I moved this over here to a new thread, because it's not nearly salacious or embarassing enough for the other thread....


Oooooooooooh, I think the final ensemble in DG is great...  it's magnificently surreal, rather like the final scene in an episode of QUINCY when the mystery's been solved and they all get together in a bar to have a laugh about it all over an (American) beer?

As I clearly started this, I wish I had time to stay and get stuck into this discussion.  But to summarise:

Idomeneo : WAAAAAAAAAAY too long.  Especially with the ballet music.
Cosi: first act just right.  Second act goes on... and on... and on... and then there's the wedding scene.
Figaro: Finale Act 3 feels like the end, and the whole of Act 4 drags, especially with two (TWO!) superfluous arias.
Don G: see Reiner's quote above.
Clemenza: perfect in length, but soooo dull unless done well.
Entfuhrung: Can be perfect, but IMHO there's not enough of a plot to justify the length.
Flute: there's a natural Finale after Tamino and Pamina have undergone the trials - by which time, the second act has been just the right length.  Although the opera would lose one of its most charming and heartwarming scenes if one didn't find out what happened to Papageno, by the time you get to the Queen and her cronies trying to break into the temple, it really is starting to drag.

I don't have time to get into the more obscure operas now, as I'm off to see a play.

(It should have been "I'm off to see a friend in a play" but friend is injured and his understudy will be on )

My own problem with FIGARO is that it's just too long, period...  I like the Act IV music, but my concentration is shot to pieces by that time.  Mind you, the opera is usually performed with a number of cuts... some more judicious than others.

You can get a clout on the nose for saying this kind of thing on for3

ooh.
i may be alone in thinking that mozart operas are the perfect length.
full version of Guillaume Tell = too long.
tristan act2 = far too long.

They are - they fit onto the cds just perfectly.  If they were any shorter, the last cd in the set would be blank, and people would complain


How do you see Ottavio, GG?  I suppose I used to think of him as a rather young and immature man who didn't yet know who to squire a young lady successfully...   I think if I were coming to the piece today I'd see him as something of an elderly roue whose passions are more fiery in their poetry than their practice    Part of his interest is by way of providing a foil to the Don's testosterone-fuelled machismo, which must have had some kind of influence on Anna... after all, he was let into the house with consent, we presume, before the curtain rises on his man left to stand guard outside...?

That's the sort of thing - I don't know what is included on those discs but anything that cut most of Act 3 in particular would be ideal.  A few minutes of scene setting - Marschallin's arrival - Ochs decamps - final trio and duet; that's all it needs really. 

There may be a tempo issue here - it may be that Mozart's operas are consistently played too slowly.

To take Cosi Fan Tutte, for example; a glance at the score shows that it has very few slow tempi - the marking adagio only appears (from memory) twice and passages that are often taken in a slow four (like the start of the first act finale) are actually written as a two-in-a-bar andante.  I wonder whether the operas really need a much quicker underlying pulse than we have become used to; listening to Ostman's Cosi (a real shock at first, but once one gets past that extraordinarily convinving) or, as I have been over the last couple of days, Abbado's Flute, suggests that doing so brings real rewards (not that I'm about to throw out my old Klemperer discs).

I disagree, GG - I always find that Figaro and Cosi last far longer than I am expecting them to.  Unlike Wagner - which I always expect will feel long but five hours somehow goes by in a jiffy.  Handel also seems much shorter than it is, most of the time - though perhaps even more than Mozart, his final acts often seem superfluous, with all the major stuff resolved by the end of Act 2 leaving a whole load of sub-plots to wrap themselves up in Act 3.

And smittims... I almost never have complete operas on as background music.  Usually I am sitting in a theatre giving them my full attention.

I think I agree about Rosenkavalier - though I'd be loth to cut much from Acts 1 and 2, the Ochs/Mariandel bit in Act 3 does outstay its welcome.