Colón, Again

I went to the Teatro Colón again this week. My second time since it reopened in May, but the last time we had seats in the Cazuela, an upper ring, and had to enter through a side door, so we didn't get to see the entire spectacular lobby. This time I splurged on a pricier ticket. The sound is the same (great), but the experience is rather different. It's one helluva theater.


That's the moon, not a streetlight, by the way. Anyway, I entered my box in the third ring (Palcos altos) through a private door. Here's the first view you get.

Every box has an entrance foyer, where you can hang your coats.


Those are the boxes to my left. The six seats in each box are unnumbered and you better get there early because the view from the front seats is fine, but the view from behind must be pretty lousy. Lots of people were standing behind the front-seat sitters. (As you can see, I did get there early enough to grab a front seat. Phew. I'd be cranky if I had to stand after paying that much for a ticket.)

The curtains are baroque and lovely.


Here's a view from my box.


At intermission, I walked down two levels and wandered around the glorious halls. Stuff like this:


A fine night at the opera. Oh, the operas? Two early 20th-century oddities, Zemlinsky's A Florentine Tragedy (based on a short story by Oscar Wilde) and Korngold's Violanta, chosen because they'd never been done at the Colón before and they wanted to do some premieres during their reopening season. The Korngold was lusher, more romantic (and over-heated, but in a fun way. Hard not to hear adolescent hormones pounding when you know he wrote the opera when he was 17); the Zemlinsky an intense 3-person chamber opera that has a great pair of final lines, Oscar Wilde's pervy idea of an O. Henry twist. An older merchant husband has been quite dismissive of his wife throughout. Nonetheless, he finally gets jealous enough to strangle her lover, the Prince. She's been hoping the Prince would kill her hubby for the whole opera, but now that the deed is done:

Wife: Why didn't you tell me you were so strong?
Husband: Why didn't you tell me you were so beautiful?

They climb over her lover's corpse to kiss. Curtain.