Don’t Fucking Mansplain Wagner, Thanks

Coming Home
© Kwest19 | Dreamstime Stock Photos
Everyone around us is saying “snow! snow!” We have not a flake, not a trickle. It’s not even cold enough.

I’m not complaining. The last incidence of snow-n-ice was more than enough for me, thanks.

The weekend was full of many things, not the least of which was trying to get some housecleaning done. I did try to get the glut of work dropped on me at the end of the working week done, but weekend means other priorities. (Don’t get me started, dear God.) I am almost done with the shawl, courtesy of last night’s knit-and-livetweet-an-opera.

It was Parsifal, the Met version, and I couldn’t make it. Four fucking hours of watching Wagner; I bailed at three. Everyone on the stage was moving through molasses. I should have done the livetweet on a drinking night, except I would have dropped even more stitches. (Look, Jonas Kaufmann was Parsifal, and dude is mega hot. I want to see that stone fucking fox as Don Jose now.)

I think a lot of the problem with Parsifal is Act I. It’s two goddamn hours of exposition. I really didn’t need two hours to figure out Amfortas got stabbed, wound won’t heal, Klingsor has the Spear, Kundry is the focus of Wagner’s HYOOOOJ misogyny. (He was as misogynistic as he was anti-Semitic, and that’s saying something.) It was interesting to see the endurance contest on stage, with singers forced to stand and look interested while the orchestra plows on through chord after chord. Really, you could have condensed that into a prelude and gone straight to Act II, which could have been crackerjack blazes–I mean, a garden of vampiric flowers! Blood on the stage! Kundry and Parsifal and their Oedipal little thing! Klingsor with the FUCKING SPEAR OF DESTINY!–but instead draaaaaaaaaags as well.

Even a mega-uber-hawt Parsifal couldn’t save the damn thing. Let the tenor sing, Wagner! JESUS WANTS TO HEAR THE TENOR SING.

Kundry, as usual with women in Wagner’s operas, is a powerful force just aching to escape the chains the composer tries to clap on everything female. Katarina Dalayman is just fantastic, a bright spot in the Catholic cannibal masturbation-fest Wagner wanted. Most of the time onstage she looks like an immortal woman who just wants some sleep, or, barring that, a soy latte to get her through the foolishness of the men around her. When she laughs at the knights, it’s a beautiful bitterness, and more than once I just wanted her and Kaufmann to run away and adopt little opera children.

The staging was innovative, but Jesus, I really would have liked this effort to have gone for some other opera that isn’t a gigantic snoozefest.

Anyway. The other highlight of the livetweet was neckbeards trying to mansplain Wagner to me. *eyeroll* I mock, true, but it’s in a loving fashion, and my patience for anyone mansplaining opera to me is infinitesimal. I love how neckbeards think my mockery means I must be Educated in the True Meaning of Wagner. For some reason, the Wags just brings out the asshole factor ramped up to eleven. (To be fair, I keep calling the Grail the Magic Vajayjay, but you know, I stand by that.)

SO that was my weekend, and I’ll probably livetweet the rest of Parsifal tonight, because I have a bottle of cheap wine and nowhere to drive this evening. Hopefully the third act will be all about Kundry finally getting her soy latte and my hope that Parsifal will again take his shirt off. Rawr.

Over & out.