Customer Reviews

Midsummer Nights

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A collection of short stories commissioned for the Glyndebourne Festival includes submissions by some of today's leading UK authors. Each story is intended to spin off the themes of operas both well and not so well known. This proves an interesting concept as part of the fun of reading this book is to figure out which operas are represented in each story. For the most part, this is not a challenge as the majority of these stories identify the opera in question straight off. Taken as a whole, this is an uneven volume. Fortunately, with an anthology of short stories, the reader can pick and choose. Some stories rise to significant heights, eg, "My Lovely Countess" (Le Nozze di Figaro), "First Snow" (Eugen Onegin), "First Lady of Song" (Makropoulos Affair). Others make you wonder, why bother?: "Fidelio and Bess,"(Fidelio and Porgy and Bess), "To Die For" (La Traviata), and "Forget my fate" (Dido and Aeneas) However, there is one real gem in this collection, "Freedom," which relates an apochryphal story of the great Irish tenor John McCormack. In it, he performs a little known opera "Natoma" (about native Americans) to a tribe of real native Americans in the Western Plains. This book will appeal primarily to operaphiles as many of the insider references will simply seem obscure to most readers. As an aid to the latter group,the appendix lists synopses of the cited operas as well as brief bios of the contributing authors. Despite some caveats, there is enjoyment to be found in this book and if you don't care for the writing, there are some great cartoons in its mid-section.

I don't really know what qualifies as "summer reading," but I'll bet this collection comes close. As you would expect with any anthology, this one is spotty. Some very good stories, even one or two worth re-reading; others something less than up to their author's par, but no real clunkers. I recommend suspending any expectation you may have for any given story to reflect something of the opera that supposedly inspired it. About five or six stories into the book, I discovered that giving up that notion and just going along for the ride gave certain of them more heft. Some of these pieces make me wonder if their authors have ever darkened the door of an opera house (or even listened to recordings or their selected jumping-off point), however.