Ep. 130 Orlando Furioso by Vivaldi

Summary

Opera For Everyone - Episode 130: Orlando Furioso by Vivaldi

Release Date: May 18, 2025

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Introduction

In Episode 130 of Opera For Everyone, host Pat Wright welcomes Jeff Counts as the guest co-host for the very first time. Jeff, known locally in Jackson Hole as the general manager of the Grand Teton Music Festival and Khol's film critic, delves into the intricate world of Antonio Vivaldi's lesser-known opera, Orlando Furioso.

Pat Wright [00:10]: "Welcome to another edition of Opera for Everyone. I'm your host, Pat Wright and I am thrilled to welcome today as guest co-host for the very first time, Jeff Counts. Welcome, Jeff."

Jeff Counts [00:22]: "Hi, Pat. Thanks so much for having me."

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Overview of Orlando Furioso

Pat and Jeff introduce Orlando Furioso, highlighting its obscurity despite Vivaldi's prolific output in opera.

Pat Wright [03:07]: "Today's opera is one that may not be familiar to people. Orlando Furioso by Antonio Vivaldi. Not a name we typically think of when we think of opera."

Jeff emphasizes Vivaldi's dominance in concertos over opera, noting the challenging nature of Baroque opera in the United States compared to Europe.

Jeff Counts [04:18]: "The exploration of opera in the Baroque period is just not something you hear a lot in the States."

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Baroque Opera Explained

Jeff provides an insightful summary of the Baroque period (1600-1750), focusing on the development of opera through the invention of recitative—a style that mimics spoken dialogue within the musical framework.

Jeff Counts [05:05]: "The Baroque period generally is defined as that time frame between around 1600 and 1750... Baroque opera grew out of something even a little earlier, though, this invention of the idea of recitative."

Pat adds context about the influence of the Florentine Camerata and their inspiration from Greek ideals, emphasizing the clarity and storytelling aspects introduced in Baroque opera.

Pat Wright [08:33]: "They are looking back to the Greeks for inspiration... the clarity that was sought is part of what kicks off our Baroque period..."

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Introduction to Orlando Furioso's Story and Characters

The duo delves into the plot and characters of Orlando Furioso, explaining the complex relationships and magical elements that drive the narrative.

Key Characters:

• Angelica (Soprano): A beautiful princess from India, torn between Orlando and Medoro.
• Alcina (Mezzo-Soprano): An enchantress who manipulates those around her.
• Orlando (Contralto/Pants Role): A noble knight whose obsession with Angelica leads to madness.
• Medoro (Mezzo/Pants Role): Angelica's true love, a Saracen soldier converted to Christianity.
• Astolfo (Baritone): Orlando's companion, serving as a moral compass.
• Bradamante (Mezzo-Piano): A female Christian warrior in love with Ruggiero.
• Ruggiero (Countertenor): Bradamante's beloved, initially under Alcina's spell.

Pat Wright [14:10]: "She is a princess, of course. She is a princess from India, and she is desired by a great many men."

Jeff Counts [20:31]: "Alcina is extremely powerful and her power comes from a relic, Merlin's ashes, that she... guards... Because that's the source of her power."

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Musical Elements and Performance Insights

Jeff and Pat discuss the musical structure of Orlando Furioso, particularly the use of the da capo aria—a hallmark of Baroque opera—and Vivaldi's exploration of different vocal types.

Jeff Counts [19:05]: "It means the top. It just basically means that it has an A, B, A form... they always go back and do the A section again."

They highlight the contrast between recitative and coloratura singing, noting how Vivaldi leverages these to convey character emotions and narrative progression.

Jeff Counts [11:35]: "Coloratura is a word that's often associated with the bel canto period... but you'll hear it in all voice types in this piece."

Pat connects Vivaldi's portrayal of strong female characters like Bradamante to his personal experiences teaching music to strong, talented women.

Jeff Counts [43:48]: "He was teaching a super high-level girls orchestra for decades. I see them in Bradamante."

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Plot Progression and Character Dynamics

The conversation navigates through the three acts of Orlando Furioso, summarizing key plot points and character developments.

Act 1 & 2:

• Angelica seeks to distance herself from Orlando while remaining faithful to Medoro.
• Orlando's obsessive pursuit leads him to madness after discovering Angelica's deception.
• Alcina's manipulation sets the stage for conflict among the characters.

Pat Wright [24:03]: "Tell us about this man."

Jeff Counts [26:41]: "Astolfo is one of those folks for us [the audience], because they point out more than once in this plot that things aren't right."

Act 3:

• Bradamante disguises herself to confront Alcina.
• Orlando's madness culminates in the destruction of Alcina's power source, Merlin's ashes.
• The opera concludes with themes of constancy and love, despite the chaos unleashed.

Jeff Counts [113:11]: "They're left with constancy and love."

Pat Wright [115:06]: "He recognizes that his beloved Angelica has married another man. He says, you two children go off and enjoy being wedded to each other."

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Performance and Recording Insights

Pat and Jeff discuss the specific recording featured in the episode, performed by Ensemble Matthias under Jean Christophe Spinozzi. They commend the ensemble's efforts in reconstructing lost Vivaldi operas, noting the challenges of piecing together fragmented scores and librettos.

Jeff Counts [60:14]: "We've been listening to the Ensemble Matthias, led by Jean Christophe Spinozzi. This is a French Baroque ensemble."

Pat emphasizes the importance of director choices in modern performances, especially regarding cuts and adaptations necessary due to incomplete original scores.

Pat Wright [62:13]: "There's no definitive single copy of this. This is the best we know of that we're talking from this libretto and this performance."

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Conclusion and Final Thoughts

As the episode wraps up, Pat and Jeff recap the opera's journey, highlighting the enduring themes and the emotional depth conveyed through Vivaldi's composition. They encourage listeners to engage with both the opera and its rich source material to fully appreciate its complexities.

Pat Wright [103:55]: "And it's fun to find the warts and whiskers on all these characters, I think."

Jeff Counts [105:03]: "It's really fascinating to me how something that seems kind of samey as it progresses actually has a lot of variation and a lot of capacity for depth and range. Emotionally, it's amazing."

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Notable Quotes

• Jeff Counts [01:58]: "And you look to your left and you see the range and you think, I am not capable of speaking words right now."
• Pat Wright [09:06]: "Reset, recitative, that's the spoken, sung, spoken."
• Jeff Counts [19:28]: "Hope, Fear, in this case."
• Pat Wright [34:05]: "He's being dumped."
• Pat Wright [46:23]: "We don't have to make specific examples now, but I think if we were to be honest with ourselves..."

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Final Remarks

Pat closes the episode by reiterating the mission of Opera For Everyone to make opera accessible and enjoyable, inviting listeners to engage with future episodes and performances.

Pat Wright [117:47]: "I always say this on Opera for Everyone, any opportunity to see these works performed in full or even, for that matter, grab the CD or grab it from a streaming service. We're setting you up to enjoy a full performance."

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Listen to Episode 130 of Opera For Everyone every Sunday from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. Mountain Time on 89.1 KHOL in Jackson, Wyoming, or subscribe to the Opera for Everyone podcast to stay updated and support the mission of making opera accessible to all.

Transcript

[Unknown Speaker]

Foreign.

[Pat Wright]

Welcome to another edition of Opera for Everyone. I'm your host, Pat Wright and I am thrilled to welcome today as guest co host for the very first time, Jeff Counts. Welcome, Jeff.

[Jeff Counts]

Hi, Pat. Thanks so much for having me.

[Pat Wright]

Oh, I'm so happy you're here, Jeff. For those of you who don't know Jeff, and I think a lot of the Jackson Hole locals do know him, he is the general manager of the Grand Teton Music Festival. And for Khol listeners, Jeff is the film critic.

[Jeff Counts]

Indeed, that's really my happy place is reviewing film.

[Pat Wright]

Oh, we could, we could go on and on, but that's not why we're here today. Before we do go on with the reason that we're here, I just want to say thank you to you and to everyone involved with the Grand Teton Music Festival, those of you who are unfamiliar with it. It's a summer festival here in J. Jackson Hole. Starts around about the fourth of July every year, goes on through most of the summer. World class players, performers and our own.

[Jeff Counts]

Donald Runicles, he's our music director and I think one of the preeminent opera conductors in the world. Unquestionably, and a highly sought after symphony conductor as well. I always say, Pat, that we're a big surprise. People hear us for the first time and they're shocked that it's happening this well here. Not that Jackson isn't a place of excellence, but to think of music at this level happening at a ski resort, it's not a place your brain just goes naturally. And I've always said that it's our job at the Grand Teton Music Festival to approximate in music the feeling you get the first time you walk off a plane at our airport here.

[Pat Wright]

Oh, yes.

[Jeff Counts]

And you look to your left and you see the range and you think, I am not capable of speaking words right now.

[Pat Wright]

Yes.

[Jeff Counts]

And I think what happens in Walk Festival hall approaches that. That's our job.

[Pat Wright]

It's magnificent. Yes. If you've never visited Jackson Hole, come in the winter to ski, but come in the summer for the Grand Teton Music Festival and all the other outdoor pursuits. It's wonderful. There we are. There's our boosterism for our local place here.

[Jeff Counts]

Much appreciated.

[Pat Wright]

Yes, yes. And you know film, film criticism. Where do we, how do we access that, Jeff?

[Jeff Counts]

Well, so I produced, I produce film reviews on Khol. Some sometimes twice a month, sometimes once a month. It just depends on the release schedule, what's happening. We don't get everything at our little theater here in Jackson.

[Pat Wright]

Yes.

[Jeff Counts]

Sometimes I need to see things in Salt Lake. So my, my release schedule for the radio station is a little irregular, but you can catch me there. Just look me up on K12. I've also got a film review podcast that I do with a couple of other Salt Lake City based reviewers called Big Movie Mouth off and Big Movie Mouth off. And the title predates me. It was a show I was on with a dear friend and he passed away sadly and I sort of took up the mantle and invited these two friends to join me. And we really do just sit around on microphones and kind of fuss at each other about film.

[Pat Wright]

That's fun. That is super fun.

[Jeff Counts]

It's a blast.

[Pat Wright]

Well, let's not leave the audience in suspense any longer. Today's opera is one that may not be familiar to people. Orlando Furioso by Antonio Vivaldi. Not a name we typically think of when we think of opera.

[Jeff Counts]

It's true. Even though he wrote nearly 50 of.

[Pat Wright]

Them and he's claimed in, in his writings, no one's found them even a greater number. I think close to 90.

[Jeff Counts]

Exactly.

[Pat Wright]

Or maybe up to 100. But little by little, it's been, I think, just a fascinating treasure hunt to find his scores or what, what they can find of the scores and the librettos that go with his opera. He did more opera than most anything else that he did, which is not what we think of when we think.

[Jeff Counts]

Of Vivaldi, except for concertos. That was the one place where he eclipsed any other kind of music in his catalog. But you're right. I think it's partly because of how we think of him today, which is through the four seasons and the 500 plus concerti. He wrote over 230 of them just for his instrument, the violin.

[Pat Wright]

Yeah.

[Jeff Counts]

We don't think of him as an opera person. We don't often think of baroque opera generally in the United States. It's a little bit of a tough sell here.

[Pat Wright]

Unless it's Handel.

[Jeff Counts]

Right, Unless it's Handel. Exactly. So.

[Pat Wright]

And even then it can be a tough sell.

[Jeff Counts]

Totally. The exploration of opera in the Baroque period is just not something you hear a lot in the States. If you go to Europe, you'll get more of it, more faithful sort of devotion to the beginnings of opera there. But here we're focused on really the, the Verdi, the Rossinis, the Puccinis.

[Pat Wright]

A lot of 19th century and a little bit of 20th. That's true.

[Jeff Counts]

Exactly.

[Pat Wright]

It's true. Okay, so let's take a moment before we get into our story. And there is so Much story here with this amazing opera, Orlando Furioso. Before we get into that, could I just ask you to tell us about the Baroque period in music, Baroque opera in particular. Just a little summation to get us all ready for what we're about to hear.

[Jeff Counts]

Absolutely. So the Baroque period generally is defined as that time frame between around 1600 and 1750. Incidentally, 1750 is exactly when Bach died. I'm sure that is not.

[Pat Wright]

Not coincidence.

[Jeff Counts]

Indeed not. But the period, artistically was defined by grandeur, ornamentation, overtly florid expression in all art forms. It happens in architecture, it happens in painting, it happens in music. Baroque opera grew out of something even a little earlier, though, this invention of the idea of recitative. And recitative, if you don't know that word, is a style of singing that mimics the rhythms and cadences of actual speech.

[Pat Wright]

Yeah. It's what people do when they're trying to impersonate opera, where they just put a little song in their voice as they talk.

[Jeff Counts]

If they take a speech gun.

[Pat Wright]

Poorly.

[Jeff Counts]

Right. It's also like chanting in church. It's very similar to that. So it's basically. It's perfect for exposition and story motivation, but functionally, it's essentially one note of music per syllable of speech. Remember that. We'll come back to that concept later. So the first operas. I'm doing air quotes right now, which only you can see, Pat, but they were.

[Pat Wright]

I'll vouch for you.

[Jeff Counts]

Thank you. They were happening right around 1600. And the first ones that are remembered or noted in history had to do with the story of Orpheus.

[Pat Wright]

Yes.

[Jeff Counts]

Which is fascinating because the first really great masterpiece of the form happened in 1607, and that was Monteverdi's Orfeo and the things he did that crystallized the form and really changed it going forward. The influence he had on the genre was that he mixed these recitatives, or recits, as you'll hear me call them often, and arias, which is a more tuneful song rather than a spoken sort of narrative device. He mixed reciton arias with various dances and other forms to give the drama an overarching structure. And it featured something that hadn't been done before, which were late drama repeats of music that you'd heard before in earlier acts.

[Pat Wright]

Yes.

[Jeff Counts]

So that larger structure was in play and that was the format. That was the design that honestly carries through to today.

[Pat Wright]

Yes. Yes. And just a little reference for those of you who enjoy opera, for everyone. Episode 85, Grant and I discuss Monteverdi's Orfeo in depth.

[Jeff Counts]

It's the first great. Yeah, it's the first great opera.

[Pat Wright]

It's fascinating. Well, and also, as I understand it, this group in Florence, this Camerata, this group of intellectuals, powerhouse minds get together, wanting to make their dramas better by hearkening back to the classical period. And part of what they try to do is to make the speech clear, to make the text understandable, to highlight the story.

[Jeff Counts]

You're talking about the early Baroque, when the Camerata was together.

[Pat Wright]

Yeah. They are looking back to the Greeks.

[Jeff Counts]

To the Greeks, yes.

[Pat Wright]

For inspiration, because that was an ideal. They saw so much in the physical art that they thought was ideal. They were also trying to use it for some of the performing arts. But as I understand it, and Jeff, I defer to you on all of this, the clarity that was sought is part of what kicks off our Baroque period and part of what motivated or what we see in the Monteverdi operas, that just three of them, sadly, only of his operas remain to us.

[Jeff Counts]

The thing about Baroque art is that it's not great for the delivery of information. So the development of the reset was important because it needed to approximate what the Greeks probably did with their chorus. Right.

[Pat Wright]

And I'll just interject to say reset, get comfortable with that, because that's the short form of recitative, or recitative, as they say in Italian. We're kind of splitting the difference there. But recit, recitative, that's the spoken, sung, spoken.

[Jeff Counts]

It's short for recitative. Thank you, Pat. I probably will use that term.

[Pat Wright]

Please. We've identified our terms. You can carry on.

[Jeff Counts]

Yes. So, yeah, the whole idea of the recit was to strip away some of that ornamentation, some of that florid nature of the expression, and be able to deliver story and plot and actual narrative drive. The Greeks would have done that with the chorus or with somebody speaking on the apron to the audience either before or during a play. So I think that's what they were trying to approximate with this invention. So opera couldn't just be arias, there would be no story.

[Pat Wright]

But we do love our arias.

[Jeff Counts]

We do love our arias. But that's usually a seven minute song with about five words to it, whereas a reset can take place in a minute and get paragraphs of information to the audience.

[Pat Wright]

Yes.

[Jeff Counts]

So that development was, I think, really important to provide that mix of musical opportunity that Monteverdi took advantage of a few years later.

[Pat Wright]

It's fascinating. It's almost like anything in history where reformers choose to focus on something to fix it and Then over time, even in this period, you'll get some of the. The singers predominating and maybe taking over with their vocal abilities and showing the audience what they can do. Anyway, we don't have to get into all of that right now, but this is a period where the recitatives will clarify, the story will move forward, things will be explained, and then in the arias, that's when the characters really delve into their feelings.

[Jeff Counts]

I feel like the arias are about emotion. They're about where the person who's singing was delivered by the reset that just happened before. So all this narrative happens before the story is moving forward, the plot is twisting and turning, and then a person in the cast stops for a moment, faces the audience and reflects on how all that makes them feel. That's what I think the function of the aria is. And it's also interesting, Pat, that Baroque's singing reflects this clarity that you're talking about this Camerata group was looking for. Baroque singing can be very melismatic. And when I use that term, melismatic, I'm referring to the word melisma, which is in direct contrast with reset, which I. Which I mentioned before, was one note per syllable. Melisma is many notes per syllable. So this is the kind of coloratura, very acrobatic, dramatic, very athletic singing that we'll hear in a lot of these arias. It's really wonderful to hear the difference between a reset and the coloratura.

[Pat Wright]

It's interesting. Coloratura is a word that's often associated with the bel canto period, the early.

[Jeff Counts]

Part of the 19th century, usually only with sopranos.

[Pat Wright]

True.

[Jeff Counts]

Yeah. But you'll hear it in all voice types in this piece.

[Pat Wright]

And you'll point that out.

[Jeff Counts]

Absolutely.

[Pat Wright]

As we go on.

[Jeff Counts]

Absolutely.

[Pat Wright]

Well, there's a lot more to be said around the edges of what we're talking about right now with Baroque opera, but let's introduce a little bit of this particular opera. Orlando Furioso by Antonio Vivaldi premieres in 1727. So towards the end of this Baroque period, as you define it, ending in 1750, though I will note there was an Orlando Furioso by Vivaldi in 1714.

[Jeff Counts]

Yes. Wasn't a big success.

[Pat Wright]

No.

[Jeff Counts]

But there was at least enough there for him that was worth revisiting. Now, 1727 is right at the midpoint of his opera career, or sub career, or however you want it, the micro career of opera that he had in and amongst all the other stuff he was doing. So maybe he was in a better place to approach this drama. Maybe he was in better command of his vocal writing skills at that point. I don't know the reasons why the earlier version didn't work. I just know that this one does. And he liked this one well enough that he stole bits of it in later operas, melodies, and that was uncommon.

[Pat Wright]

For composers at this period. We're not talking about streaming, and even just getting a score published was kind of a big lift.

[Jeff Counts]

Yeah. And most of the stuff he wrote probably were heard once, if at all. So borrowing from himself was no crime.

[Pat Wright]

No. And that went on for quite a long time until considerably more modern times. Well, I think we're going to jump into some of the music. We'll skip the Overture or the Symphonia, as it's called, because they don't definitively know what overture or Symphonia that Vivaldi himself put with this piece. The people who are recreating it for our ears pick something appropriate that Vivaldi wrote from the period of time, because it's not like a Broadway overture, where it's snatches of the music throughout the.

[Jeff Counts]

Show, or like Verdi, or where they're.

[Pat Wright]

Setting you up with those, getting your ears ready for what you're about to hear. It's not that, but let's meet our first character and then we'll fill in some of the backstory. The first person we're going to hear is the incomparably, overwhelmingly beautiful Angelica. I mean, that's a name that just says beauty there, isn't it?

[Jeff Counts]

It is.

[Pat Wright]

She's a princess, of course. She is a princess from India, and she is desired by a great many men. But what does she want to tell us about herself?

[Jeff Counts]

At the very beginning of the opera, everyone is already in the clutches of Alcina, and we'll talk later about what that means. But Angelica is trying to process a couple of conflicting emotions. She has come to this place to distance herself from Orlando, the main character, who she knows pines for her. She pines for Medoro, somebody she has met during the war that Orlando's been prosecuting. So she is pining for Medoro and worried about Orlando's passion for her while she sings this. Un rajio di speme. A ray of hope.

[Pat Wright]

Yes, And I'm going to point out that she talks in the first part of this. There aren't many words in this aria.

[Jeff Counts]

There aren't many of these arias, but.

[Pat Wright]

She talks about hope. But it's tempered by fear.

[Jeff Counts]

Exactly.

[Unknown Speaker]

La ram.

[Pat Wright]

Sa.

[Unknown Speaker]

Boy sam nama ra.

[Pat Wright]

That was Angelica singing In Orlando Furioso by Antonio Vivaldi, an opera which premiered in 1727. Dear Angelica. She is hopeful because Alcina has just said that she will help Angelica, but she's afraid because she's got a problem. But before we explain who Alcina is and what the problem is, could you tell us about this sort of aria? I know it's called A da capo aria. Explain for us what that is.

[Jeff Counts]

It means the top. It just basically means that it has an A, B, A form. All of these arias have two parts. So if you're reading the libretto, you'll see the first part that they sing. Sometimes they do it twice. It's the A section. Then there's a second section where the music shifts mood a little bit, and their personal mood also shifts a little bit. Often that's the B section.

[Pat Wright]

Hope, Fear, in this case.

[Jeff Counts]

And then they always go back and do the A section again. So a B, a da capo.

[Pat Wright]

Back to the top. Back to the top, Back to the top. All right, so who is this Alcina that she's speaking to?

[Jeff Counts]

Alcina is the person behind everything. Handel was right.

[Pat Wright]

Yes.

[Jeff Counts]

His version of this story is called Alcina, not Orlando Furioso.

[Pat Wright]

Yeah.

[Jeff Counts]

Orlando Furioso comes from time immemorial from the source material. But Handel knew that the real character that made everything go in this story was Alcina. She's an enchantress, she's a sorceress, She's a person of magical power, and she's able to influence the people around her. And this entire plot is about her manipulating the folks around her that are sort of trapped in her domain. Their relationships to one another, their affections for one another, are things that she controls, like toys. And it's all because of her interest in the Saracen soldier, Rajeev.

[Pat Wright]

Saracen, meaning the Muslim soldier. Because this is set in. In a period of time when the Europeans are fighting back the advance of Islam.

[Jeff Counts]

The time of Charlemagne. This is. Orlando was a Christian paladin, and he was fighting Saracens.

[Pat Wright]

A paladin being one of the great knights.

[Jeff Counts]

Exactly.

[Pat Wright]

And there are a handful of those in the original story.

[Jeff Counts]

Exactly.

[Pat Wright]

Yeah. I would say probably the reason Vivaldi called this Orlando Furioso is because that's also the name of the epic poem about 200 years earlier that was written. But well known. Very well known. Probably one of the longest epic poems in the European canon and may not be as familiar to people as even Song of Roland, which predates it, or other epics. You know, the Iliad, the Odyssey.

[Jeff Counts]

Exactly.

[Pat Wright]

In the western world. But I suspect he used the name because he wanted to clue people in. This is my. This is my world. But you're right, Alcina is central.

[Jeff Counts]

Alcina is extremely powerful and her power comes from a relic, Merlin's ashes, that she.

[Pat Wright]

Merlin, from the King Arthur stories.

[Jeff Counts]

Exactly. That's how integrated this story is with all of the stories. The urtext, as I call it, of human creativity. So those old, ancient stories are all finding their way into this. So Merlin's ashes give her her power. They're kept in a reliquary that she jealously guards.

[Pat Wright]

She has an immortal guard.

[Jeff Counts]

She does indeed.

[Pat Wright]

Protecting these ashes because that is the source of her power.

[Jeff Counts]

A lot of productions leave that guard out. Interestingly, it's probably just maybe just a cast cost saving thing, I'm not really sure, but it's. The only death that happens in this story is the guard. And I feel like it's important to the story because Orlando has to cross that bit of a Rubicon to get to his madness. But I'm crossing Rubicons too early right now, so let's forget what I just said, we'll come back to it later. But no, her power is based in ancient magic. And she's using it, though not for grand designs, but for very personal, very specific things.

[Pat Wright]

Yes. Although here as she's introduced, she seems like a kindly, helping older woman helping a younger woman, this young distressed princess who is fleeing the pursuit of Orlando, which again makes him seem very dark and kind of creepy from my point of view, that she's fleeing his pursuit and asking for help because she, she has a true love, Medoro. And Altrina says, oh, yes, sweetheart, I can help you, don't worry.

[Jeff Counts]

She seems kind, doesn't she? But she's hiding the fact that she is hundreds of years old and not nearly as beautiful as she allows herself to be seen. So everything about Alcina is not only a mystery, it's a lie.

[Pat Wright]

Yeah, deception is the way she works.

[Jeff Counts]

It is.

[Pat Wright]

But Angelica is happy for what she offers.

[Jeff Counts]

Well, maybe Pat, we should listen to some Alcina. Let's hear what she has to say for herself at this point in the story. This is the aria. The command of love is raised in those eyes. At this point, Astolfo, a knight and compatriot of Orlando, has entered with Orlando into her domain. She is ignoring Astolfo, who seems to have some interest in her, but that's not something she's got any interest in pursuing herself.

[Pat Wright]

He's yesterday's news totally.

[Jeff Counts]

And never to be tomorrow's news. Poor Astolfo. We'll circle back to him as well. But she's ignoring him and attempting to sort of figure out Orlando and how he fits into her scheme, because he's critical to it.

[Unknown Speaker]

Sam.

[Jeff Counts]

My phone.

[Unknown Speaker]

Sam.

[Pat Wright]

That is our evil sorceress Alcina in Orlando Furioso. She's the one who's pulling a lot of the strings at this point. Astolpho is the man who she has ensnared. She has bewitched, and now she's tired of him. Tell us about this man.

[Jeff Counts]

He's one of the men that she has bewitched. We'll meet the other later. But Astolfo is a compatriot of Orlando, as I said. And Astolfo, in an interesting way, I think, serves as that Greek chorus we talked about before. There's a couple of characters here that I think are there for us, the audience, because they point out more than once in this plot that things aren't right, things aren't what they seem, that people aren't being treated fairly and that people aren't themselves. And Astolfo is one of those folks for us. So even though his role is certainly not outsized, it's a pretty minor role in the grand scheme of this story. He's critical to us because without him and other characters like Bradamante, who we'll meet in a moment, we wouldn't really understand that anyone in this room was seeing things for what they truly are. So he's important. He's more important to us than he is to Alcina. Much to his chagrin.

[Pat Wright]

Yeah. He's in the process of being tossed aside.

[Jeff Counts]

He is. Should we hear a little bit of him?

[Pat Wright]

Absolutely. And let's point out, so that you can enjoy this, he is the only male character who has what we would consider a traditionally male voice.

[Jeff Counts]

Absolutely. He's a bass baritone. It's on the higher end of that spectrum. More like a Figaro baritone. But you're right, he's the only male cast member that is singing in what we would identify as a masculine voice. The other is a countertenor. We'll meet Ruggiero shortly as well. I was going to talk about voice types for a moment because I think that's interesting in this opera. Angelica is a soprano.

[Pat Wright]

Yes.

[Jeff Counts]

Alcina is a mezzo.

[Pat Wright]

Right.

[Jeff Counts]

Astolfo, as we mentioned, is a baritone. Orlando, though, is a mezzo. It's what we call a pants roll.

[Pat Wright]

Yes. Yes, a trousers roll, which we've referred to before on the show. It is interesting. Our strong, great paladin knight of Charlemagne, he's a hero. But we've seen that a lot in the older operas sung by a woman, and might have been a castrato in this time period, but Vivaldi chose no. I'm going to have a mezzo sing this.

[Jeff Counts]

I think the mezzo gives the richness and the depth and also the range that the character requires. A lot is asked of whoever plays Orlando. There's a lot of singing. There's a lot of very dramatic singing. There's a mad scene. It requires the top and bottom of the voice to be very Clary and clear and very, very strong. So I think the mezzo was the right call. But this cast is full of pants roles. Orlando's not the only one. There's also Medoro, who is a mezzo pants role.

[Pat Wright]

Oh, the one who is loved by.

[Jeff Counts]

The one who is loved by Angelica.

[Pat Wright]

Well, it's a requited love. So they love each other. Right.

[Jeff Counts]

It's the only initially requited love in the show. The other loves sort of take shape as we go. Bradamante is a female Christian warrior in the script sung by Amezzo, but she has a meta pants role later in the show when she dresses as a man in the context of the story. Really interesting.

[Pat Wright]

We'll introduce her later. But she has a lot of characteristics that in our world are coded male, totally. So she's an interesting one.

[Jeff Counts]

And like Astolfo, she provides us with some reality to ground ourselves in. Because she has a magic ring that makes her immune to Alcina's nonsense.

[Pat Wright]

Right. And just a little bit of the background in this, she has this magic ring that gives her power and also some immunity and all of this. If you were to go back and read that source material, the Ludovico Ariosto Orlando Furioso that he wrote, and I'll just stick in right now, that. That in fact, that our main source material, this great long epic poem, is playing off of a previous poem about Orlando's life. And Orlando, by the way, is the same person as Roland in the Song of Roland. As you said, it's all woven together, intertwined, pulling together the pieces. And I believe there's an expectation that the audience would know these characters already, so that when these people show up, you know that Alcina is hundreds of years old and really quite ugly, but she uses her own ability to enchant, to make herself look beautiful. And alluring and try to find this love that she says she's seeking. But this ring. There's a good sorceress behind all of that who is referred to a few times in the libretto, but not a character in the story. There's a rich story behind this that I believe Vivaldi and his librettist are, are expecting us to know. And modern audiences don't necessarily know it. So some of that gets left out sometimes.

[Jeff Counts]

Do you think that during their time that folks understanding and experience with old stories made it possible to drop the needle in this way more so than today? I do, I do.

[Pat Wright]

But I think if we were to be. We won't make specific examples now, but I think if we were to be honest with ourselves, there are other stories that are more modern where the storytellers are relying on our pre existing knowledge. It's just a different set of pre.

[Jeff Counts]

Existing knowledge, more ripped from the headlines now than it was then. Probably because he's dealing with 100-year-old material that he assumed everyone was familiar with and was probably right.

[Pat Wright]

Right. Well, because this story, this Orlando Furioso that's written by Ariosto in the early ish 16th century.

[Jeff Counts]

Yeah, 1516 to 1530 was when he worked on it, roughly.

[Pat Wright]

It shows up in so many. There were three or four operas before Vivaldi got a hold of it, that Lully, one of the great composers in France, wrote an opera based on this and there were others that are less well known to us today. And Handel wrote three different operas based on the characters, portions of this story and it goes on and on. And there's visual art as well as musical art. So it's a great inspiration. So yes, even though it's an old story, it was an ever present story. We have ever present stories in our day.

[Jeff Counts]

These days you can count on people knowing Shakespeare and the Bible, you can do things based on those stories.

[Pat Wright]

Usually yes, it depends on who the people are. But usually. But anyway, opera for everyone. We're here to explain things. But back on track with our story and our song. Let's hear Astolfo.

[Jeff Counts]

This is the male voice in all its glory as far as Vivaldi was concerned. This aria, you teach me constancy is when Astolfo is speaking to his friend, thanking him for the advice of constancy, which is one of the themes of this opera. And he's feeling also though behind this appreciation is a little bit of wistfulness because he's feeling a little sorry for himself. Because as I mentioned before Alcina won't even give him the time of day.

[Pat Wright]

Yeah, he's being dumped.

[Unknown Speaker]

Sam. Ra.

[Pat Wright]

That was Astolfo. And right about this point, Orlando has shown up. He is in search of Angelica, as Angelica told us he would be. And we also have Bradamante. And just interesting to note, both Bradamante and Astolfo, they are cousins of Orlando.

[Jeff Counts]

Is that true?

[Pat Wright]

It is. I've done research. I didn't get to read all of the epic poem, but I read part of it.

[Jeff Counts]

Oh, in the source material, but not necessarily in Vivaldi.

[Pat Wright]

Well, I think, again, I think it's background knowledge that we would know. They're all part of this same effort of fighting against the. They're the Christian knights fighting against the Saracens. And P.S. angelica is not a Christian.

[Jeff Counts]

No, she's a pagan princess.

[Pat Wright]

And Bradamante's true love is not originally a Christian. He converts. In fact, Bradamante and her true love, Ruggiero, who shows up, he's originally a Saracen. He converts to Christianity. And they are ancestors of the people who commissioned the original poem from Ariosto.

[Jeff Counts]

Yeah, that part I had read. I'm glad you brought that up about the cousinhood in the context of the story, because I think it's interesting that Bradamante and Astolfo team up as this opera progresses, not only as our Greek chorus to keep us grounded, as I said, but they're the ones that are trying the hardest to undo all of Alcina's machinations. So, like cousins, they work together to save not only Orlando, but everyone.

[Pat Wright]

We'll get into it in the third act. They have a slightly different point of view on the whole thing.

[Jeff Counts]

He wants vengeance, she just wants her husband or her spouse back.

[Pat Wright]

But Bradamante and Ruggiero are angry at Orlando.

[Jeff Counts]

Yes, they are. And she is also angry at Alcina because Alcina has bewitched Ruggiero. Ruggiero is the focus of Alcina's ardor in this story. And Bradamante, as we hear in I Shall Conceal My Anger. Wonderful aria. She is mad. She sees what's happening. She is immune mostly to Alcina's charms because of the ring we mentioned before. But she's keeping her powder dry for the moment because she's hoping that Ruggiero, her beloved, her betrothed, will come to his senses and be released from Alcina's spell.

[Pat Wright]

Yes. And in the reset which precedes this aria that we're going to listen to, an excerpt of, she explains that this ring was given to her by the good sorceress Melissa. And how very powerful this ring is. I mean, that's really classic, isn't it?

[Jeff Counts]

Very classic. Powerful ring, powerful rings. You've probably talked about that on this show before.

[Pat Wright]

Sometimes. Sometimes. Well, let's hear Baradamante. That was Bradamante, another mezzo soprano. Alcina's a mezzo, but she's a different kind of mezzo.

[Jeff Counts]

Yes. Alcina is more lyric. Her writing is less melismatic and more tuneful, more melodic. The other characters do a lot of physical work with their voices. It's this coloratura singing I was talking about before, and I'll mention it again when we get to Medoro's first aria because that's, I think, the best example of this kind of singing in Act 1. But everyone else's voice is very dramatic, it moves a lot. There's a lot of intensity and ornamentation in their singing, where Alcina, at least in Act 1, is more self possessed, a little bit more calm, a little bit more in control. And I think that reflects itself not only in these two wonderful singers that are cast in this recording, but in the way that the parts were written.

[Pat Wright]

Yeah. So in the bit that we just heard with Bradamante, she is ready to fight for her man. She is going to be fierce if there is any opposition, reminding us that she is in fact a warrior. She initially comes on stage dressed as a warrior, not hiding the fact that she's female, but she is right up there with Orlando and his ilk in terms of being a knight, which is fascinating. It's not something we expect to see thinking of the romantic poetry of knights and damsels. She's one tough lady.

[Jeff Counts]

She is. And the fact that she is clearly female from the start and also a knight I think is a very important choice here because gender is obviously something that is somewhat fluid in the sense of the pants roles and the fact that women are playing characters that are supposed to be men in this opera. But there's something about Vivaldi that I think adds a little meta layer of perspective on his view of women and their toughness. One of the things that was super important in his life and his story was his some 30 years that he spent at the Hospital de la Pieta, which is an orphanage, convent and music school. And he was the violin teacher at this school. The boys in this place were given trade jobs and sent out at the age of 15 to find jobs. But the girls in this place were taught music and the arts and he taught this really super high level girls orchestra for decades. I think he had powerful female presence in his life all the time. So to write a character like Bradamante, I think of the Pieta orphanage, I think about those formative experiences with really strong young women and I see them in Bradamante.

[Pat Wright]

And a lot of his works, not just operatic words, were written for that group. All female. Absolutely fascinating. Well, and Bradamante, I mean, to be fair, it's also part of the source material.

[Jeff Counts]

True. That wasn't a choice Vivaldi made, but he made the choice to keep it, which is important to keep it and.

[Pat Wright]

To highlight it for sure. Well, at this point, she's interacting with Orlando. Orlando is going to show up and we're going to see he is not furioso yet. Furioso, meaning frenzied, furious. Yes. And as you referred to earlier, there will be mad scenes with Orlando.

[Jeff Counts]

Indeed.

[Pat Wright]

But right here he's very clear. He has a mission and he's on this island of Alcinas.

[Jeff Counts]

He has a mission and he is clear. I also think he's a little bit clueless, Pat, because he doesn't really know what's about to happen to him.

[Pat Wright]

Well, he doesn't know that Angelica's been running away from him because she wants to get out of his romantic clutches.

[Jeff Counts]

Absolutely. And he also doesn't know that she is in league with Alcina to try to make this manifest. So he, in this moment when he sings probably his most famous aria, certainly the most Famous from Act 1, it's Nel Profondo into the Deep. He's attempting to steel himself against the trials that he has ahead of him. He knows that he's going to have to work hard to win Angelica over to him permanently. And he also knows that there are other opportunities for knightly courage to be expelled on this island. So he's steeling himself for the things that are coming.

[Pat Wright]

And one of the other tasks that he's been given where he needs to use his knightly courage is in taking back those ashes of Merlin the Valcina, her power.

[Jeff Counts]

Yes.

[Pat Wright]

Again, behind the scenes there's a mentor, someone powerful, who's told him, you must do this. You must reclaim those ashes, get them out of the hands of this evil sorceress. So he's got two, he's got two jobs here. He's trying to win Angelica or marry Angelica, essentially, and also blunt or eliminate the power of this evil sorceress, Alcina. Orlando, as you said, is a pants roll.

[Jeff Counts]

It's a pants roll sung by A contralto which differs from Mezzo's in that the voice is set a little lower. There's a darker, huskier tone to the voice. A contralto voice is a very specific, very unique and incredibly gorgeous voice type. You don't hear them written for very often these days.

[Pat Wright]

Not these days.

[Jeff Counts]

It's fallen out of fashion. You did back then. Absolutely. So it's another way that Vivaldi is exploiting the kaleidoscopic variety of the female voice. I just love that he uses every opportunity to show what women singing can sound like.

[Pat Wright]

That's Orlando, the title character of Orlando furioso in Vivaldi's 1727 opera, Orlando Furioso. He's psyched up for battle. He's ready to do what must be done. He's a knight. He is regarded in this story, at any rate, as a great knight who will not be defeated. We'll see how that works out.

[Jeff Counts]

We will indeed. He's also just about to start a long line of getting fooled by everyone else in this story.

[Pat Wright]

Well, you know, he's maybe more brawn than brains, but. Yeah. But we're going to take a minute and spend some time back again with Angelica.

[Jeff Counts]

We're back with Angelica and we're being introduced to one of our final two characters that we need to hear from in this story. Medoro. Medoro has been saved from the ocean. Angelica is now dealing with both of the men in her life. She's dealing with Medoro. She's also dealing with a very confused and becoming jealous Orlando. Luckily for her, Alcina convinces Orlando that Medora is actually Angelica's brother.

[Pat Wright]

Yes, very tricky here. Medora literally washes up from a shipwreck and he explains all of that. And Alcina uses her magic to heal him because he is on death's door.

[Jeff Counts]

Keeping her promise to Angelica that they will be wed. But in doing so, realizes she needs to also deal with Orlando, who's as I said before, confused, a little clueless. The conceit that Medoro is Angelica's brother keeps Orlando at bay for a moment, but it then requires a second step. The step where Angelica must fake seduce Orlando.

[Pat Wright]

Right. Convince him that she. Because otherwise, heaven knows what Orlando could do. He could cause great trouble.

[Jeff Counts]

They need to convince him that Angelica loves him. She needs to do a lot of that convincing herself so that he can be sent away on these nightly errands that we talked about before, and then she can focus back on Medoro. So here we hear Medoro the first time in his first aria And I say his. This is another pants role by Amezzo. This aria is I Break My Chains. And this is again, Alcina has convinced Orlando that he's Angelica's brother. She has begun this fake seduction of Orlando, and Medoro can't help but be a little bit jealous. So jealousy is the emotion you hear shining through the entirety of this aria. And this is an example, the best example so far, of this coloratura singing that I was talking about before. Coloratura. For opera fans, that is the word that refers to what the Queen of the Night does in magic.

[Pat Wright]

That's a great way to think of it, because that is a familiar piece.

[Jeff Counts]

Absolutely. And the same sorts of things are happening here in this different voice type. Very acrobatic, very elaborate, with lots of trills and runs and leaps and skips. It's incredibly virtuosic singing.

[Unknown Speaker]

King.

[Pat Wright]

Well, Maduro may be jealous here, but we are going to have another man.

[Jeff Counts]

Showing up and more jealousy will ensue.

[Pat Wright]

And what an entrance he makes.

[Jeff Counts]

Absolutely, yes. Ruggiero has finally entered the fray. This is the love interest of Bradamante, but he is fully enchanted by Alcina and now loves her, much to Bradamante's chagrin. This role would have been cast in Vivaldi's day by a castrato. It is now being sung by a countertenor, castrati having gone out of fashion some time ago or made illegal.

[Pat Wright]

We could just be blunt about that. It's the modern an.

[Jeff Counts]

Yeah, it is, but it's a really incredible voice type, and it's actually unlike contralto coming back into fashion in modern opera. You hear it a lot. One of the most famous is the title role in Akhenaten, the Philip Glass opera. But Britten did it a lot. There's a lot of use of countertenors now. So Ruggiero is with us. He is, as I said, fully under Alcina's spell. And he sings her a love song. And this is where that other jealousy I mentioned happens before, because Bradamante must witness this while she's waiting to figure out how to stop it.

[Pat Wright]

And I must explain his entrance on the hippogriff, because I think this is. It's wonderful. And it's not usually eliminated because it's just such a piece of stage. Wow. Wow us with this. Part horse, part eagle, flying creature that he arrives on again. The people in the audience originally would have known that this was a gift that was given to him by this good sorceress. She gave him this hippogriff this wonderful, wonderful creature. So you know that he's special when he shows up on this thing.

[Jeff Counts]

Totally. And every art genre refers back to the previous great ones. So there's all this classical imagery happening in baroque art. So the fact that there would be a mythological creature like a hippogriff in this makes perfect sense.

[Pat Wright]

Oh, yes. And he's going to sing now of his love for Alcina.

[Jeff Counts]

He is sa.

[Unknown Speaker]

Ram Jesus, glory to be queen.

[Pat Wright]

You're listening to Opera for Everyone, a radio show and podcast that embraces drama and story through love of music. Opera for Everyone airs Sundays from 9 to 11am Mountain Time on 89.1 Khol, Jackson, Wyoming's only community radio station. If you'd like to hear more conversations about opera, please join us on the Opera for Everyone podcast. And if you subscribe and rate us, you'll be helping with our mission to bring opera to everyone by helping others find this show. Stay with us. The second half of today's show is coming right up it welcome back to the second half of Opera for Everyone, where I am here with general manager of the Grand Teton Music Festival and Khol's film critic, Jeff Counts. Welcome back, Jeff.

[Jeff Counts]

Thanks, Pat.

[Pat Wright]

We're talking about Orlando Furioso by Antonio Vivaldi. And before we talk any more about our story, we want to say thank you to the people involved in creating this music that we've been listening to today. This is a recording from 2004. Jeff, because your Italian and general pronunciation is better than mine, would you do the honors?

[Jeff Counts]

Be happy to. We've been listening to the ensemble Matthias, led by Jean Christophe Spinozzi. This is a French Baroque ensemble. The cast is Marie Nicole Lemieux as Orlando. Jennifer Larmor is Alcina, Veronica Kanyemi is Angelica. Philippe Jarowski is Ruggiero. Lorenzo Rigazzo is Astolfo, Anne Hollenberg is Bradamante. And Blandine Staskiewicz is our Maduro.

[Pat Wright]

What a wonderful CD I was able to get a hold of here.

[Jeff Counts]

It's fantastic. When you presented this idea to me and talked to me about this recording, I actually found a version on YouTube of their production. So I was able to watch it. Not only listen, it's wonderful.

[Pat Wright]

Yes. And I'd like to mention that it's part of what they're calling this Vivaldi Edition. It's a whole. You can Google it and find more information about it. And they are making an effort to compile, perform, release CDs of a lot of the lost Verdi work. Not only Operas, but operas among them. Because one of the things that's fascinating with Vivaldi and operas is that they went missing for centuries. They were in private hands and got passed down among families. And it wasn't until the 30s, the 1930s, that the pieces of this collection were put together and made available in a library in Turin, Italy. It's fascinating that missing music was, in fact, found music that people didn't even know was missing, that existed sometimes.

[Jeff Counts]

Pat. It's also a little bit of the composer's fault, because, as I mentioned before, they often break up these works and repurpose parts of them for other projects. These people back during the Baroque era were probably not thinking too much of posterity.

[Pat Wright]

No, that's true.

[Jeff Counts]

They were working for work's sake. And posterity is ours to manage. And thankfully, there are people like Jean Christophe, Spirit Spinozi, who are putting so much time and effort into recombining these original ingredients and making these experiences whole for us again.

[Pat Wright]

Yes. And it's not just the Symphonia that I mentioned in the beginning. They had to do tremendous amounts of work to. They found bits of libretto and had to piece together. And some of it, there's a little bit of interpolation that goes on, but I think probably it also makes perfect performance companies feel okay about cutting some of this, because these folks have done the best they can to recreate what Vivaldi originally wrote. But there's no definitive single copy of this. This is the best we know of that. We're talking from this libretto and this performance. But if you have a chance to see a streaming or a performance of Orlando Furioso, it may not match exactly what we're saying, because there are choices that the people putting these on, they will make, and they will make cuts.

[Jeff Counts]

Case in point, you and I watched two different video versions of this, and they are in some ways completely different. Very important story points.

[Pat Wright]

More different as the story goes on.

[Jeff Counts]

Absolutely important story points in the version that you watched were not present in the version I watched at all. And look, cutting russets is part and parcel to doing Baroque opera. Russets get cut no matter what production you're in. All over the world, people even cut Mozart, Magic Flute. Spoken stuff gets cut. It just happens. So it's part of telling a story. The directors often dictate what is in and what's out based on the kind of experience they're hoping the people in the audience will have. So the cutting of russets is no crime, but it's part of Reconstructing these things is making those kinds of choices even before they hit the stage.

[Pat Wright]

Yeah. This is such a rich piece of art. There's so much to mine in here. And again, if you're familiar with the story here, and then you go see, for example, Handel's Alcina, it'll resonate and you'll probably enjoy it even more. Or Handel's Orlando. It's just these, these operas are out there. And now, if this was unfamiliar territory for you, now, this is the beginning. You will see more of this as you experience different works of art.

[Jeff Counts]

Absolutely.

[Pat Wright]

All right. And now you know what time it is.

[Jeff Counts]

I do.

[Pat Wright]

He's looking at me blankly.

[Jeff Counts]

No, not blankly. It's time to recap.

[Pat Wright]

It is opera helmet quiz time. Jeff, will you, as briefly as you can, let us know what has happened in the story thus far?

[Jeff Counts]

So we've just met our entire cast. The cast comprises Orlando, a noble knight who loves Angelica and is arriving in Alcina's domain to win her over once and for all. Alcina, as I mentioned, is the sorceress, the enchantress, who is manipulating all of the events of this story.

[Pat Wright]

We're on her island.

[Jeff Counts]

We are indeed on her island. We're in her world and in her clutches. Angelica is the pagan princess who is the intended of Orlando, but she loves Medoro, who is a rival prince who also requitedly loves her. Also in the story are Bradamante, a very interesting female Christian warrior who is in love with Ruggiero, a Saracen turned Christian fighter who is fully in the thrall of Alcina and in love with her. The only character I haven't mentioned is Astolfo. This is Orlando's companion. Nobody loves poor Astolfo, but he is also in the thrall of Alcina and completely baffled why she doesn't cast her eyes his way.

[Pat Wright]

Yes, but he's in love with her through enchantment. So he's going to. He's going to break free of that.

[Jeff Counts]

He's going to come to his senses.

[Pat Wright]

And I have a good feeling about his future. He's. He's quite a guy.

[Jeff Counts]

We are both on record as Astolfo fans. Yeah, yeah.

[Pat Wright]

There's. There's a lot of interesting characters here, but I do, I do appreciate Astolfo. He does some good work here.

[Jeff Counts]

He does.

[Pat Wright]

Well, as you said, Angelica has to convince Orlando that she is still faithful to him because he can cause trouble if he's angered.

[Jeff Counts]

Absolutely.

[Pat Wright]

So deception.

[Jeff Counts]

Very much so. This is the point where we are now in Act 2, where Angelica must complete. She must seal the deal of the deception and the fake seduction that she began in Act 1. The point of this, what she hopes will happen, is that she can convince him, through his ardor and devotion to her, to go off into a dark cave and fight a monster there. She hopes that he'll die and not return, which makes her life easier, right?

[Pat Wright]

She says, oh, sweetheart, oh sweetheart, will you please get me that potion that will keep me forever young? I want to stay beautiful for you. Of course. I'm like, oh, come on, sister.

[Jeff Counts]

Yeah, I know. She. Angelica is in this moment what we call a lot. But the aria she sings as dear as a shining star, is not just seductive, it is absolutely gorgeous and so beautifully sung by this wonderful artist. This is the moment where, as I said, she's trying to get her fake beloved to go off and get himself killed.

[Pat Wright]

Right after saying, oh, be careful, sweetheart. This dangerous. And he's like, I live for danger.

[Jeff Counts]

When I described him as clear, but clear, clueless in act one, he is still.

[Pat Wright]

So now, yeah, he, he is a knight and he knows that he's good at what he does. And if the little lady wants something, he's gonna go get it for her. I mean, of course, let's hear her.

[Jeff Counts]

And see if you'd be convinced too.

[Unknown Speaker]

Sam.

[Pat Wright]

Sh.

[Unknown Speaker]

Ram Sam J. Jesus.

[Pat Wright]

That was Angelica sending Orlando off on this deed that she says is so important. But it's interesting, right before he goes off, there's this three way interaction with Astolfo and Angelica and Orlando where Angelica is saying one thing to Orlando and one thing to Astolfo because Astolfo says, my friend, don't go. This is certain death for you. You will not survive this. It's too dangerous. And Angelica lets Astolfo know. Oh, it's okay. I'll talk him out of it. You go away. Let me, let me do my womanly work here and convince him. It's interesting because she's first presented to us as this poor woman trying to escape unwanted romantic advances from Orlando. But here she's really good at deception.

[Jeff Counts]

She becomes kind of a villain in act two.

[Pat Wright]

Yeah.

[Jeff Counts]

And they say in comedy, Pat, commit to the bit. She definitely does that because she turns her charms on Astolfo a little bit to try to convince him that, don't worry, I'm not actually going to be.

[Pat Wright]

Yes, yes, it's really interesting. Again, a lot of that will get cut in many productions because it's not essential. But so telling of character.

[Jeff Counts]

Absolutely. Especially hers and his, because, as I mentioned earlier, he notices things in a way that we count on him for. And that's one of those moments that proves it.

[Pat Wright]

Yeah. Here's the reality. This is Dangerous Orlando, and in fact, it is. And then we have a little interaction with our other couple, sort of. They'll get there eventually. Bradamante, the female warrior, and her beloved Ruggiero, the Saracen turned Christian.

[Jeff Counts]

She frees him from the spell. She basically frees him, but does not immediately forgive him. It's very interesting. It takes a while for her to come around. She is not happy with how deeply he was taken in by Alcina. So that has happened. Then we come to the point where Alcina gets to keep her promise to Medoro and Angelica and let them wed. So the next thing we'll hear is Alcina singing the aria, if Only I Too. And the words are so heartbreaking. She starts by saying, if only I too could enjoy with the one I love the peace my heart cannot find. Because at this point, she can't just be happy that the plan has come together for Angelica and Medoro. She's upset and sad because she knows she has lost Ruggiero. She can feel it. He's not only saying it, but she can feel the loss of his passion. So this song is meant to say to the audience, I wish this were happening to me.

[Pat Wright]

Yes, it's all about Alcino.

[Jeff Counts]

The cracks are starting to show in her patience.

[Pat Wright]

Yeah, she's not invincible.

[Jeff Counts]

She's not.

[Unknown Speaker]

Ra. Lord me. Your call.

[Pat Wright]

Alcina does lament here that she does not have the good fortune that these two young lovers who have just been married have. But she has truly kept her promise to Angelica. And not only has she kept the promise, she makes it very, very tangible with an inscription, an inscription that reads, let Angelica and Medoro live as lovers and spouses forever. By the way, there's going to be a cutting into trees. It reminds me of. Of what people used to do as kids. The initials with the heart for someone else to find. And of course, they're broken up six months later. But they will inscribe in the laurel both Angelica and Medoro, that they love each other and they have wed each other. Not just that they love, but that they are officially wed. And that's a little bit of the. Of the Christian ethos being very clear. It pops up throughout this work. But it's very clear here that once someone is wed, that's it. That is a bond which cannot be broken or Sullied. It's the end of any other interaction with another romantic partner.

[Jeff Counts]

That's why it's carved into a tree. Right. Because the whole thought behind this story is this idea of constancy. It's the thing that Astolfo mentions in Act 1, and it gets mentioned a lot more in Act 3 by Orlando. And yeah, it's carved into a tree. That means forever. So matrimonial fidelity is. You're right, one of the meta themes that is over this entire story. In the production. I saw the production. That is. That corresponds to the recording we're hearing. They write it on the table, just sort of. Just sort of dash it off and.

[Pat Wright]

Not carve it in.

[Jeff Counts]

It's very impermanent in this version, which I thought was an interesting choice for the director to take because it's critical, because Orlando needs to see it.

[Pat Wright]

Right, right.

[Jeff Counts]

That's one of the things that sends him on the path. We're about to go down with him.

[Pat Wright]

Yes, it is critical that he is able to see it. Angelica here was wed to Medoro. Medoro here was wed to Angelica. This is a testament to. I mean, again, it's a little more modern to think of it. It's real. If it's in writing, it's the stone.

[Jeff Counts]

Tablet of this story.

[Pat Wright]

Yes, yes, it is. And it's interesting. After the lament that Alcina has sung, Medoro feels a little pity for her.

[Jeff Counts]

He has had a tough relationship to much of what's gone on around him. For this entire story. He was baffled and hurt and jealous by what Angelica was doing, even though she has several established during her seduction to say, don't worry, I'm still with you.

[Pat Wright]

He can't.

[Jeff Counts]

He can't figure it out. And his heart goes out to Alcina. He's a sweetheart.

[Pat Wright]

He is depicted as young and not as on the ball as some of. He's no Bradamante yet.

[Jeff Counts]

No, he is definitely not. There's only one of her in this story, for sure.

[Pat Wright]

Well, then, as you have alluded to, Orlando comes upon this scene and sees these inscriptions and understands that the woman who just said she loved him so much, please go do this little errand for me, sweetheart, in spite of the danger. Oh, by the way, he does have a difficult time with this errand.

[Jeff Counts]

He absolutely does. And it's not just difficult for him physically. He starts to realize, even while he's there, while he's trapped in this cave, that maybe he was sent there under false pretenses. He's starting to doubt Her. I don't know if it's the distance from Alcina that is giving him a little bit of clarity of mind, but he's starting to wonder if everyone has been acting in good faith and having his doubts. So when he comes back, he's beaten, he is tired, he is not fully himself. And when he sees the inscriptions, that really is the final straw. He goes bonkers. This is where the mad scene happens. He has escaped, he's managed to get back to them, but when he learns of the wedding and Angelica's full deceit, he loses it.

[Pat Wright]

Yeah, he says, I demand vengeance. I mean, first it makes sense, right? I demand vengeance. And then he just goes round the bend.

[Jeff Counts]

He does.

[Pat Wright]

He loses it. He's hallucinating. He's not making a lot of sense, except in little portions. But this is gonna be the end of Act 2 with him losing his mind.

[Jeff Counts]

It's interesting too, because the mad scene, this predates so much that happens in opera in the centuries after. Mad scenes are a very important component of operatic stories now. They happen all the time, even in contemporary opera.

[Pat Wright]

Audiences love them.

[Jeff Counts]

They do.

[Pat Wright]

We love to see a person going crazy.

[Unknown Speaker]

Sam.

[Pat Wright]

That.

[Unknown Speaker]

Sa.

[Pat Wright]

This is opera for everyone. And you are listening to Orlando Furioso by Antonio Vivaldi. We have finished act two of our three act opera. And act three is quite a whopper.

[Jeff Counts]

It is a whopper. A lot needs to happen.

[Pat Wright]

And so it does. Yeah. We have gotten Orlando to the point where he's lost his mind.

[Jeff Counts]

Yes.

[Pat Wright]

He's gone round the bend when he finds out that the woman he loves has married another man, a young man.

[Jeff Counts]

And sent him off to die, no less.

[Pat Wright]

Yes, she. Well, he. She had to get him out of.

[Jeff Counts]

The way, I guess.

[Pat Wright]

And Ruggiero and Astolfo, two of our men in the opera, are worried about Orlando because he's off. You know, they wonder, is he dead? Did he go off and do this errand and did he die?

[Jeff Counts]

I think, in fact, they assume he did. And they don't know, though, that he's returned and seen the inscription and gone, as you say, around the bend. They're not aware of that yet. So in this moment in the story, they're trying to get revenge on Alcina.

[Pat Wright]

Yeah. And also, being good brothers in arms, Ruggiero says to Astolfo, here, take my steed, my hippogriff. Take him and go recover his remains.

[Jeff Counts]

Yeah. It's interesting what happens to ruggiero in Act 3. We'll talk about that in just a moment. But his return to normalcy is accompanied by an attitude.

[Pat Wright]

That's one way to put it.

[Jeff Counts]

It's a little unearned. He's very critical of everyone else in this story, which will manifest its himself in a few moments. But yeah, he's all in now on getting Orlando whole and figuring out how to get back at Alcina. He's embarrassed about what happened to him. And one of the steadiest people in the story, Astolfo, is somebody that he's aligned himself with so that he can get that revenge.

[Pat Wright]

Right. Well, Ruggiero easily excuses himself because of the witchcraft that was involved because the sorceress worked her charms. I'm free of that now. But you're right, he doesn't necessarily grant the same forgiveness to others, probably because.

[Jeff Counts]

It hasn't totally been given to him by Bradamante yet. She is still holding out a little bit of frustration for him. So I think he's probably dealing with a lot of emotions, but they manifest itself in him having a little unearned ego in this third act.

[Pat Wright]

Yes, but now Astolfo, yes, he sings.

[Jeff Counts]

Where valor does battle. And this is him still believing Orlando dead, trying to convince Ruggiero that they take their revenge on Alcino.

[Unknown Speaker]

Sam la.

[Jeff Counts]

La.

[Pat Wright]

That was Astolfo steadfast Astolfo going to do the work of saving his compatriot or at least bringing back his remains. And Bradamante shows up, but she looks a little different.

[Jeff Counts]

Indeed she does. This is the moment I mentioned earlier, the meta pants roll part of the story. Bradamante shows up dressed as her own brother in an attempt to trick Alcina. So it's a female singer playing a female character who is dressing as a male. Just another way to play with gender in this incredibly fluid story.

[Pat Wright]

Well, and also, isn't she nice looking? Alcina is going to think.

[Jeff Counts]

Absolutely, absolutely. That's part of the plan, I think.

[Pat Wright]

Yes, yes, because Bradamante is also aware of this urn that we talked about with the ashes of Merlin in it, this reliquary, the possession of this is so carefully guarded.

[Jeff Counts]

She knows the trick for getting rid of Alcinus. She may not know it fully, but she understands that there's something important about those ashes.

[Pat Wright]

Right. And she knows that it's guarded by this quote unquote invincible arontes. This, this man who has no singing or speaking role in the opera, but his power, the mace that he holds, he doesn't just hold it, it's chained to his arm, which he uses to protect this Precious urn that helps make sure that Alcina stays in power.

[Jeff Counts]

It's interesting because the urn is fragile, which means that Alcina's power is fragile, but the strength of Orontes is what keeps her whole. So Bradamante is onto something. She's starting to maybe see a path here.

[Pat Wright]

Yes. And it can only be helpful that Alcina is starting to find her attractive. Absolutely fascinating.

[Jeff Counts]

We should check in with Angelica, though, because something interesting is happening to her now too. She is starting to feel a little bit of guilt. She's not able to completely enjoy her wedded bliss with Medoro because she's starting to realize that what she's done to poor Orlando, who is back among them now and being crazy around them, she's starting to see the cost of her deception and her manipulation of this.

[Pat Wright]

It's true. But she's also seeing it because she's being accused of bad behavior by Ruggiero and Beratamante.

[Jeff Counts]

People are pointing the fingers at her unabashedly.

[Pat Wright]

Yeah.

[Jeff Counts]

So this song, My Poor Feelings, is that moment where she's realizing what she's done and starting to feel a little guilt, even though My poor feeling seems more like she. She's feeling sorry for herself.

[Pat Wright]

Yeah.

[Jeff Counts]

There is a little sorrow for Orlando as well.

[Pat Wright]

She's a hot girl. What can we say?

[Unknown Speaker]

Sa holy Sam.

[Jeff Counts]

Sa.

[Unknown Speaker]

Sam.

[Pat Wright]

That was Princess Angelica feeling a little bit of the guilt of the. What she's done. Done. Because after all, Orlando is creepy. I maintain that he might have been. He is a great knight and she's done him pretty dirty.

[Jeff Counts]

And she's not enjoying everyone being mad at her.

[Pat Wright]

No, she doesn't like that. And Orlando's going to wander in here and show us a little bit more of his unstable mind. And Ruggiero, he just feels pity for his comrade.

[Jeff Counts]

He absolutely does. And he's also, though, a little confused and in need of reassurance from Bradamante, because Bradamante is of course dressed as her brother, as I said, trying to trick the evil Alcina. But she takes a moment to sing directly to Ruggiero, to reassure him. I am bound to you is what she sings. But Ruggiero is not done being haughty and judgmental of people in this moment. After Bradamante leaves for a moment.

[Pat Wright]

Well, she's instructed to leave.

[Jeff Counts]

She's instructed to leave Fiocina. Exactly. He takes that opportunity to sing directly to Angelica. He's disgusted by her behavior.

[Pat Wright]

Yes.

[Jeff Counts]

And tells her that she will find no peace.

[Pat Wright]

Yeah. If he hadn't given Away his hippogriff. I'd say he's up on his high horse.

[Unknown Speaker]

Sa sam protect.

[Pat Wright]

Ah, Ruggiero. He is not finding peace. But I did say he was one of the ancestors of the people who commissioned the story. So they're going to be okay.

[Jeff Counts]

We're probably reading a little bit more into him than Aristo wanted us to, but it's fun to find the warts and whiskers on all these characters, I think.

[Pat Wright]

Well, yes, and honestly, part of what we're reading is what the librettist has put in there. So he's interpreting or taking from this very rich source material. And I don't think we've said the name of our librettist yet.

[Jeff Counts]

No, it's Grazio Braccioli. He wrote the libretto.

[Pat Wright]

Yes. And this same libretto was used by an earlier composer. It's the same libretto that was used in part by Vivaldi with his early effort at this story. So it's important to know that the librettos in this period of time, in some ways are the most treasured pieces of these operas. One of the things, for instance, that Mozart did when he visited Italy in his young manhood was to gather up librettos that he might be able to use. Because finding good poetic works, well structured for opera, that was a challenge for a capable composer.

[Jeff Counts]

Absolutely. Good writing made good singing possible.

[Pat Wright]

Yeah.

[Jeff Counts]

And I think every composer knew that in their bones. So finding a partner like Mozart did and like Puccini did and other opera composers have found people that they worked with repeatedly throughout their careers. Finding a good partner is great. And finding, as Vivaldi did, a person like Bracioli who had kind of a party piece.

[Pat Wright]

Yeah.

[Jeff Counts]

The source material that they really knew. Well. And it explored in several different interesting ways. He knew it was going to make for a great project.

[Pat Wright]

Yeah, it's true. It's fun. Like I said, I haven't gotten through all of the original Orlando Furioso, but the bits that I did are fascinating and they don't necessarily appear in this opera. So go enjoy that long epic poem by Ariosto. And also any opportunity. I always say this on Opera for Everyone, any opportunity to see these works performed in full or even, for that matter, grab the CD or grab it from a streaming service. We're setting you up to enjoy a full performance.

[Jeff Counts]

Absolutely. And you might think that the reset aria rhythm of baroque opera would get tedious after a while. This piece, even in its cut down version, can be three hours long. But there's something about those guideposts that each of the arias represent for these emotional moments in the story, you never get bored. It's really fascinating to me how something that seems kind of samey as it progresses actually has a lot of variation and a lot of capacity for depth and range. Emotionally, it's amazing.

[Pat Wright]

In a modern presentation of these operas, you can see a good director really putting things on stage that help the audience understand that, because not all of us have perfectly trained and prepared ears to hear it all in the music. We'll understand it on a subliminal level, but a good director can really help out.

[Jeff Counts]

Absolutely.

[Pat Wright]

Yeah. Well, we've finished with Ruggiero's hypocrisy. Things are going to work out with Bradamante. I'll just let you know that we.

[Jeff Counts]

Finished with his hippogriff for the moment and his hypocrisy. But the hippogriff might return in my version. It does not. But I'll be really interested to hear what you saw in the production that you watched. But I'm curious how they handled Alcina's defeat in the version that you watched, because in the story, Orlando, during his madness, grabs a statue that he thinks is an entrapped Angelica and tries to rescue her, manages to break it, which unleashes the ashes and breaks Alcina's power. It's one of the lamest defeats in the history of villains, I think. I wonder how they handled it in your version.

[Pat Wright]

Well, honestly, no. My version killed off the hippogriffs. Version that I watched also got rid of a lot of what we've already discussed in the third act. It was a little more, honestly, incomprehensible. A close reading of the libretto is what gives me as much understanding as I have. So go see a full production and enjoy the music. But sometimes reading libretto is not a bad idea. It's really not.

[Jeff Counts]

Especially in something like this, where the third act is subject to a lot of chopping. Directors really do carve up this act a lot. For example, the version that I watched, not only did it not have a hippogriff ever in it, there's no statue and there's no, like, physical representation.

[Pat Wright]

There's no statue. Statue.

[Jeff Counts]

Merlin's ashes.

[Pat Wright]

I did see a statue. And again on stage, it's not necessarily. It's hard to depict what's going on, because part of his madness is he thinks this statue, and I'm getting this from the libretto, but he thinks that this statue is Angelica. That's part of his delusion and he's A powerful man. And in his fury, that's how he breaks this. Just like in his fury, he breaks out. He's able to break the chain of the mace that's holding it to this immortal guardian.

[Jeff Counts]

Yes.

[Pat Wright]

Once the mace is out of his hand, he is able to be defeated. Orlando defeats him. He's still a powerful man, Crazy or not. The statue breaks, the ashes are freed and the enchantment is broken.

[Jeff Counts]

Her power dissipates completely. But it was inadvertent. He didn't even mean to do it.

[Pat Wright]

It wasn't. But he was given the task of achieving this. And so he does, even though he's out of his mind. And the characters say repeatedly throughout, particularly Astolfo and Bradamante and Ruggiero, that he's gone crazy, he's lost his wits, any sort of expression, like he's not in his right mind, but he still achieves what he was sent there to achieve. Not his own desire, but his assigned task. And the whole thing exhausts him. But it's beautifully explained in the libretto, when this statue is broken, when the ashes are no longer in the possession of Alcina, the enchantment is broken. And it's not just, she can't do things in the future. The glorious palace, all of the structures, and it's just an island, it's just vegetation. And Alcina is not a beautiful woman anymore, and that's hard to depict on stage. So it's pretty much not done.

[Jeff Counts]

Just sort of happens in your mind. And you're right. When everything falls away, she is not only exposed, but I think everyone in the cast is exposed as well. They all have to reckon with the parts of themselves they brought to this story. It doesn't happen overtly in the libretto, but it happens for me as a viewer.

[Pat Wright]

Yeah.

[Jeff Counts]

And when you just mentioned Astolfo and Ruggiero and Bradamante as a group, they do become one in the third act of this.

[Pat Wright]

Yes.

[Jeff Counts]

And I think that's one of the things that bugs me about Ruggiero, is that he doesn't deserve to be with the other two. I can imagine him sidling up to them and saying, yeah, can you believe all this? And one of them should say to him, no, dude, you weren't here from the beginning.

[Pat Wright]

Okay, I'm just going to reference you back to the source material. He is one of the ancestors of the commissioning. I know nobility. I know when this poem is first written. So he has to maintain a certain elevation and dignity, I guess.

[Jeff Counts]

I'm Bradamante on this podcast. I just can't forgive him for that.

[Pat Wright]

Oh, you know, he was enchanted.

[Jeff Counts]

He was.

[Pat Wright]

I think I almost can forgive him, to tell you the truth. Yeah, yeah. And Bradamante at this point can reveal her true self. She no longer has to disguise herself as her brother. And Alcina, who's like, okay, well, I still have this love here. The new young man, wink, wink. Who is Bradamante dressed up? She's got nothing. And she seeks vengeance. She sees Orlando, who is exhausted from all of his efforts. She sees him lying, vulnerable. He's asleep, and she's going to take vengeance on him.

[Jeff Counts]

She picks up a sword and tries to do him in. And luckily the others stop her. Astolfo and Bradamante and Ruggiero are able.

[Pat Wright]

To stop our three torpedoes there.

[Jeff Counts]

Yeah, our three musketeers, they're able to stop her and keep Orlando alive. And she, at this point, is completely and utterly defeated. In some productions, she actually. They have her cast an eye towards Astolfo at this moment, like maybe. And he's like, no, no, that ship has sailed. So she's completely defeated at this point and bereft and desperate.

[Pat Wright]

Yes. And also, speaking of Bradamante having clarity here, Bradamante still points to Angelica and says, this great man, this great Orlando, has gone mad and it's your fault. Your fault. And also, Astolfo's gonna do one more great deed here towards the end. Remember the hippogriff that Ruggiero gave him?

[Jeff Counts]

The one I wasn't allowed to see in the first place?

[Pat Wright]

The one that you did not see, but trust me, it's there. The hippogriff that he planned to use to go recover the remains of his comrade, well, instead he flies off to outer space on the hippogriff. He'll never guess what he finds in outer space.

[Jeff Counts]

The sanity of his pal.

[Pat Wright]

Well, okay, you read. He finds Orlando's reason, his sanity. It is a ball of light or some sort of light. It is the light of his reason. And he's able to restore reason to Orlando with this light that he has retrieved from the moon. Outer space, somewhere beyond the earth.

[Jeff Counts]

Maybe we buried the lead that this is actually the first Sci fi story, maybe a trip to the moon or at least to the celestial spheres to find reason. Who saw that coming?

[Pat Wright]

In this story, you know, it's a little bit like a dais ex machina, a little bit without seeing the gods show up, right? Yeah. So he will get his sanity back and things are not good for Alcina.

[Jeff Counts]

No, she is, like I said, bereft, desperate. And she actually, in one last gasp of meanness, promises that she will call upon the deep, the very profondo that Orlando referenced earlier, and she will try to find demons or spirits or something to come to this mortal plane and assist her in her vengeance. Spoiler alert. It doesn't work.

[Pat Wright]

It doesn't work. Well, the evil wants vengeance. And the good people, what are they left with?

[Jeff Counts]

They're left with constancy and love. And love.

[Pat Wright]

Constancy and love. Yeah.

[Jeff Counts]

It's interesting to me, Pat, that at the very end of Orlando Furioso, we get the chorus. The chorus only shows up twice in the entire opera. There's two chorus moments. Once at the wedding and then once here at the very, very end. And I find those two moments to be rhyming a bit. This one at the end is maybe a little more bittersweet than sweet because not everyone is leaving this island intact. And it's interesting, in the production that I saw, while the chorus is singing this music about flowers and myrtles and happiness ever after, everyone goes off on their merry way, they are released and they leave, except for Orlando, who in the production I saw as the curtain drops, is still stumbling around the stage, not truly fully recovered. I think it's a really interesting way to play the ending.

[Pat Wright]

Well, you needed the hippogriff to go get his reason.

[Jeff Counts]

Exactly.

[Pat Wright]

You needed that because there is resolution in the libretto as written.

[Jeff Counts]

He wakes up just enough to bless the wedding.

[Pat Wright]

Right, Right. Well, he regains his reason. And part of what his reason does is it makes him recognize the sacred bonds of marriage.

[Jeff Counts]

Exactly.

[Pat Wright]

He recognizes that his beloved Angelica has married another man. And he says, you two children go off and enjoy being wedded to each other. He is completely at peace with that here, which is fascinating.

[Jeff Counts]

It is.

[Pat Wright]

And Astolpho, our grounded, sensible character here, will say the last line, besides the chorus, where he says, wise are those who learn prudence from their mistakes. And so he's putting a pin in it that Orlando has learned he's become wiser. Yes. He has made mistakes. I mean, he. What a guy this Astolfo is, really. He gets the reason back.

[Jeff Counts]

Yeah.

[Pat Wright]

He lets us know Orlando's okay. He's learned from this. Again, I think he's going to find some love.

[Jeff Counts]

I hope so, in his future. Astolfo is the real moral compass for me as a viewer of this story. And him getting the last word, I think, is totally appropriate. Orlando, as I said, in the depiction of the story that I saw is a little too broken to come all the way back. The cost was too high. But he is able to give that last blessing to send off Angelica with at least some measure of grace, grace that our buddy Ruggiero certainly wasn't willing to give her. But he's able to sort of tie that knot for her, the knot of matrimony. That's why I think it's important that the chorus shows up at this moment, because that chiming with the earlier moment in Act 2 is not just musically interesting. I think from a narrative standpoint, it locks in not only what Astolfo Sundays, but what Orlando's able to do in that moment of clarity.

[Pat Wright]

Perfect. And we're going to hear some of that. But first I would like to say Jeff Counts thank you so much for joining me today and talking about this amazing opera.

[Jeff Counts]

I loved it so much. Pat, thank you for having me.

[Pat Wright]

Thanks for listening to this episode of Opera for Everyone. Opera for Everyone airs every Sunday morning from 9 to 11am Mountain Time on 89.1 Khol in Jackson, Wyoming. If you've missed any of today's show, you can find this episode and many others on the Opera for Everyone podcast. And while you're there, please subscribe, rate and comment. By doing this, you'll be helping others to find us. I know opera can be unfamiliar and challenging, but everyone loves a good story, and a story set to music is even better. That's why the mission of this show is to make opera enjoyable for everyone. Opera for Everyone.