Last week, I attended a performance of Donizetti’s opera L’elisir d’amore at the Deutsche Staatsoper, on the east side of Berlin. The Staatsoper, for all its grandeur on the outside, turned out to be kind of dowdy on the inside. I imagine it wasn’t kept up well during the Communist years, and they just haven’t gotten around to redoing it, what with the thousands of other construction projects ongoing in that side of town. The hall was very short, so that the side balconies were approximately the same length as the back balcony. That made for a wonderfully intimate space where every patron had an excellent view of all the other patrons, as well as a close view of the stage.

I was not at all familiar with the opera, which was sung in Italian and super-titled in German. This necessitated some linguistic gymnastics (lingnastics?) in which I had to mentally translate the supertitles from German to English, mostly successfully, and then just for fun tried to match that meaning to the Italian words, mostly unsuccessfully. I got the gist of the plot, though: boy meets girl; boy loves girl; boy enlists in the army to get enough money to buy a love potion to get the girl; misunderstanding, misunderstanding, misunderstanding; boy gets girl.

The whole thing was pretty silly, but there was one point in the performance where the audience transitioned from “mildly entertained” to “enraptured.” Thanks to the house configuration I was able to observe the audience closely as it happened, which made it all very communal. Usually the soprano is the star of the opera, especially if she is pretty. This soprano was gorgeous, but for some reason it was the young tenor who held everyone’s attention. He sang a very pretty romantic aria in the second act, and you could just feel everyone’s focus sharpen on him. The last part of the aria was a capella, and the house grew absolutely silent. The tenor indulged in a long, dramatic pause before the final flourish…all eyes were fixed on him…and some idiot blew his nose. It didn’t ruin the effect, though. I think the crowd was even more partial to him after that. He got the most applause at the end, and the curtain call was so long I think I sprained my hand. I don’t know if the excessive applause was a European thing, or if he really was that good.

When I returned home I did a typical New England thing and attended a literary talk. (From the nineteenth-century novels of which I’m so fond, I get the impression that New England bluestockings of that era were always rushing around attending “improving lectures.” The Bostonians, which I finished on my trip and which was every bit as good as I had anticipated, lampooned this tendency.) Port City was putting on a literary festival. It was a spectacular effort, with multiple events scheduled every hour. The two talks I was most interested in attending, X. J. Kennedy and Richard Russo, were scheduled for the same hour. I chose the latter.

Russo wrote two books that I adored. The first, Straight Man, belongs to what is now a veritable subgenre of “frustrated English professor novels.” (See David Lodge’s Changing Places and Small World for exemplars.) As a former frustrated English professor, I enjoy reading about others’ pain. The second, Empire Falls, won a Pulitzer prize and was made into an HBO movie, which I have not yet seen. Russo is best known for Nobody’s Fool, which was adapted into a movie starring Paul Newman.

Russo spoke in the downtown Unitarian church, which I had never before entered. It was similar in style to the two other Protestant churches I’ve toured in Port City: plain, with hard straight box pews and big clear-glass windows. Russo’s microphone intermittently cut out, and he periodically eyed the high pulpit, concerned that he would be forced to deliver his lecture from there.

He read excerpts from his new short story collection, The Whore’s Child. Now, I am a fan of the short story, but more in theory than in principle. In other words, I have enormous respect for the power of the short story but strenuously avoid reading them. Once I drag myself metaphorically kicking and screaming into a story, though, I usually find something to admire. Thus I thoroughly enjoyed hearing Russo read three excerpts, and was tickled when he uttered a curse that had probably never before been proclaimed publicly in church. (Even Unitarians have their limits.)

What with the opera and the literary festival, I feel decidedly improved.