Pacific Opera Victoria founding artistic director Timothy Vernon is giving audiences a look into the work of Greek comedic poet Aristophanes with the opera The Birds. Aristophanes was a satirist, using his work to comment on the society of his day.
“What he was writing wasn’t necessarily through-line plots as [it was] satires, making fun of what he thought was foolish in the Athens of his day, fifth-century BC Athens,” says Vernon. “Aristophanes is the only great comic poet we have from the Greeks, but his satires are still funny, even though a lot of the jokes are about contemporary Athens.”
Vernon says that this particular opera has a sweetness and an innocence to it.
“There is a love story in it, but it’s not about people dying… a lot of people think opera’s all about people dying, this is not that,” he says. “This stays rooted in comedy but there is a love story in it.”
The Birds is a very unusual opera, says Vernon, because it was lost in history for a while.
“It’s an opera that kind of disappeared,” he says. “It premiered in 1920 in Munich. It was a huge success, it had 50 performances in its very first run. It’s in the tradition of German romantic opera, which is to say it’s not so much a realistic story as a kind of fantasy. All the composers since Mozart, who wrote The Magic Flute, have loved to show things beyond the human, in a good way, the happy end of fantasy. Some of them have written darker things too, but it lives in that in-between space, somewhere like A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
Vernon was drawn to The Birds mainly for its style, even if it’s not the most well-known opera.
“I have a lot of German in my family history and when I went to study music, I studied in Vienna, which for a long time was the capital of music in Europe,” he says. “That’s the tradition that I absorbed in my very young years, when I was 18 and I lived there for 11 years. Although this individual work isn’t that well known, it’s in a style and in a way I recognize… and I came to love it.”
Vernon says that he would love the audience to have a very emotional and wonderful experience coming to see the show.
“[It’s] a fantasy that is full of innocence but a thoughtful idea about human nature and society in general, but at the same time it has a charm, it has a sweetness to it, an innocence to it that we don’t always get,” he says. “We’re in an age where zombie films are the most popular, and this is the complete other direction from that. In that sense, it might feel a little bit old fashioned but I don’t think so, I think it’s something people will really love.”
The Birds
Various times,
February 22, 24, 26, and 28
Various prices (community preview tickets $15),
Royal Theatre
rmts.bc.ca