okay my special interests are coagulating in an interesting way again; time to make a post about the Pathologic Opera Playing Only In My Mind.
i’ve talked a bit about voice types, which i have admittedly revised in my head a bit as i go, but that’s not all i’ve thought about. here’s a bit about stage picture, themes, musical style, and directorial style.
there is a specific type of somewhat self-referential and self-aware art music dating all the way back to the baroque and before such as purcell’s come ye sons of art! and ode to st. cecilia that is either about music or specifically about performance. it isn’t actually a genre but it’s very much something that you’ll notice after a while. britten also got quite into it, again with some st. cecilia-related music (hymn thereto this time) but also with things like his cantata rejoice in the lamb. this also occurs to a lesser or greater extent in his opera, especially in gloriana thematically and in death in venice.
on a surface level there are a couple of references that you could make, that are just “this sounds like this”. pathologic is also very aware of its status as a game or as a play i always imagined that you would kill probably young vlad on-stage and have something akin to billy’s execution and the subsequent down all hands and see that they go chorus. as russian romantic opera is very much its own thing with its own traditions born out of centuries of russian history i would also be very inclined to lean on that. if you’re doing britten-inspired that could work pretty well -- britten wrote arrangements of folk songs in his youth and retained that interest long into his career so it might be a little pulling around but also an interesting combination.
i keep updating the post with my pathologic playlist which now includes wond’rous machine (from purcell’s ode to st. cecilia) and for a reason separate to what i think about mark immortell, who just has the vibes of a countertenor and for whom i just like the irony of baroque, a very early genre which has a strong convention of historically informed practice, combined with a character who essentially represents pulling apart tradition. wond’rous machine is specifically about progress supplanting tradition -- in this case through the lens of pipe organs supplanting the sorts of ensembles that composers such as monteverdi would have written for. so i’m also thinking that the plague gets a style similar to this.
this is the point at which i will tell you my Separate Thought About St. Cecilia And Potential Uses For Her, and that is basically that victoria snr. and capella both get the symbolism traditionally associated with her. st. cecilia is the patron saint of musicians -- her feast day is actually britten’s birthday -- and the story is that she was an avowed virgin who was forced to be married off to to a man that she didn’t love. at her wedding she sat apart and ‘sung to god in her heart’. the symbolism is broadly “it’s my opera so i get to decide on the religious symbolism” but the self-reference of the patron of musicians is. quite a delightful idea.
unfortunately we must now talk about religion, but don’t worry. we won’t talk about it very much, because tbh the end of Pathologic As An Opera is like... idk how you would even achieve that and that’s one of the two places where it comes into play and that’s more me noticing that the loading screen when you load a save in a game that you’ve finished in p2 reminds me of and i saw a new heaven than it is any particular informed statement. (to be honest the diurnal ending generally gives me those vibes.) i... struggle in vain mostly with clara because her symbolism is so deliberately mixed up even though she’s the most obviously religiously-themed character.
the other thing i was thinking was specifically artemy retrieving the living blood and that is a fairly straightforward “well that reminds me of the nunc dimittis”. there’s a famous russian (or old church slavonic) setting of that by rachmaninov with a very distinctive ending figure of a descending scale for the second basses going down to a Bb1 and referencing that at some point would probably make other people go “oh. ha. nunc dimittis”, which is... really all i would hope for.
anyway. direction. because pathologic is a rare case where regietheater doesn’t just work but is actually probably actively necessary. i have made the joke before that mark is probably a director who didn’t get booed at bayreuth and let it go to his head, but mark-as-character vs. mark-as-director could be an interesting idea dramatically speaking. i don’t really know how you would do that other than what i mentioned above with him singing in a baroque style.
finally, i need a whole section on wagner, despite not being too into wagner. this is purely because i want to discuss the parallel between artemy destroying the polyhedron brunnhilde destroying valhalla at the end of the ring, and also my Pet Thought about the fisher king narrative as it relates/could relate to pathologic. the latter of these i was originally planning to cover in zum raum wird but unfortunately i have adhd and cannot follow a project through to its end. (and i’m gonna rewrite it eventually.) this is... really a bit more regietheater because one could spin the end of the ring into what i mentioned before about wond’rous machine. it’s progress supplanting tradition, albeit in a very dramatic way. it also works equally well for daniil and artemy’s endings (or at least for the diurnal ending).
the fisher king thing is a bit more complicated because there are a lot of places that it applies, not all of which i think it would make sense to bring it up. looking at it thematically though the inheritance of a barren land theme and the progress/tradition theme could (ironically) coexist pretty well so... pointing to either clara’s ending or the nocturnal ending but i think clara’s probably works better with the original theming. idk this post got away from me and now i can’t get it back again. enjoy.
