Well worth the wait

My mom tells a story:

When I was four or so, I was playing downstairs in our basement family room, and Mom noticed that it had gotten very quiet. Uncharacteristically so. So she called down the stairs to me, "...what are you doing, honey...?" and my little 4-year-old voice piped back, after a minute, "...watching Carmen."

She tells it better than I can, but I had apparently found a production of the opera on PBS or something, and was totally mesmerized. I remember vaguely, and probably from some other time later, this: a woman in a red dress, ochre-colored background stuff, and the melody that is probably one of the most recognizable things on earth. When I was a bit older, my ballet teacher (yes, ballet - it was very short-lived) used music from "Carmen" for our recitals. I remember different figure skaters using it for their routines when I was a kid. It's rapture. I have always loved it, in the back of my head.

Tonight, I got lucky. Very lucky. The Staatsoper was doing a production, only 3 shows, and with singers famous enough to have recordings of their music in the opera lobby. I was away in Hamburg for the first two shows, and then returned to find it completely, hopelessly sold out. I tried everything I knew, got a bunch of different answers, and still had no ticket an hour before tonight's performance. But my last ditch effort was to go to the opera and see if anyone had tickets they wanted to get rid of. And so I and another girl from my second set of classes (who has a similar Carmen memory - someone should check this out) went to the opera, and found quite a few well-dressed older ladies with very, very good seats to sell. We bought our tickets at a reduced price, and ended up sitting next to the same black-clad elegant woman who sold them to us, and who then proceeded to tell us all about the stars, the production, what other opera events are going on, and so on. The performance was broadcast live on German television, too. We were in the 10th row.

I didn't expect it to be so sexy, and so driven, in a way. Probably best that my 4-year-old self just saw a woman in a pretty red dress and didn't get all of the passion and intrigue and prostitution and attempts at stabbing one's rival. I also didn't remember so many other distinctive pieces of music. The principals were impressively loud, and the company, all together, was almost shockingly so. There was a 15-minute ovation, mostly standing, at the end - true to form for Germany - and people actually threw flowers at the diva.

I've gushed enough about Berlin, and opera, and what-have-you, to deserve a link from the Berlin tourism bureau, but I am literally without words to describe tonight. I just have such a beautiful life. If I don't do another cultural thing in Berlin or hear any music that I care to remember, for the next however long, this will have been enough. More than enough.

[And if anyone can help me find a link to any clips from the score, please let me know...]