A new production of Bellini’s IĀ Capuleti e i Montecchi‘ in Tel Aviv features two women as the teenaged lovers.
Dan Ettinger conducts Hanan Snir’s challenging production.
If they’d let me fly into Israel this week, this is the first thing I’d want to see.
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Groundbreaking avantgarde..
Jumped the shark…
The original Shakespearean text is salacious enough: 13 year old girl weds 18 year old man, without parental consent.
You already got statutory rape and illegal marriage (not to mention a creepy friar and a randy nanny), who needs lesbians?
Probably for the same reasons that lesbian porn outsells everything else in that genre.
Though, interestingly, the libretto to Bellini’s opera is not based on Shakespeare.
Bellini opera’s not after W.Shakespear play.
Excuse me, what’s so special about that? Bellini’s original score specifically calls for a soprano and a mezzo. It’s done that way just about everywhere. Are the Feldmarschallin and Oktavian lesbians? Is Cherubino a lesbiano? C’mon Norman! Anything to get a headline?
Correct!!
This reminds me (warning: garrulous old man going into story mode)
The first time I ever saw “Der Rosenkavalier” I knew nothing whatsoever about the opera, just that it was by Strauss and it was famous.
The curtain comes up on these two women lying in bed, and one of them says to the other “You were wonderful last night!” And I thought “wow, I was not expecting… lesbians.”
So you are saying Romeo is a trouser role?
Probably the most iconic young lovers in history. And someone has to go and switch “orientations” on us.
Is this usually done with a lesbian theme? I never think if that in Rosenkav, nor would I in this if it were played straight. Is it ACTUALLY being done with the lovers as lesbians?
Is NL such a fan of Bellini, or of the named artists, that he would fly to Israel if he could? Or is it the staging?
Easy to say he would if he could when he knows he can’t.
But the point is that, in this production, they are both playing women (whereas the mezzo singing Romeo usually plays him as a man).
Why? Dumb concept. š
What’s dumb about it…? Some lgbtq representation won’t kill anyone. Go cry about it to your homophobic parents
A gimmick for horny men and curious women…
It was written for two women, mezzo Romeo and soprano Giulietta. If memory serves me well, I remember Baltsa and Gruberova in the 80’s at ROH singing this beautifully.
Yes, but one was playing Romeo as a trouser male roll, as per a lot of Handel operas, but not as a lesbian or as a woman with other sorts of overtones which were never intended. It’s about what you do with the production.
Oh dear, they are not lesbians unless they are renamed Romea e Giulietta.
The opera is called I Capuleti e i Montecchi, and Romeo is usually sung by a mezzo, in a so called Hosenrolle.
Again, much ado about nothing (and I mean the “clickbait”-headline of course)
I used to run a small opera company. We did “I Capuleti” with a female Romeo, as it is supposed to be. I got several complaints from audience members who accused us of promoting lesbianism.
The israeli opera stages Bellini’s Romeo and Juliet, not I Capuleti e i Montecchi …
Well sorry Count, but in the business it’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi, the way Bellini and Felice Romani entitled it.
Tell that to the NIO PR department
Same difference! Just semantics. We all know it’s Romeo and Juliet.
Why not? It sounds like two women in love; might be interesting for it to look like it too.
As long as they don’t set it in a 1950’s meat-packing plant or something…
I hear that there are plans in Bayreuth to have a Ring next year with three live crocodiles as the three norns.
I’d be all for it, as long as the crocs are allowed to eat the leading tenors.
I think crocs at Bayreuth have already had their day, don’t you?
Well, since the roles in I CAPULETI E I MONTECCHI are both sung by females to begin with, I kind of always think of it as a semi-lesbian relationship. My power to suspend disbelief is not quite up to the task of thinking otherwise. Ditto Octavian and Sophie and Orfeo and Euridice (without the comma after Sophie, they sound like Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice). I guess I’m just a slave to my age demographic.
You could have a counter tenor if you’re so offended but they were not in vogue in this kind of music in those days! Nothing to do with lesbians, just the tradition of trouser roles. Same for Fledermaus.
I just thought. There’s poor mezzo-soprano Cherubino, who is in love with every girl he sees, but unloved back. Isn’t it time that some idiot producer thought to make Count Almaviva bi-sexual, so that when he’s not chasing Susanna around the castle, he can take a crack at the young man? And maybe Countess Rosina can run off with Susanna, and Figaro will be left with with Basilio. Oh, the possibilities are endless.
Not good enough. They must be both be multiracial trans.
Ha, ha, mustn’t forget the equality act and social integration!
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-romeo-is-a-woman-in-the-israeli-opera-s-lesbian-version-of-romeo-and-juliet-1.10104551?fbclid=IwAR2eExMG_8DCWtz6mzM1bkiaggUYuoKUnPRm682Q_dnjCsGmP9GDOehkSBE
Frankly, without having read the programme notes, one would never guess that this was supposed to be a story about a couple of lesbians.- – certainly not during the first act, where Romeo was dressed as a man. If you knew that Bellini wrote the role of Romeo for a female soprano, you wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow, since you couldn’t tell from the English surtitles that Romeo “identified” as female, as he was referred to in the third person masculine, and English itself is a non-gendered language. As for the Hebrew, s/he spoke mostly in neutral terms eg. instead of “I know”, you would read “It is known to me”. It was not until the second act that Romeo/Romea appeared in female dress so that, without having read the programme notes, one would merely come away with a feeling of complete confusion!
As for the little girls running away from the nuns in the beginning, during the overture – I had NO idea what that was supposed to be about until reading this review.
So, if the director intended to make some kind of statement here, he failed. A “statement” of this sort is meaningless if it needs a detailed explanation beforehand to make the intention clear.