THE WORLD OF THE MOON
Although Chamber Opera Chicago is now seven years old, I’ve just had my first taste of the company, having attended its recent alternating productions of Haydn’s The World of the Moon and Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, both sung in English. If it had not been for the Haydn, a seldom-done 18th-century comedy that has never been performed here before, I probably wouldn’t have gone at all. My sister is a singer, and by the time I was ten I had seen Cio-Cio-San slowly singing her way through suicide as many times as most kids my age had seen The Wizard of Oz. Pleasant childhood memories aside, Madame Butterfly is not an opera that I generally go out of my way to see. But I enjoyed The World of the Moon so much that I decided to check out what the company would do with Puccini’s war-horse.
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My first experience of Haydn’s The World of the Moon was a bizarre old recording of the work that was severely cut, heavily arranged, and sung in German. On the basis of that recording, one could easily assume–as I did–that the work was as trivial and meaningless as opera history books were apt to make it. Haydn himself had a poor opinion of it (when have composers ever been correct about the worth of their work?), as he did of all of his operas, which he felt were inferior to Mozart’s (whose aren’t?).
The music is enchanting, although conductor-pianist Lawrence Rapchak had his hands full playing continuo on the piano (instead of on harpsichord or fortepiano, presumably out of budget), accompanying the recitative sections, playing synthesized effects, and conducting the tiny string quintet that made up the “orchestra.” The biggest problem was a grossly out-of-tune piano and the pitch problems that therefore resulted in the strings. Rapchak’s own accompaniments were always interesting, although many stylistic peculiarities and improvisations were introduced that were inappropriate for a Haydn work. The tempi were on the slow side, presumably to keep the singers from getting into trouble and to make sure they could be clearly understood. Even so, Rapchak kept the music from dragging.
