> -----Original Message-----
> From: [log in to unmask] [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 1998 1:20 PM
> To: Multiple recipients of list SF-LIT
> Subject: the first SF opera
>
> I learned an interesting thing in music class today. The famous
> composer Joseph Haydn composed the first (and probably last) Sf
> opera. There was a man in the royal court who was obsessed with the
> moon, so Haydn wrote an opera about a man whose friends drugged him
> and put him in the garden, which was made to look like the moon.
> When he awoke he was surrounded by people in strange costumes.
> Definetly a first.
>
>
>
I managed to get to see (a truncated version of) this opera (The
World of the Moon) last year; it's great fun. It's not exactly the man's
*friends* who did this, but a con man who was getting money from him by
telling him how wonderful the life on the moon was, and promising to
take him there. His daughter was also involved in the plot for
complicated reasons to do with her inheritance and desire to get
married.
There is an opera (The Adventures of Mr Broucek) by Janacek with
a similar theme; he also wrote The Makropolous Case about a woman who
had taken an immortality drug hundreds of years ago which contains
gothic if not perhaps SF ideas. There are certainly other twentieth
century operas which might be considered science fictional (Philip
Glass's Einstein on the Beach comes to mind), but there don't seem to be
a large number for some reason. It's strange, because there are many
science fiction novels which might make good operas, given the operatic
love of spectacle. I suppose a lot of the fantastic element is difficult
to do on the stage by comparison with the film.
Simon
Simon McLeish
[log in to unmask]
|