Back.

My last day in Zurich I was too exhausted to do much but wander around (and have tea in the Cabaret Voltaire). I did, however, go to the opera that night--we got last-minute tickets for Rigoletto. I think it was the first fully-staged opera I'd ever seen, not counting the field trip where they got us nosebleed tickets at the Met and we got to watch two-millimeter-tall figures performing Don Giovanni from half a mile away. Rigoletto was utterly amazing, especially considering half the cast appeared to be out with bronchitis and I believe that both Rigoletto and Gilda were understudies. The first act was a little bit confusing, since all the court scenes were performed in 16th-century regalia and all the other costumes looked very mid-19th-century bourgeois, so I had trouble keeping track of who was who. (Not helped by the supertitles being in German, and my German not being up to snuff.) But I bought a program and libretto at intermission, so I understood the second and third acts better. And fully-staged opera is so so so much more fun than concert versions.

So now I'm back home after an uneventful flight, and futzing around the house doing nothing in particular. Trying to play some of the stuff out of my Sweeney Todd vocal selections, but my piano skillz are rusty so the only one I'm not having heaps of trouble with is "Johanna." I'm making some headway on "Not While I'm Around," too, but it has a huge spread and lots of LH/RH crossing over, which keeps tripping me up.

Random: Apparently my accent in both French and German is recognizably foreign, but not clearly American; nobody had any idea where I was from when the subject came up in small-talk. The most common guess was Irish (yay stereotypes? I guess I pull off the red hair pretty well), and a couple of people even assumed I was Swiss-German when I was speaking French. Nobody guessed American. In fact, when I said I was, I got a lot of "An American who speaks [French/German]? That's abnormal!" jokes. (Yay stereotypes indeed.)

Back.

My last day in Zurich I was too exhausted to do much but wander around (and have tea in the Cabaret Voltaire). I did, however, go to the opera that night--we got last-minute tickets for Rigoletto. I think it was the first fully-staged opera I'd ever seen, not counting the field trip where they got us nosebleed tickets at the Met and we got to watch two-millimeter-tall figures performing Don Giovanni from half a mile away. Rigoletto was utterly amazing, especially considering half the cast appeared to be out with bronchitis and I believe that both Rigoletto and Gilda were understudies. The first act was a little bit confusing, since all the court scenes were performed in 16th-century regalia and all the other costumes looked very mid-19th-century bourgeois, so I had trouble keeping track of who was who. (Not helped by the supertitles being in German, and my German not being up to snuff.) But I bought a program and libretto at intermission, so I understood the second and third acts better. And fully-staged opera is so so so much more fun than concert versions.

So now I'm back home after an uneventful flight, and futzing around the house doing nothing in particular. Trying to play some of the stuff out of my Sweeney Todd vocal selections, but my piano skillz are rusty so the only one I'm not having heaps of trouble with is "Johanna." I'm making some headway on "Not While I'm Around," too, but it has a huge spread and lots of LH/RH crossing over, which keeps tripping me up.

Random: Apparently my accent in both French and German is recognizably foreign, but not clearly American; nobody had any idea where I was from when the subject came up in small-talk. The most common guess was Irish (yay stereotypes? I guess I pull off the red hair pretty well), and a couple of people even assumed I was Swiss-German when I was speaking French. Nobody guessed American. In fact, when I said I was, I got a lot of "An American who speaks [French/German]? That's abnormal!" jokes. (Yay stereotypes indeed.)