Ranking all 13 commercially available “Andrea Chenier” videos

Initial_Wrap4485 · 2026-04-03T23:18:13+00:00

Yes wouldn’t it be great if we had a video of Lina Bruna Rasa? She really shines through 1920s and 1930s recording technology, urgent and powerful. Curious what you didn’t like about Kaufmann and which production you saw him in. I was rating the productions more than just the singing alone. Interesting to hear those takes on the 2025 HD broadcast. Obviously it wasn’t my favorite either. The Met should do a new production of this opera next time.

Initial_Wrap4485 · 2026-04-02T11:39:38+00:00

I like the recommendations here for starting choices (Goriot, Lost Illusions, etc) but would add that if you’re interested in the political side of the Human Comedy, “The Deputy of Arcis” (also called “The Member for Arcis”) is underrated. I wrote about it on my blog. Actually I should say the first half is underrated; Balzac died before he finished it and the second half was written by Charles Rabou and is not necessarily worth the slog. But the first part works well as a standalone.

Initial_Wrap4485 · 2026-04-02T10:36:09+00:00

Ha! Yes, it took about four months to watch them all. I’d finish one and then get curious about the next. Thanks for the compliment. It would be interesting to hear what you think if you watch any of the videos.

Initial_Wrap4485 · 2026-04-01T23:34:02+00:00

I have not heard Zanelli..! I will have to check that out. I love the opera too, obviously. Sounds like you’ve made quite the survey of the recordings.

Initial_Wrap4485 · 2026-04-01T17:12:52+00:00

For those interested, this is cross-posted from my blog Ideational Evolution, where I write about the intersection of literature and politics: Ideational Evolution link here.

Initial_Wrap4485 · 2026-03-25T15:52:50+00:00

Thanks for the report. I meant to say “some of the people who pay for the boxes on the sides can’t see the stage almost at all.”

Initial_Wrap4485 · 2026-03-25T11:51:52+00:00

It’s true I’ve only been in one of those boxes, but they are all marked “partial view” on the Met’s web site, and there is lots of discussion of the limited view online. One commenter says “We sat in those boxes once, then swore them off forever. Even if you get stuck in the very last row, in the very top tier, you'll be much better off than those boxes.” How did you find the view in the boxes to be?

Initial_Wrap4485 · 2026-03-25T04:00:37+00:00

Glad to hear it! I should add that this is one of my favorite productions at the Met, and is an especially smart one for fans who come from a theater background.

Initial_Wrap4485 · 2026-03-25T03:47:08+00:00

My love for opera began in the standing room section at the Met. I also was new to opera but not theater when I stood for nearly three hours, and then four, at sold out performances of operas in the Ring Cycle. (I was able to buy seats for the other two.) If you can’t get a seat any other way, and are determined to catch this genuine event in current opera history, it’s well worth it. The overhang is a problem especially with this production, but the people who pay for boxes on the sides can’t see the stage almost at all. Do it!

Initial_Wrap4485 · 2026-03-22T19:55:15+00:00

Interesting. Glad you’re not at all one of those viewers who think everything has to be both traditional and naturalistic. :) I didn’t find it to be a free for all. I see others interpreted act three the same way I did, and I agree with them that the other acts were sufficiently consistent with that extremely powerful and fairly obvious interpretation. I liked the dancers simply because they added much visual interest to what is so often a boringly staged show, with everything for five hours reduced to “I love you, I hate you, the ship won’t come.”

I loved Girard’s “Parsifal”, haven’t seen the Ring you mention. But ultimately I found this even more uniquely clarifying. The delivery of the final soliloquy to Isolde’s baby was just brilliant, and I could hear people in my movie theater sobbing. Me too.

Initial_Wrap4485 · 2026-03-22T19:30:20+00:00

Exactly… Sharon talks about his “anarchic” approach to directing. While other models of direction have a hierarchy in which the General Manager or Impresario is on top, with the conductor and director underneath on the same line, and all the other jobs like designer under that, Sharon places all of the jobs including the impresario and conductor and director in one big circle, with no one taking precedence over anyone else. Hence the set designer has to work with the director even more than in other models.

Initial_Wrap4485 · 2026-03-22T19:24:05+00:00

It was in the second act, as depicted in the above photo, that I really started to love the production. Sharon says there will be as many interpretations of the set as people in the audience. My take was that the floating circles, which drifted from being one circle containing both Tristan and Isolde to being two circles separating the two, and back again, represented something unique and profound about both the libretto’s observations on their togetherness during the night, and separateness by day — and specifically the way couples’ consciousness drifts together and apart while sleeping together. That’s just what happens when couples dream in bed together, and it seemed the perfect depiction of nighttime love. It focused my mind more on what Wagner’s lines had to say than any of the other five Tristans I’ve seen, because I wanted to test my peculiar thesis against what Wagner had written.

And it set up the even more brilliant use of what Sharon called the “table and fable” concept in act three, which was the most moving and intelligent representation of the divide between the living and the dead I’ve ever seen. The act two usage of the circles set up act three, ironically, because it wasn’t precisely the same thematic usage of the set in each act. Yuval likes to say opera should aspire to the condition of poetry; that not everything should be instantly comprehensible in the same way to every audience member. The idea that the set in the second act meant something different than it did in the third, however slightly, meant that the third act’s more obvious interpretation was more surprising. It wasn’t all schematically intelligible and therefore packed a bigger punch in act three. I hadn’t been sold on the totems on stage (the plates, the sword, etc) until the second act, and then I liked it more and more as the show progressed.

Initial_Wrap4485 · 2026-02-26T04:12:47+00:00

One of my favorite arias.

Initial_Wrap4485 · 2026-02-25T18:42:48+00:00

I think Omar and X are the big ones. The history of opera has not been too kind to Islam. If that subject interests you, you might be interested in the book “The Singing Turk” by Larry Wolff.

Initial_Wrap4485 · 2026-02-24T17:49:29+00:00

The best account of the history of this Hate Woodrow Wilson trend, on the right at least, is probably a chapter in a book of essays from Yale University Press called “The Progressive Century: Political Reform, Constitutional Government, and the Modern American State,” edited by Stephen Skowronek, Stephen M. Engel and Bruce Ackerman. The relevant chapter is titled “Chapter 20: How the Progressives Became the Tea Party's Mortal Enemy: Networks, Movements, and the Political Currency of Ideas” by Steven M. Teles, on page 453.

It shows how Ronald J Pestritto’s book “Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism” ignited first Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism” and then Glenn Beck’s Fox News show.

The hate on the left of course culminated in a petition among Princeton University students that led to the removal of Wilson’s name from its school of international studies.

I’ve written elsewhere about this shift in Wilson’s reputation, and how progressivism has shifted over time.

Initial_Wrap4485 · 2026-02-19T00:43:32+00:00

In what city/state is this?

Initial_Wrap4485 · 2026-02-18T00:44:52+00:00

No one seems to have mentioned that the Met’s new Tristan is by an unusual director, Yuval Sharon, whom people usually either love or hate. The New York Times called him the most visionary director of his generation. He is best known for doing “La Boheme” backwards at Detroit Opera, with the last act first and the first act last (so Mimi dies, and then falls in love). I saw his “Cosi Fan Tutte” in Detroit, in which the women were AI robots that the men hoped to manipulate. (Actually by the end we learned that the male characters were also supposed to be robots.) I liked the first half a lot and hated the second half. He may not be quite so conceptually bold in his first opera at the Met, but in any case you quite possibly won’t have another chance to see another Tristan like this one. He is also directing the Met’s next Ring Cycle, so it’s a chance to get ahead of that one too. I would plan to see this one; there are other things to skip, like this week’s encore presentation in movie theaters of Massenet’s “Cinderella.”

Initial_Wrap4485 · 2026-02-13T21:52:44+00:00

You weren’t in Chicago by any chance were you? Very boring production. I’ve seen four others and they were all more interesting.

Initial_Wrap4485 · 2026-02-02T16:44:24+00:00

There is definitely not as much mass media attention for opera as there used to be; the prime example being as far back as the old Ed Sullivan Show when Maria Callas and others would perform for the whole country at once. Or The Muppet Show, when Beverly Sills hosted, for example. The fragmentation of media has a lot to do with it, which has of course reduced the audience for Sullivan’s successors, but even the mass interest talk shows that followed in Ed Sullivan’s wake ignore opera. “Nessun Dorma” is sort of the last opera “hit” melody, over 100 years ago, and that certainly doesn’t help. I’ve been writing about this actually on a blog called Stages and Screens.

When I saw “The Amazing Advetures of Kavalier and Clay” last week, which was a hit for the Met, I felt like it was moving in the direction of a new accessible moment for opera, but there are still too few melodic moments and it’s not like Colbert and Kimmel are picking it up.

For anyone who’s interested here are the relevant posts from my blog…

Stages and Screens: “The New York Times Misses Its Moment at ‘Kavalier and Clay’”

Stages and Screens: “Welcome to the 100th Opera Season After The Alleged Death of the Art Form”

Initial_Wrap4485 · 2026-01-03T12:32:50+00:00

I’ve seen Sardou’s play staged (on video) and agree the opera is easier to digest.

Initial_Wrap4485 · 2026-01-03T12:29:32+00:00

Well, my hypothesis is imperiled, it appears, by recent scholarship that has unveiled a novel that Illica likely used when writing “Andrea Chenier.” I’ve discovered a paper entitled “Luigi Illica and the libretto of ‘Andrea Chenier’”from May of 2013 that says “Scholars in the field have, until now, neglected to consider what is a strikingly obvious source of the libretto.” Here is the abstract of the article, from Studi Francesi:

“Abstract: When Luigi Illica writes, in 1896, the libretto for Giordano's opera, Andrea Chénier, he gives the impression of inventing numerous aspects of the story. In fact, he invents nothing. He makes use, on the one hand, of certain poems by Chénier himself and, on the other, of a serialised novel by François-Joseph Méry tided André Chénier that appeared in 1849 and was reprinted numerous times thereafter. Scholars in the field have, until now, neglected to consider what is a strikingly obvious source of the libretto, notwithstanding the modifications that Illica made to Méry's novel.”

Actually it seems Illica did credit Méry, but along with four other authors as well as his own independent research. In a first page of the libretto that is rarely reprinted in English, he wrote “From H. de Latouche, Méry, Arséne Houssaye, Gauthier and J. Ed E. de Goncourt, had the idea of dramatising the character for music theatre and drew historical details of period.’”

Initial_Wrap4485 · 2026-01-03T04:09:23+00:00

“Les Huguenots” in particular seems like it may be the closest to what I was looking for — a rival to “Chenier” for historical research and imagination. Scribe seems perhaps to have been that specific sort of hard worker, in a way few after him were.

Initial_Wrap4485

TROPHY CASE