So I’m trying to find photos of a particular opera costume that I saw on PBS a decade or so ago. Not finding it because I don’t remember enough about it. Can you help?
Here’s what I remember, or think I remember:
[ul]
[li]big American production, not sure where, maybe the Met[/li][li]I think the soprano was an American[/li][li]the opera was set in pre-commie Russia around the turn of the century[/li][li]gorgeous costumes throughout, but the one I’m trying to find was …mostly blue[/li][li]…in a late act, maybe the third[/li][li]…in a scene set in the soprano’s home with a big party going on[/li][li]…very art-deco elegant in that pre-flapper style, like Erte[/li][li]…featured pants, like pantaloons, loose and blousy at the bottom[/li][li]…may have been meant to be particularly Russian, as in, a highly stylized but vaguely folkloric outfit[/li][/ul]
Any ideas? My Google fu is letting me down.
Do you remember anything about the plot? Or about the composer? When you say pre-communist Russia, was that the original setting that the composer wrote about, or where/when the director decided to set the piece?
PBS probably keeps some sort of record of their opera broadcasts; I’d have a look there. (And if it was definitely PBS, it may also have been San Fransisco, Chicago or Houston, though it is most likely the Met.)
Hope this helps…
Just a couple of suggestions - could it have been Tchaikovsky’s ‘Queen of Spades’ or ‘Eugene Onegin’? Both of them are intended to be set in Imperial Russia and have glamourous ballroom scenes. It could also have been Mussorgsky’s ‘Boris Godunov’, which features a ballroom scene at the Polish court.
You haven’t mentioned anything about the language in which it was sung. Was it in English? Or something foreign (and if so, do you remember what)?
*Queen of Spades *was my first thought.
Hi and thank you both. I wish I remembered more!
My instinct is that it was in Italian, but I really don’t remember.
I don’t think it was Tchaikovsky; at least, the images I Googled under those two titles weren’t what I was looking for, and I think the designer would have had to deliberately set the opera later than any of his original settings, going by the style I so poorly remember, which I think would have been more in the 1910’s or so.
Quick look at PBS was unhelpful. Will return later, but a search on operas on Great Performances only goes back a little while, like maybe a year, certainly nothing like the decade this would have been. I saw this sometime around 2000 - 2002. I do remember that at the time or within a few years of seeing it I was able to find images of the costume online, and it seemed as though it had been a big-deal production, like one that was still listed at the top of the soprano’s resume, or where the costume description was “this famous outfit from ____” or something.
ETA: Quick search on Boris Godunov doesn’t bring up anything familiar either.