Florence Report: A Night at the Opera

Even though - technically - Peer Gynt is not an opera

Leknes, Nordland, Norway. Photo by Stein Egil Liland.

Sunday morning the nave was cold. Our small choir was gathered around not one but two gigantic concert grand pianos attired in enormous shower caps. We began to review the music. My friend Liz said she had a dress rehearsal that day in the afternoon at the Maggio Musicale, where she is a professional mezzosoprano. Oh for what? I asked. Peer Gynt, she said. It’s a two-night show.

I will come, I immediately replied. That music lies very close to my heart.

Liz said that Tuesday was sold out, but that Wednesday still had many open seats. It’s in the smaller theater, she reassured me, not the big one, so all the seats are good.

That night I wrangled the opera website to purchase a ticket online. I selected a seat in the far left corner of the uppermost, very back row. I was a bit concerned about the distance from the orchestra but felt armed with professional reassurances. After some back and forth with the website, which would not finalized my purchase until I provided my middle name (Italy will never let you drop a middle name - I have never used my middle name so much in my life as I do in Italy) to match my Italian codice fiscale.

Off to find Jason to discuss family logistics via-à-vis my late night out and his departure the next day to Rome with 170 students. If it’s raining, I’ll take a cab, I said.

The evening was indeed as wet and dark as January can be in Firenze. I had to get money out of the Bank of Eleanor for the taxi since the tassisti here get very grumpy indeed about fares that wish to pay with plastic.

I grabbed a program in the lobby. The theatre was almost full. I took my seat in the loft and settled in. As soon as the first strains sounded, I was transported.

I wore this CD out in the late nineties in what was a very lonely and fraught chapter in Seattle, in a city I didn’t know, without friends, wondering what I was doing. The rain never quit but the light did by mid-afternoon every day that winter. I took Norwegian classes at the Scandinavian Museum and listened to Grieg nonstop. I dreamed of my immigrant ancestors who scratched out a living fishing in Nikkel, Norway. I wondered if I would ever go to Norway. The fairy orchestra stayed with me. Not just Morning Mood (which to this day I associate with the pan over the Smurf Village at the start of the show), but The Death of Aase, Anitra’s Dance, In the Hall of the Mountain King (even Victor and Elanor recognize this one from Just Dance), the dissonance of The Abduction (Ingrid’s lament). Solveig’s Song stayed in my mind like a personal soundtrack for years.

I never understood the history behind the Grieg compositions, how Ibsen wrote Peer Gynt and then Grieg added the music. Hence, not an opera - far too much spoken word. But even not knowing the text I easily imagined the dreamscape of trolls, fairies, dreams and archetypes. If you like Joseph Campbell, then you’ll love Grieg: the evocative music sings for itself. I reviewed the story prior to heading out to the theater on Wednesday, but to be truthful, the richness of my own memories from the period when I fell in love with this music superseded the literary framework unfolding on stage.

I closed my eyes and let the spoken lines of Peer Gynt and his mother Aase float past me. The singing in Norwegian was supra-titled in Italian but I was still able to pick out a lot of the Norwegian by listening.

In the cinema of my mind the lens swept over dripping cedar forests, a house with low and vaulted ceilings, windows onto a perennially wet terrace. I thought of Laughing Monk tea from Trader Joe’s in the green box and the parquet floor of the kitchen where the rectangular shapes the size of a fish stick were loose. The aquarium in the bedroom, gloomy and greenish, and the giant fish that cleaned the bottom of the case with a mouth as big as a bracelet. A pewter brooch in the shape of a heart and two bluebirds given to me by my Norwegian cousin. A red fleece jacket. Fragrant turpentine, wood shavings, oil paint, old rags. How the blackberry brambles twisted through the greenhouse with the utility sink, the house falling back into the forested mountain. The rain, and rain, and rain. The woodstove that I expertly packed and lit each day - longing for heat, comfort, light. The blue glass plates laden with steamed halibut and sauteed spinach. Norwegian: Jeg kann ikke smiler. Venn jeg se po deg…. Ikke sant? The loneliness. Feeling like I might have been kidnapped myself, like Ingrid, set for centuries in the hall of the Mountain King with his insistent music, waiting for an end punctuated by swords of flame.

The concert came to an end. I took my coat and I slipped out before the applause was over to get the taxi I'd reserved. The seasoned tassista talked my ear off all the rainy way home; work, taxes, pandemic, the injustices of Italian economics, tourism, foreign investment. He laughed at my comments. When I let myself back into the apartment Eleanor was the only one asleep. Victor came out and said I was so loud with the key that I woke him. I put him back to bed.

I slipped into bed with the strains of the orchestra still playing in my mind, my heart, my gut. What a treasure to attend a live performance of a piece I’d only ever before heard as a recording and still loved. I’ve not yet been to Norway, but will. It’s on the short list. Now I’m motivated to see what else is on the opera schedule. I’ve always been an outer-ring fan of the opera - maybe time to find a closer orbit, ikke sant?