sex and death

Noting the two featured operas - Don Giovanni and Romeo et Juliette - as well as much of the other fare at Spoleto - Tristan and Isolde, Mahler's 5th, Don Juan - my roommate and I decided that the festival's theme must be sex and death.

Every stage here in Charleston seems full of sex and death: erotic funerals, morbid orgies, you get the point. Of course, the difficulty is finding an opera or piece of serious music that isn't about sex or death. The only operas we thought of were Hansel and Gretel and Nixon in China. Though the witch dies in H & G, and neither of us has seen Nixon. We just assume there isn't any sex, since that would be gross.

No sex and death celebration would be complete without a little Wagner. We'll play the Prelude and Liebestod (that's love death, but it comes to the same thing) from Tristan und Isolde next Wednesday and Thursday. The program also includes the Scene d'Amour from Berlioz' Romeo et Juliette and Beethoven's Fifth (fate=death, and maybe sex). There's also a theatrical production in town, "Tristan & Yseult," which apparently turns the story into a comedy - here's a review by Joshua Rosenblum of the Charleston Post and Courier.