Music Transcends all Barriers
Though my focus was on choreography, I could not pull myself away from the emotion that radiated through the singers’ tone and simply the way they delivered their lines. Regarding choreography, there would be moments in the play where very little movement was needed and then other scenes where all of a sudden a parade of characters would come onto the stage and the audience must reluctantly give up trying to follow each and every character’s actions.The scene that blew my mind is when the widow, the three orphan daughters, a hairdresser, a group of tradespeople, a man of letters, a flautist and a tenor parade into the living room and all go upon their own activities with the tenor drawing in the most attention with his melody or aria. The choreographer of this scene takes a huge risk and had to have planned out what they wanted most out of this scene. Did he/she want to create a busy scene – so busy that one should not be able to follow each character’s activities in detail? Or did he/she want a busy scene and in the midst of it all want the audience to notice that one character—in this case the tenor- and by doing so placing a greater emphasis on the beauty in the tenor’s aria? Such planning is what makes a great choreographer admirable and one of the greatest assets to making a performance a great performance.
What I wanted to address quickly was how the singers could bring out my feelings of sadness, anger, and disappointment even though the entire opera was in German. Sure there were subtitles, but whether I looked at them or not, I could still feel my eyebrows being pulled together and the corners of my mouth turning down as the Marchellin was realizing that Octavian would end up leaving her and that it was best if she let him go. It is amazing how music can transcend all barriers- in particular language and visual since we could not see the actors facial expressions at all. My heartache was probably the high light of my experience at the opera.
