A Night at the Opera

Friday I was invited to the Liceu Opera: Richard Strauss' Cavaller de la Rosa. Richard? Yes, not Johann. It was interesting. With three acts with two 30 min intermissions, the opera didn't end till 9pm or so. And it started at 4:30pm. The story behind the opera was an older woman who realizes her affair with a 17 year old boy won't work and so she lets him go by setting up this mission for him to deliver a silver rose to a young lady as an engagement present on behalf of this other fellow. The idea is for the boy to fall in love with this girl, which he does, etc. It's somewhat complicated, one of those "you'd have to have been there" type explanations.

The interior of the opera house was very nice. I was told it is something of a "gift" from Madrid to the Catalans, and so the building's exterior and interior styles are not really indicative of Catalan taste. That's about the only way I can express it. After the opera we walked around town and my friends showed me the Catalan style of building exemplified by the Palau Musica, where they said I should go see a show there some evening. If I go I'll take pictures so you can get a comparison of the buildings. Here, at the Liceu, was my first operatic experience. What struck me about the stage was that it had HDTV-like dimesions: it seemed as though I was looking at a super high-res TV set, that had depth. Perhaps that's what TV is trying to emulate: the live stage? This "live TV" also had subtitles! Do all operas provide this service? I had no idea. The white bar above the stage is where they're displayed.

The subtitles are also available in a little electronic window in the back of the seat in front of your own. And the subtitles are the reason why I got tickets to the opera in the first place. The department that invited me here (Traduccio i Interpretacio) is the department of translation and interpretation, and subtitles is what they do (among other things—they also train interpreters, like the ones that work at the UN, e.g., as portrayed by Nicole Kidman in The Interpreter which I watched coincidentally just before coming here). The university has a kind of mini mock UN classroom that they use for training purposes. And subtitles is what I'm now doing as well—the code I'm writing is for eye tracking while watching video, where the video contains subtitles. I'll describe that in another post, once I get my code working...