Hammerstein research

I've just spent a considerable time trying to establish exactly what opera with which singers really did open Oscar Hammerstein I's Manhattan Opera House: one source claims that it was "Norma" (hard to picture Christine Daaé rehearsing the role of Norma) but in fact it seems to have been another Bellini opera, "I Puritani", with the obscure Polish soprano Regine Pinkert in the lead. (In fact it looks as if this may have been the end for her of a career that started in 1892.)

But sadly for Andrew Lloyd Webber's plot, this opening night was actually December 3rd 1906 -- so Christine could hardly have been engaged "to open his new Manhattan Opera House" in summer 1907! Perhaps I should theorise that it was actually the start of a new season that she was supposed to be promoting... or simply feel at liberty to imitate the historical inaccuracy of the source material :-p

I thought I'd successfully patched last night's plot holes, ( Read more... )

If I were Vicomte (ch2)

I'm still not particularly happy with the first chapter of my Hammerstein-story, despite having rewritten three pages of it to cut out most of René and add in old Oscar himself. My suspicion is that it's a boring info-dump — and while I'm usually pretty good at those, the trouble is that this time no-one has any reason to care about any of the characters involved, Jos, McWhirter or René. So it's effectively just a massive plot summary to describe 'how Christine managed to go missing in the middle of New York', as told from the point of view of characters who didn't actually witness it :-(

It's frustrating, because I still think the idea in itself is original and promising; the experience does at least have the merit of making this preceding story seem better in contrast, even if this one is pretty fragmentary!

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2. Matelot

It was three years before he saw Christine again, and when he did it was under very different circumstances. His father’s boat, caught by unseasonal gales, had put in at Toulon, and there the boy had caught the attention of the navy. Well-grown and muscled for his age, and handy on the water, Yann Le Coennec was just the type of sailor on whom the fleet had had its eye for centuries immemorial, and the long and the short of it was that young Yann had found himself enlisted almost willy-nilly into the Marine National — the service which he soon learned to call ‘La Royale’, the nickname for the navy time out of mind.

Yann accepted it with a shrug, as he accepted most things these days. But when he found himself with a few days’ embarkation leave a brief flicker of independence woke, and he turned aside from the long road back from his dépôt to call at the little house in Perros-Guirec.( Read more... )