A Night At the Opera!

Hi everyone!  Big announcement!  Emma Close is now an opera-going-girl!  And it was pretty awesome too!

Basically, my school's music class tries to go on a couple of music/arts-related outings every year, and last Tuesday, we got the chance to go out to the St. Etienne Opera to see Jules Massenet's Werther.  I didn't really know what to expect for my first opera, but I was honestly blown away by what I saw and heard.

I'll admit, the story wasn't incredibly original, but I guess I'll forgive them for that ;) . Actually, it kind of had the classic opera plot of: man loves woman, woman is married, man keeps chasing woman around anyway, woman loves him back but tells him to go away anyway, man kills himself and takes a good thirty minutes to sing himself to death in woman's arms.  On Christmas.  With a choir of children singing in the background.  A little cheesy maybe, but the singing made up for it a million times over.  It's absolutely breathtaking to see people put such power into their voice, and to tell an entire story without any spoken dialogue at all.

As I'm told, the opera was based on a German story but written by a French man, so it's sung in French... with French subtitles, since singing opera in French requires some tweaking of the letter "r" and pronunciation of normally silent syllables, plus the fact that it's sung and doesn't follow the normal French pattern of keeping a sentence fairly monotone and raising the voice on the last word or two... all of which can make a totally normal French text sound like... well, Fr-italian, frankly.  Anyway, having the subtitles really helped certain exchange students (especially those who aren't well-versed in opera) understand what was going on.

So, the big conclusion: French opera is pretty awesome.  I highly recommend it.

Update After the Great Hiatus... Sorry!

Hi again everyone!  Apologies for the several weeks of non-posting; it's all been a bit of a rush!  Basically, I've spent the past three weeks:

• Exploring Paris and Barcelona by bus with other exchange students
• Having my REAL DAD coming to visit me
• Sightseeing in Rome with said REAL DAD (and making my mom extremely jealous- I'll be home soon, Mom!!!)
• Changing host families (for the last time this year!)
• Settling back into school routines after winter vacation

... All while attempting to chip away at scholarships a little bit. :P

So, you can see that I've been busy!  Since I'm tired tonight, I figured I'd just put up a couple of pictures from my recent adventures, and then do a proper blog post soon.  Here we go:



Eiffel Tour with my Rohit, my Indian friend, and Jacques, my counselor and one of our chaperones.



First floor of the Eiffel Tower with some friends :)


(My phone's not being very cooperative right now, but I promise I'll be putting some other pictures up as soon as I can get them onto my computer!  Anyway, just wanted to show you I've emerged from my epoch of non-blogging darkness :P)