Hope! Blood! Turandot!*

Home in a rainy, wintry Berlin night and just back from seeing "Turandot" at the Deutsche Oper with my new friend Bess. We got in line early for the Abendkasse and scored second row center seats for 13 Euro, which made me glad the ticket guy gave me such good advice last weekend. I will now check all of the weekday performances and mark my calendar!

Tonight had a few firsts, though -- first time I really cared not a bit about the plot or book and just absolutely loved the music. It was transporting and big and amazing. It was a sort of new-German staging with lots of right angles and images projected onto screens in front of the action on stage (like La Traviata at the Staatsoper), modern clothes. Oddly enough, they had these weird hints of Chinese-ish stuff every so often, which I found jarring, cultural product placement. I'd kind of love to see a production that is full on fake historic Chinese, but that would be a bit much, too.

Also the first time a plot twist in an opera made me smack my companion in surprise. You see, they give you a synopsis of the story. It's a known quantity. Plus, everything is said two or three times, you read the surtitles, move along. And then the Germans go and do something like have the main characters kill their fathers in the last scene, and start going after surviving cast members with huge knives as the curtain falls!!! I actually really liked the end result, the feeling it left you, because the story ends up being less about love and triumph than about power and hunger. Or batshit craziness. Turandot, she's crazy.

But it was a nice reward for a not-very-rewarding day. Spending the morning trying to figure out my notes from a year ago underscored both how long I've been at this research, and how patient I will have to be as I'm writing up. The old handschrift is still no fun to spend an hour with, but I do usually figure it out. It's my little crossword puzzle of sorts. The bigger problem is that your mind changes over a year, things connect in different ways. I'll have to file and re-file as I go, I guess.

For those of you interested, I've decided to try combining the major parts of what I thought would be chapters two and three, to see how they work argument-wise for my seminar in three weeks. I've got the section of chapter three already written, so it makes my life a bit easier, but it also seems intuitive. Keywords are: tropical medicine - international - Germans - sleeping sickness - community - tension - appeal.

* Turandot poses three riddles to her would-be suitors, all of whom lose their heads but for our hero Calaf.