold choices do not run contrary to the drama, but rather serve to exalt the symbolism in place on the stage.
While the vocal elements of the opera are fugitive once uttered, they are gone , the orchestral mass carries elements of continuity throughout the drama, insisting on an almost physical mode of seeing the drama. Her voice, with a tight vibratoβas is often the case with Mozartian singers nowadaysβ, carried a sense of delicacy and confusion that permeated throughout the night.
