: A night at the opera :
As everyone knows, I'm a fan of classical music, and I've been thinking a lot about it of late ("Everyone deserves music" - Oct. 23, 2005). Kyla and I were talking about the opera recently, so I went to the Houston Grand Opera site and found that The Marriage of Figaro is playing, so I bought a ticket for last night's performance.
On my way downtown I stopped at a point along the Sandy Reed Memorial Trail that runs along Buffalo Bayou and snapped this photo of the downtown skyline as the sun was going down.
I arrived early at the Wortham Center to pick up my ticket at the will call booth and walked for a bit down on the hike and bike trails down by Buffalo Bayou behind the opera house. They have fountains and architectural structures built down there to try and make you forget how ugly the bayou looks and smells.
Since I still had about two hours before curtain, I walked three blocks over to the J.P. Morgan Chase tower and rode the elevator up to the 60th floor Sky Lobby, where you can see a breathtaking view of downtown and look west toward the Galleria. I've visited this place several times, but never this late in the day, and got to watch a lovely sunset from a vantage point that most people never get to see. As darkness fell over the city, I watched the lights appear for miles around, lighting up the earth like the stars in the heavens.
I walked back to the Wortham and attended a pre-show lecture on the opera, which was very informative and gave us lots of interesting background on the history of what many people consider to be one of the greatest operas ever written. One thing I didn't know was that it was Josef Haydn who championed Mozart's opera in Prague after it had failed in Vienna, being performed only nine times. Without Haydn's intemperate endorsement, it is quite likely that The Marriage of Figaro would have been lost in the pages of musical history.
For those of you who may not be familiar with this opera, you have undoubtedly heard some of the arias or the famous overture without realizing it. The overture was played at the beginning of the movie Trading Places, and also by Gene Wilder's character in the original version of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, who used it as the musical password to the chocolate room (not Rachmaninoff, as Mike Teevee's mom mistakenly thought). More recently, one of the duets from the opera was the piece played on the phonograph and broadcast over the prison loudspeakers in the movie The Shawshank Redemption.
I was discussing opera with a dear friend recently and we observed that The Marriage of Figaro is one of the few great operas that actually has a happy ending - no one dies, and everyone is happy and in love at the end. That, plus some of the most beautiful music ever written, should be enough for even the most opera-phobic person to give this Mozart masterpiece a try.
On my way downtown I stopped at a point along the Sandy Reed Memorial Trail that runs along Buffalo Bayou and snapped this photo of the downtown skyline as the sun was going down.
I arrived early at the Wortham Center to pick up my ticket at the will call booth and walked for a bit down on the hike and bike trails down by Buffalo Bayou behind the opera house. They have fountains and architectural structures built down there to try and make you forget how ugly the bayou looks and smells.
Since I still had about two hours before curtain, I walked three blocks over to the J.P. Morgan Chase tower and rode the elevator up to the 60th floor Sky Lobby, where you can see a breathtaking view of downtown and look west toward the Galleria. I've visited this place several times, but never this late in the day, and got to watch a lovely sunset from a vantage point that most people never get to see. As darkness fell over the city, I watched the lights appear for miles around, lighting up the earth like the stars in the heavens.
I walked back to the Wortham and attended a pre-show lecture on the opera, which was very informative and gave us lots of interesting background on the history of what many people consider to be one of the greatest operas ever written. One thing I didn't know was that it was Josef Haydn who championed Mozart's opera in Prague after it had failed in Vienna, being performed only nine times. Without Haydn's intemperate endorsement, it is quite likely that The Marriage of Figaro would have been lost in the pages of musical history.
For those of you who may not be familiar with this opera, you have undoubtedly heard some of the arias or the famous overture without realizing it. The overture was played at the beginning of the movie Trading Places, and also by Gene Wilder's character in the original version of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, who used it as the musical password to the chocolate room (not Rachmaninoff, as Mike Teevee's mom mistakenly thought). More recently, one of the duets from the opera was the piece played on the phonograph and broadcast over the prison loudspeakers in the movie The Shawshank Redemption.
I was discussing opera with a dear friend recently and we observed that The Marriage of Figaro is one of the few great operas that actually has a happy ending - no one dies, and everyone is happy and in love at the end. That, plus some of the most beautiful music ever written, should be enough for even the most opera-phobic person to give this Mozart masterpiece a try.
