Lucia di Lammermore

Bern and I went to the opera on Saturday. Lucia di Lammermoor. This is something we regularly do - approximately once every 17 years so far!! Might have to be a bit more regular in future as it was great.

It was in the Westpac St James theatre, rather than the Opera House (where you have to dodge pillars in the cheap seats). My Italian is limited to foodstuffs and music terms (fettucini adagio!) so fortunately the surtitles were in easy view, and I fairly quickly worked out how long a line of Italian would take to sing. Longer than you might think!

Wikipedia has this to say about the opera.

What really impressed me was the emotion - the way that, instead of rushing through a book, say, with lots of plot, the amount of plot was kept to a minimum, but the emotion content of it was so much to the fore. (This could also be because the story is a tragedy in the Romantic style - where it's no good unless the lovers (and several other people) all die.)

There was some theatre in another sense on the night too. Just as the curtains went down for interval, there was an almightly crash from behind them. It transpires that part of the set fell down, slightly injuring 2 tech people. As we came back after the break the sound of hammering and power tools was noticeable! All looked fine when the curtain went up though. Word was that the injured staff went to hospital to be checked up, but don't know how serious that was.

(Wednesday) this last drama was mentioned in the paper on Monday, and on Tuesday there was a note to say the staff were fine and had gone back to Auckland.