Midnight rhapsody

Midnight dashes to retrieve stuff from Museokatu, Panic-ridden moments at the suitcase, Running to get last-minute shopping, Impromptu breakfast for four guests, adding things to the to-do list faster than crossing them out, junk food, getting caught in torrents of rain - welcome to my last 48 hours before leaving.
Of course, it's not all that bad: It's midnight now, and I already have the key which opens my suitcase. The rain gives me an excuse to skip my nightly run, and I only have a hundred or so pages to read of Sense and Sensibility, the book I'm determined to finish before 5.30. That's when I'm leaving the house. And the part about the breakfast was exaggerated - actually my friends brought it with them.
And at least I have Puccini to accompany these moments of excitement. My biggest fears at the moment are: locking myself out of the apartment (everyone with a spare key is out of town), finding myself outside my home without the key and losing the keys. This is a fear which will probably always follow me, but especially at times like this I find myself obsessively clutching the keys from time to time.

Very soon the suitcase will be closed, the harp covered under its ugly brown blanket, the garbage thrown out, and the aparment will be left to manage on its own for 24 days.

Last week was spent, among others, studying "La Fanciulla del West", the opera Puccini composed right after Madama Butterfly. Actually, one can't really say he composed it straight away - quite on the contrary, he was plagued "composer's block" and went through a great number of subjects for his next opera, dismissing them all as not suitable. Not to mention a great deal of trouble his marriage was causing him, with violent accusations by his wife of extramarital relationships almost ruining his reputation in his hometown. "Fanciulla" was first performed in 1910 at the Metropolitan Opera house in New York. So thrilled was Puccini at having finally gotten on with composing he praised it to be his best opera. However, after a while, reality settled in. The media wasn't too impressed by the three-act opera, and while one can certainly hear influences from "Butterfly", the opera doesn't match "La Bohème" when it comes to lyric melodies or profound emotion. These things apart, "Fanciulla" is a fascinating work in which the music heroically rescues the plot, which is at times downright ridiculous. Highlights include an embarassingly clichéd conversation between two Indians, consisting of infinitives and the word "Ugh". The opera is set during the famous gold rush of the 19th century in California and the main character, Minnie, is a very demanding role to sing, vocally and otherwise.
It takes two listenings at least to fully appreciate the sound of the orchestra, in which Puccini definitely hit all the right marks. Every situation and emotion is perfectly responded to by the orchestra, and, as a matter of fact, many times one feels that the orchestra is the leading force of the opera, not the singers. A good example is the arrival of a blizzard, particularly in the second act, during which one can almost feel the snowflakes blowing in your face listening to the recording. While it's not very easy to find sweeping passages of Puccinian melodies (once again one thinks of Butterfly's love duet), the action-packed sequences make up for that.

Quiz! Do YOU recognise the music playing in the background of my new answering machine? If you do, why don't you tell me about it!
Good night!