{"id":23661,"date":"2023-02-21T09:00:12","date_gmt":"2023-02-21T17:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=23661"},"modified":"2023-02-21T12:17:00","modified_gmt":"2023-02-21T20:17:00","slug":"opera-the-birds-gets-sweet-with-satire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2023\/02\/21\/opera-the-birds-gets-sweet-with-satire\/","title":{"rendered":"Opera The Birds<\/em> gets sweet with satire"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pacific Opera Victoria founding artistic director Timothy Vernon is giving audiences a look into the work of Greek comedic poet Aristophanes with the opera The Birds<\/i>. Aristophanes was a satirist, using his work to comment on the society of his day.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat he was writing wasn\u2019t necessarily through-line plots as [it was] satires, making fun of what he thought was foolish in the Athens of his day, fifth-century BC Athens,\u201d says Vernon. \u201cAristophanes is the only great comic poet we have from the Greeks, but his satires are still funny, even though a lot of the jokes are about contemporary Athens.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vernon says that this particular opera has a sweetness and an innocence to it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a love story in it, but it\u2019s not about people dying… a lot of people think opera\u2019s all about people dying, this is not that,\u201d he says. \u201cThis stays rooted in comedy but there is a love story in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Pacific Opera Victoria’s Timothy Vernon is bringing the work of Greek comedic poet Aristophanes to town with The Birds<\/em> (photo provided).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Birds<\/i> is a very unusual opera, says Vernon, because it was lost in history for a while.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an opera that kind of disappeared,\u201d he says. \u201cIt premiered in 1920 in Munich. It was a huge success, it had 50 performances in its very first run. It\u2019s in the tradition of German romantic opera, which is to say it\u2019s not so much a realistic story as a kind of fantasy. All the composers since Mozart, who wrote The Magic Flute<\/i>, have loved to show things beyond the human, in a good way, the happy end of fantasy. Some of them have written darker things too, but it lives in that in-between space, somewhere like A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vernon was drawn to The Birds<\/i> mainly for its style, even if it\u2019s not the most well-known opera.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have a lot of German in my family history and when I went to study music, I studied in Vienna, which for a long time was the capital of music in Europe,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s the tradition that I absorbed in my very young years, when I was 18 and I lived there for 11 years. Although this individual work isn\u2019t that well known, it\u2019s in a style and in a way I recognize… and I came to love it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vernon says that he would love the audience to have a very emotional and wonderful experience coming to see the show.<\/p>\n

\u201c[It\u2019s] a fantasy that is full of innocence but a thoughtful idea about human nature and society in general, but at the same time it has a charm, it has a sweetness to it, an innocence to it that we don\u2019t always get,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019re in an age where zombie films are the most popular, and this is the complete other direction from that. In that sense, it might feel a little bit old fashioned but I don\u2019t think so, I think it\u2019s something people will really love.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Birds
\n<\/i>Various times,
\nFebruary 22, 24, 26, and 28
\nVarious prices (community preview tickets $15),
\nRoyal Theatre
\nrmts.bc.ca<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pacific Opera Victoria founding artistic director Timothy Vernon is giving audiences a look into the work of Greek comedic poet Aristophanes with the opera The Birds. Aristophanes was a satirist, using his work to comment on the society of his day. \u201cWhat he was writing wasn\u2019t necessarily through-line plots as [it was] satires, making fun […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23662,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,283],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-february-22-2023"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23661"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23696,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23661\/revisions\/23696"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}