Der Platz ist verflucht!

One of the many phrases learned in my new program, Learning German Through Opera. Hopefully I'll run into a lot of conversations involving love and/or death. So, as Berg's Wozzeck throws his wife into the river, I'm just taking a break from reading Irish plays (also about love and/or death) to read the online libretto. I've never really listened to opera before, and I have to say that it gets stuck in your head a bit. There's more dialogue than I originally thought, and even the recitative (speak-singing) is almost just intoned talking. It's really kind of a disappointment; I was expecting uninterrupted atonal arias.

One of my favorite arias, Maria's (Wozzeck's wife, pre-drowning) first, where she sings "eia popeia," crops up again just after Wozzeck kills her on some scrambled ragtime-esque saloon piano riff. Genius. The Viennese are like the stoic grandpa: when he makes a joke, it's such a shock you're not sure whether to laugh.

Went to another new-music concert last night, this time a choral one. The choir moved around the audience, rearranging itself for each piece. It was in the chapel, so the pews were facing each other ("These Protestants must have straight backs") and the choir split itself up between the two sides, with half the choir on the furthest-back pew of each side. Kind of a cool effect, but it takes a special type of writing, which didn't always work out. You would need to sacrifice the traditional choral idea of blending and purity of sound for a distinctly individual performance; for the people in the back pews, there was always one person blasting into your ear. Some of them worked, some didn't. One that did was a German translation of the e.e. cummings poem

silence

.is
a
looking

bird:the

turn
ing;edge,of
life

(inquiry before snow

If you were wondering, the title means "This place is haunted!" said by Wozzeck at the start of Act I, Scene ii.