Ghosts of Versailles was just the livestream offering from the Met, which means i am once more Full Of Thoughts about this Perpetually Vexatious show

it's vexatious because it's doing such fascinating things with absurdism and sincerity, and some of the arias are SO good, but then it's got the orientalism and transmisogyny at the end of Act I and it's also . . . so Horny for absolute monarchy?? distressing

like obviously the French Revolution was . . . messy, and i'm not about to be like "everything the revolutionaries did was Good, actually", but like, absolute monarchy is not a . . . good system of government? and Marie Antoinette, like, very much was a monarch

Ghosts of Versailles spends a *lot* of time establishing how Traumatic Marie Antoinette's execution was, and like, yeah! sure! i can't imagine that being paraded thru a mob of people who *hate* you and then guillotined is like, fun. some of the charges at her trial were probs bs

but also like, Marie Antoniette absolutely spent lavishly on trivialities at a time when people were starving to death. she may not have *actually* said "let them eat cake!", but she unarguably lived a life of unimaginable luxury in the midst of crushing poverty

by any reasonable measure she just . . . was not a very good person. we can certainly argue about how much power she had as a woman given the setup of the state at the time, but like, she and Louis XVI were bad people. they caused tremendous, widespread, avoidable misery

and Ghosts of Versailles is just like "man! isn't it *such a bummer* how that turned out for Marie Antoinette??? wouldn't it be so beautiful if she had managed to live instead????". and t b q h really i'm just like ". . . no?" and the show . . . never really convinces me

i just keep going back to the moment in Act II where Bégearss holds up Marie Antoinette's necklace and says "this will be used to buy food for the hungry and homes for the homeless!" and the nobles scream "NO!" in shock and horror

...and we're supposed to root for the nobles?

and sure, Bégearss is a comic book villain, we might doubt he's actually going to use the necklace for that! but there are a lot of people who *do* genuinely want to take the trifles of the rich to provide for the needs of the masses, and a lot of people who *hate* them for it

there's . . . not really any indication that Almaviva et al are horrified because they think Bégearss is lying about his intentions; they think that necklace is the Queen's, and are horrified that it could just be Taken and used for the public good. which is . . . monstrous

(and here is maybe where one starts to wonder: how many people in the audience of the Met have a necklace kind of like that? how many of them would be horrified by the prospect of selling their jewels to feed the poor and house the homeless?)

sure, in the end Marie Antoinette reconciles to her death, but it's not from a place of "oh shit, i really fucked up, and the rage against me was actually . . . kind of justified, fuck", it's just . . . "i've made peace with this terrible thing that can't be changed"

(which like! is an interesting thread in the opera! there's so much interesting stuff about forgiveness and fallibility and finding peace and grace in fundamentally impossible situations in the show, and it's so Frustrating that it's just like, well,...

...you don't think poor people deserve to eat or that women deserve autonomy over your own lives, so like, my investment in your emotional world is . . . m i n i m a l. i want these themes and this music with characters who aren't all *massive* shitheads)

and the fact that that's the peace that Antoinette finds feels like Ghosts of Versailles is positioning Opera as like, an art for the rich, an art that, at its best, can do no more than make the rich feel at peace with their own obsolescence

it can't actually express the justified outrage of the masses — they're frenzied, rabid, almost incomprehensible, their demands elided and not given moral weight — nor can it change anyone's political commitments. it's a mournful palliative for a vanishing aristocratic stratum

which is just! a *really fucking bleak* vision of what opera is and what it can do and i hate it and i reject it even as . . . so much of the opera world seems to be a d a m a n t l y committed to it. i fight doomed fights sometimes, i guess

so like, yeah, idk! i feel like i'll never be free of this show, b/c there's so much on a small scale that i like, and yet so much on a large scale that i find *infuriating* and so i'm just Trapped in this love-hate relationship with it lmao

also it's Embarrassing that the LA Opera beat the Met to releasing a recording on CD of this opera, but that goes to show the relative priorities of the two companies!

also also: my KINGDOM for depictions of ~kink~ that aren't hardcore associated with villainy and/or sensationalized pls this is e x h a u s t i n g and also lazy and boring (~and also homophobic~)

anyway: what's your favorite anti-monarchy opera? and/or which opera do you think is the most viciously and unsparingly opposed to unmerited hereditary rule by unqualified randos who inherited it from other unqualified randos?