Oh hey, there's an opera about Wolfram von Eschenbach.

Last weekend I went to see the Met's Tannhauser.  It was sort of a mixed bag, and my recommendation is to skip the first act and get there in time for the second.

The production is from 1978, and is. Well.  From 1978.  The opening in the cthonic Venusberg involves a repetitively-choreographed ballet orgy that outstays its welcome by a good fifteen minutes and then gives way to Michelle DeYoung's Venus, looking and sounding to a regrettable extent like a tired truck stop waitress, arguing with the immovable and inexpressive rock that is Johan Botha.

(I should note that Act I was the only place where the Met orchestra and Levine's conducting seemed off-point.  Tannhauser's music seemed rushed and jumbled; the result sounded less like emotional turmoil than like James Levine had a train to catch.)

For the entire first act, I honestly wondered what I had gotten myself into and how I was going to live through four and a half hours of it.  Botha is one of the last great practitioners of the park-and-bark school of opera performance; he has, as far as I could tell, never met a costar he wanted to look in the face at any point in time, and on more than one occasion he literally sat down on the stage and did not move again for ten or fifteen minutes.

"But it's totes because he's morbidly obese and -"  No.  Don't give me that.  Stephanie Blythe can't be much smaller than Botha and you have only to watch her performance in the Lepage Die Walküre to see the physical and emotional command a talented performer can exert over a limited space.  Botha just can't act for shit, and also seems to be a distinctly ungenerous stage partner, staring woodenly at the floor and giving his hapless co-singers nothing at all to react to.  Poor Eva-Maria Westbroek's powerhouse Elizabeth bounced right off Botha like the idle wind he respects not; even Peter Mattei's glorious Wolfram only elicited a brief stir of interest.

But that's okay, right?  I mean, it's opera, it's all about the voice, right?  Well, no, but even if I agreed with that it wouldn't matter, because I don't like Botha's voice either.

I mean, look.  Most of the praise for his performance - in fact, as far as I can tell, nearly all the praise for his performance - has centered around his amazing vocal stamina and precision.  Tannhauser has some punishingly long and difficult passages, and I will concede one hundred percent that Botha outlasted them hands-down.  He never seemed in danger of running short of wind or voice.  I noted this during the performance and was duly impressed by it.

But... well, in opera as in sex, while stamina is a plus, one hopes that one's partner has more to bring to the table than the ability to hammer away like the Energizer Bunny for hours on end.  Botha's voice sounds thin and colorless to me, sort of like a sheet of plywood.  I can't hear any charm, individuality, beauty of tone, or elegance of phrasing in it, and it's not terribly expressive either.  Believe me, I focused a lot on that voice, being as I was trapped in a barn for four and a half hours with it.  I did not find that it repaid inspection.

So I guess it's lucky that Eva-Maria Westbroek and Peter Mattei were there to save the evening with their flawlessness.  Westbroek apparently had some stability issues during the first couple of performances, and indeed the opening notes of Dich, teure Halle sounded a little uncertain, but she found her footing quickly and for the rest of the opera went from strength to strength. (I got the impression that she was headed up to Heaven, not to sit piously at the feet of the Lord and plead Tannhauser's case with chaste womanly tears, but to Clear Some Shit Up.)  Her Elizabeth is not just an Injured Woman but a powerful voice of moral authority - an unusually strong and sympathetic rival for the hollow, tired mess going on in Venusberg, where you totally believe that that orgy has been going on since 1978 and seriously, just go the fuck home already because your mascara has run all over your face and it's just sad now.

Mattei shares space only with Simon Keenlyside in my desert island baritones collection.  (Mariusz Kwiecien is maybe stowing away in the trunk.)  I have loved him since his transcendent Amfortas in the 2013 Met Parsifal, and the role of Wolfram suits his voice as if they were made for each other - it sits precisely in the range where he seems to be most at ease, full of the elisions and soft turns that Mattei's voice loves.  Against a powerhouse Tannhauser, Wolfram can occasionally fade into the background to an unfortunate extent.  With an interpreter like Mattei, set on stage against an animatronic Tannhauser who only whirrs into motion when it's his turn to sing a verse of "Yo Ho, Yo Ho, a Pirate's Life for Me," Wolfram's lovely music and sheer human decency are the heart of the opera.

Oh, and I cannot do a review without mentioning Yin Fang as the Shepherd, because I love her and she should be in all Met productions going forward.  Her Barbarina was the most delightful discovery of the season for me and she was just as wonderful here, with her gorgeous, warm voice that hits notes with the brightness and precision of a glockenspiel.  She's sung so many things at Julliard that I'm kicking myself for missing; I'll have to keep closer tabs on her schedule.

So I strongly recommend seeing the production, with one caveat: have dinner or drinks or something, skip the first act, and get there at the first intermission for The Epic Tale of Wolfram, Elizabeth, and That Other Guy Who Sings Stuff Sometimes But Mostly We Just Wait For Wolfram and Elizabeth to Start Singing Again.

And then go home and read the Gawan cycle of Wolfram's Parzival, because it is half Monty Python and half Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and you will be dying from the hilarity.

I see what you did there, Chatelet Don Carlos.

I almost missed it, too.  It was one of those things where you're cruising along listening to Roberto Alagna serenade you personally his Elisabeth, and suddenly there is a needle-scratch noise and you have to reach for the remote and rewind.

As Carlos sings "Dans ses Flandres si chères, d'abord je veux lui faire élever un tombeau comme jamais un rois n'en obtint de plus beau" (In his beloved Flanders, I will build him a tomb fairer than any king's), the Flemish Deputies pass by in the background, carrying Rodrigue's body on their shoulders.  Apparently Carlos is Not Fucking Around about this and means to cart Rodrigue's remains across Europe with him into exile.

"Now where have I seen that before?"  I wondered.

Oh, yeah.  That's where.  

Whether this was a deliberate visual reference to Carlos' great-grandmother Joanna the Mad's grim trek across Spain with her husband's decomposing body in tow, I have no idea, but by God I'm going to pretend it is until I hear otherwise from the director himself.

Kettlebells, and why I can't feed myself.

My sternum is still giving me grief.  I've been out of the gym for a couple of weeks now, resting it and just doing some kettlebell work and pull-up practice.  Tomorrow I go back to squatting, so wish me luck not getting stabbed in the chest with serious pain as soon as I hit my work sets.  In the meantime, I've been working on one-handed swings with my 53-pounder, Ma'at, Mother of Kettlebells.

Oof, that is heavy.  I'm doing the 2T-2R-2T-2L-2T sets of 10 and so far I can barely swing the bell up to hip level with one hand, let alone chest level.

I've also been trying, in a sort of half-assed way, to cut some fat.  But because I will not ever have time in my life to weigh and measure and count calories - I'm pretty sure if I were stranded on a desert island I would find more pressing things to do - I figured I'd just eat intuitively, cut back on the food a little, cut out the junk food, and watch my carbs.

Well, for the last couple of weeks I've felt like crap.  No energy, anxious, depressed, and so forth.  So I figured, well, even I can log my food for a week or so to see if I'm hitting my macro targets.

I was not.  Not only was I not hitting my macro targets, but my average daily calorie intake over the week I logged was somewhere around 850 per day.  Apparently "intuitive eating", for me, results in yogurt for breakfast and lunch and then something small and light for dinner, because eating is a pain and as a general rule I want no part of it.  I need someone to just tell me what to eat so I don't lose all my muscle.

February is a busy month.  Last weekend was Carmen at the Met.  Next weekend is Iolanta and Bluebeard's Castle.  The weekend after that is the telecast of Andrea Chernier at the Ritz Five, followed in close succession by What We Do in Shadows (vampire mockumentary!) and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (first-ever Iranian vampire movie!).

Jonas Kaufmann is invited to my funeral.

And so is Rene Pape.  The two of them can just stand there singing Requiem aeternum and Kyrie eleison.  Of course, my family being what we are, they will be in grave danger of having mourners attempt to climb them like trees and siring a dozen new clones for the Clone Army by the end of the service, but circle of life and all that.

This week I set a few PRs and failed at one.  I really wanted that 225 deadlift, but as I was trying to break it off the ground something went POP in my sternum, so I decided that waiting was the better part of valor.  It hurt for a solid few minutes and is still uncomfortable, but there's not enough pain to make me want to go to the ER.  There was enough pain to make me cut my workout short, which sucks, but not as much as rehabbing sucks.  I'm hoping I'll feel better tomorrow.

Earlier this week, though, I set PRs on rack pulls (335), squats (145), walkouts (185), and good mornings (65 for sets of 10).  That was good, though I think I need to supplement the rack pulls for halting deadlifts since my lockouts haven't been giving me issues lately.  Or I could just, you know, do more deadlift volume.  The workouts with the PRs made me sore in a very strange way, like I'd charbroiled my entire nervous system root and branch.  Well, I'll get used to it.

In other news, my birthday is tomorrow and I bought myself a bunch of Jonas Kaufmann stuff from the Met.  Verdi's Requiem, which I'm listening to now, is amazing, and I say that as someone who thinks that Verdi (as someone once said of Wagner) has sublime moments and very tedious half-hours.  This is the La Scala version, directed by Barenboim and featuring Kaufmann, Queen Anja Harteros, Elina Garanca Who Is Just Plain Better Than You, and the magnificent Rene Pape.  Listen to Jonas and Rene belting out Requiem Aeternum with that ominous kettledrum booming out behind them and tell me they aren't invited to your funeral too.

I always think the test of any mass is its Kyrie; if you can make hay out of four words, you will probably do pretty well with the rest of the text.  Verdi's Kyrie is sublime; the Times reports that Kaufmann's first entry is "like an exploding volcano," and they're completely right.  That's what happens when you put Jonas Kaufmann in front of a choir.  His voice is the auditory equivalent of having the mills of God land on your head from a great height, grinding exceeding small but with the speed of a crazed buzz-saw - you're left stunned and unsure quite what happened except that you are pretty sure you just witnessed the Divine.

Queen Anja Harteros is flawless as usual, floating the most extensive phrases with such grace that you honestly wonder if she ever needs to breathe.  Elina Garanca hits low notes I wasn't even aware she was capable of; I'm not necessarily convinced of her emotional investment in the text, which is a handicap in this most operatic of Masses, but who cares when the sound is so gorgeous?  Rene Pape, who was the one redeeming feature of the execrable Met Faust my daughter and I saw a couple of seasons ago, here occasionally manages the superhuman feat of stealing the show from Jonas Kaufmann with his rich, glorious bass.  This is just really a collection of astonishing artists at the peak of their talents, tossing melodic themes back and forth like a team of Olympic athletes passing the ball in the end zone, and I bet there is no one whose life won't be materially better for having heard it.

Anyway, my sternum still hurts a little.  Hopefully it will be okay by tomorrow morning, but I think I'm going to wait until my next deload week to try 225 again anyway.

In which worlds collide, a little.

In the last couple of weeks, I have:

- Set a new PR on the deadlift, at 205 pounds;
- Set a new PR on the rack pull, at 275 pounds, though my grip did not love that weight;
- Pulled a muscle in my back trying to pull 200 pounds for reps after coughing and hacking with allergies all day; and
- Bought two new opera DVDs, with mixed results.

First up on the opera front was the 2013 Aix-en-Provence production of Elektra.  I spent about 50% of the time admiring the production, which was awesome, and 50% of the time coveting Evelyn Herlitzius' upper-arm definition, which was at least as awesome if not more so.  Seriously, the woman is ripped.  And also one of the best Elektras I've ever seen.  It does not seem fair that one woman should have both those advantages.

The production itself was minimalism at its best; a lot of people have criticized the set as "boring", but honestly, it's Elektra - how much distraction from the plot do you really need?  Minimalism works best for this opera, in my opinion, assuming you have excellent singers; and this one does.  Herlitzius is as good an actress as she is a singer, which is saying a great deal about the excellence of both; Waltraud Meier is her usual glorious self;  Adrianne Pieczonka as Chrysothemis is in fine voice and brings an affecting degree of humanism to an often thankless role, and Mikhail Petrenko as Orest is so compelling that it's easy to love him as much as Elektra loves the idea of him, as soon as he walks on the stage.  Buy this one if you haven't already; it's more than worth it.

Next up was the 2013 ROH production of Eugene Onegin, with Simon Keenlyside and Krassimira Stoyanova, in which dancers portrayed the young Onegin and Tatyana while the principals sang the vocal lines.  I think I would have been more fond of this production if the dancers had taken on the roles the whole time while Keenlyside and Stoyanova sang from the sidelines; instead, for a good chunk of the opera, we have to watch while the leading roles are sung by performers who are far, far, far and away too old for the parts - to the point of actual grotesquerie in the case of Stoynova, who is in her 50s and looks a decade older here thanks to a supremely unflattering costume and wig. I don't think I've ever seen a production more brutally unkind to its principal soprano, either intentionally or otherwise. Stoynova is a lovely woman with a beautiful voice, but in this production she bears an unfortunate resemblance to one of the leads in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

I have to admit, though, that the way the duality was performed was not entirely jarring.  Being two different stories, there are two different hearts to the opera.  The first is the Letter Scene, which is brilliant in its portrayal of the discrepancy between Tatyana's fantasies of Perfect Love and, well, any form of objective reality; the difference between the dancer's hope and (very young) optimism and the older Tatyana's regret are so resonant with anyone who's ever wished they could go back and reassure their younger selves, or advise them, or give them a good swift kick in the ass, or all of the above.

Then there's the Duel Scene, which, well done, breaks my heart every time.  The way the scene is done in this opera is devastating- Lensky and the young Onegin performing the duel, while the older Onegin drifts back and forth between them like an unquiet ghost, trying to comfort Lensky, trying to step between Lensky and his younger self, trying to change the past and knowing that he can't.  

Still and all, in my opinion the central relationships in Onegin are not Tatyana and Onegin but Tatyana and Reality on one hand, and Onegin and Lensky on the other; and I really have no complaints to make on either front.  Pavol Breslik is, as always, a treat for both the eyes and the ears; one of these days I will get hold of the Bayerische Staatsoper's Brokeback Onegin production with him and Keenlyside, and then I will never leave my apartment again.

Then there's this sort of strange polonaise where Onegin dances with all these girls, who promptly die after dancing with him - sometimes on top of the corpse of Lensky, who remains on the stage throughout the production, an inescapable reminder.  This is an odd and unnerving scene, but honestly, during my first viewing I mostly thought "You know, if I'd known that dancers were allowed to rub all over Simon Keenlyside, I'd have been a lot less bitter about the ten years of ballet lessons my mother made me take."

In short, though I would follow Simon Keenlyside and Pavol Breslik to the ends of the Earth, I thought the dancers who were supposed to represent Tatyana's and Onegin's younger selves were either underused or underfilmed, to the detriment of the production at least on a first viewing, though maybe not on subsequent ones.  I'm not sure I'd be interested in the production with lesser singers than Breslik and Keenlyside.  In the meantime, I was reduced to doing bicep curls and some light yoga, because my back hates me like Elektra hates Clytemnestra.

I am not very good at blogging.

So in the *coughmumble* months since I last updated, I have:

- Squatted 135 for a single; new squat goal is 145, which is around my current bodyweight

- Deadlifted 200 for a single; new goal is 225

- Moved up to my 35-pound kettlebell on S&S

- Worked on pull-ups and am now almost able to do a dead-hang chin-up, though working on them kills my arms in the "Danger, Will Robinson" way that seems to imply strained tendons

- Decided that it's high time I did a cut, since I have now been bulking for six months straight and am looking pretty, well, bulky.  And not in the good way.  I'm about 35% body fat, from pictures, and I'd like to cut that down to 25%.  I know I have muscles under there somewhere and I'd like to see them.

Anyway, that's two goals met.  Additional goals include being able to do dragonfly pose.  I'm not actually sure I'm built to do it, but we'll see.

Exercises I am going to have to break up with, part 1.

The lat pull-down.  There's nothing wrong with it per se, and I sort of hate to get rid of it, but it really aggravates my bad shoulder.  For purposes of building up my back, there are other exercises that do just as well that don't cause me as much pain (e.g., rows).

The barbell glute bridge.  Okay, first, I am not tall enough to put my shoulders up on a bench the way you're supposed to.  I'd have to sit on a booster seat.  Second, ow.  I can't imagine that even using the pussy pad would stop the bar from bruising my hipbones worse than anything I have ever done in the gym so far.  I need to strengthen my glutes to help ameliorate my epic hyperlordosis, but I'm thinking heavy kettlebell swings will be more useful and less damaging.

The OHP.  No, I just wish I could break up with the OHP.  It hurts my shoulder when I'm not careful with it, and also I suck at it and I hate doing things I suck at.  But it seems to be a pretty critical exercise, so I will channel the spirit of Pudgy Stockton, make sure to shrug at the top to minimize impingement, and keep putting heavy shit over my head.

My bench press is up to 75 for singles.  Heavy singles on the deadlift are at 185, and 115 on squats.  That puts me 25 pounds away from my goal for the bench press, 15 pounds for the deadlift, and 20 pounds for squats.  It's so annoying to be so close and still have to work your way up a few pounds at a time, but I tried 205 on the deadlift (stapled to the ground) and 135 on the squat (went down fine, but coming back up was not happening) and it's clear that the slow working-up is going to be how I get there.

Well, I've got time.  Probably.  And if I don't, I imagine the state of my deadlift will be the least of my concerns.

General health: okay but not great.  I've been completely exhausted lately - like, brain-fogging, swimming-through-sludge exhausted.  I think part of it is because my RA has been more active than I'd like.  To tell the truth, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to wean off methotrexate like I'd hoped.  I'm down to two pills and I'm really starting to feel it.  The last few days have been better, but I had a couple of days last week where I was hugely stiff and sore getting out of bed.  Oddly, but fortunately, my lifts don't seem to be suffering for it; but it's a little depressing anyway.