Professor Quinby (and fellow Imagining the End of the World colleagues),
The name of the opera I was talking about before class is Le Grand Macabre by Gyorgi Ligeti. Truthfully, I don’t know much about it. So, in the composer’s own words: “It’s an imagining of the end of the world, but very colorful, very bizarre, populated with medieval imps… It’s a Rabelaisian world, a world full of obscenities, sexual and scatological. People are constantly eating and drinking and leading a very chaotic life. It all happens in a sort of broken-down dictatorship where two opposing parties, both completely corrupt, pursue in reality the same crooked policies… It’s tragic and light-hearted at the same time…It’s not my intention to be provocative, though naturally I enjoy shocking people a bit.””
Here is an advertisement/excerpt on youtube from a London production of it a few years back: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TP3DvIjcpi0
and from the more recent New York Philharmonic production: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pTmr1OqiDY&feature=related
As a non-fan of Opera, I love the idea of an absurdist Carnivalesque Opera and the NYC production looks completely fabulous. And all the more so because it is also an absurdist Apocalypse! Thanks so much for posting this, Ilirjan.