Secco Recit

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This weekend marked the inaugural production of a new opera company, which is something I don't think a lot of us were expecting in the midst of a still-ongoing pandemic. Opera NexGen made its first foray onto the scene with a virtual presentation of Cosi Fan Tutte , ambitiously presented with live performances from the singers, to a pre-recorded piano track. Oh all the things that can go wrong. I cannot in the least bit hold many of the technical glitches which occurred against the company, cast, or creative team. As we've all learned these past twelve months, these things are difficult and there is no way to be sure of everything working perfectly. There were lag issues, sync issues, sound balance issues, crackling sounds as singers overpowered their microphones, and, during much of the first act, background noise that sounded as though it might have been conversation coming from a control room, which included a little bit of the performance in progress, about two seconds ah...

Okay I'm still really hung up on that horse thing. Is Brian on good terms with Zamor or not? How does Zamor feel about all this? Illustration by Maurice Greiffenhagen.

1. Introduction Sooner or later, most fans of Gilbert and Sullivan become aware of the infamous “Lozenge Plot” that was the source of some of the duo’s quarreling in the later years of their collaboration. The story, as popularized in the 1999 film Topsy Turvy goes that in 1884, in the wake of the relative failure of Princess Ida , Gilbert proposed to Sullivan for their next opera a plot about a magic lozenge that transforms whoever consumes it into whatever they are pretending to be. Sullivan rejected the plot out of hand, for two primary reasons. Firstly, that the premise bore at least a superficial resemblance to that of The Sorcerer , and he did not want to be seen as repeating himself. Secondly, that at this point Sullivan was tiring of Gilbert’s zany, unrealistic plots, and wanted to set “a story of human interest and probability.” The lozenge plot was something Gilbert was clearly intent on doing at some point though, and he periodically floated it again in various forms and g...