I love the intersection of opera and other forms of art. Take, for instance, Lully’s Persée. Having been to both Barcelona and Florence, I remember Dali’s and Cellini’s sculptures of Perseus with the decapitated head of everyone’s favorite gorgon, Medusa (a “head” joke is too easy). I also had the grand plaisir of seeing a Lully opera (finally!) thanks to Toronto’s Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra. Lully has begun to click, and re-listening to him in October for brush-up is kind of the perfect seasonal complement to riding the N train from Queens to Brooklyn in 40 degree, golden sunny, turning-leaves weather. It’s a weather I missed for two years in LA.
It’s funny, though, to see the cross-cultural interpretations of one Ancient Roman poet. The first time I saw Cellini’s 
Perseus was when I saw Benvenuto Cellini at the Met in the winter of 2003; it was the Playbill cover (or it was in a painted reproduction). I all but forgot about it until I moved to Italy in 2005 and went to Florence in the wee weeks of 2006. It reminded me of the constrained ruthlessness of the Berlioz opera (which, at this rate, I’ll hit by the time I’m 30), something violent in the Baroque curvatures.
And then there’s Dali. His sculpture reminds me of his moustache, loose, flowing, and yet stylized. On my bohemian budget in Barcelona, I still thought about splurging on a lobster so I could answer it like a telephone and say “Hello?…Hello?…It’s for you.” But the big M’s head in this sculpture looks close enough to a cellular crustacean. And I’m already a bad enough Jew that one absence of shellfish is probably not the worst thing in the world.
But despite the veritable bloodbath that Cellini conjures up in his beheading of Medusa and the controlled chaos of Dali’s meditation on the same theme, Lully’s opera is downright soothing. I still have the Netflix Red Envelope from when I had the DVD sent over in July, and before sending it back the other week, I popped it in one morning. It was 5:00 am, I couldn’t sleep, and I figured I may as well get some work done on the supertitles I’m translating for Florida Grand Opera. It was still pitch-dark out in Queens, and I think that’s what Lully needs. There’s too much glitter onstage to compete with natural sunlight. And even though that makes it hard to see sculptures, the dark does well to illuminate JB.
