BUSY WEEKEND II

Sunday afternoon I was back at Lincoln Center, this time for a performance of Ariane et Barbe-bleue (Bluebeard) at the New York City Opera. The City Opera is the "other" opera company at Lincoln Center, number two to the great Metropolitan Opera. It often does operas, such as this, that would fail to find a large enough audience at the Met--which needs 3800 backsides to fill all the seats in its hall. The tickets are half the price of the Met's. Usually, though, you only get what you pay for--if you're that lucky.

The music was by Paul Dukas, the French composer of the most famous piece of cartoon music not associated with Bugs Bunny: The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Walt Disney cast Mickey Mouse as the apprentice in Fantasia, and Dukas' music will live therefore forever. It probably would have lived on anyway, at least at pops concerts, because it is a cute little piece.

But, the 1907 Ariane et Barbe-bleue is not. Richard Wagner was a great enough composer to write operas where there really aren't any melodies, but Dukas was not. It also helped Wagner to have characters whose motivations were clear. Ariane's was not. I've read all kinds of things about her--it was curiosity and/or greed that moved her to disobey her husband and use the forbidden key, or that she wanted to liberate his earlier wives whom she thought (correctly) were still alive. As far as I can tell in this opera it's all of the above. (The libretto was written by Maurice Maeterlinck, the winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize for Literature. I am not surprised that this work was not listed on his official Nobel biography.)

Instead of fleeing after Ariane frees them, the earlier wives stay. They've been locked up in a dungeon, but they do not run at the earliest opportunity. They even tend to the wounds of Bluebeard, the man who imprisoned them.

So it boils down to one of your stupider opera plots. People do things for a bunch of conflicting reasons, or for no good reason. Even the scenery started acting for no good reason--a rotating wall, used to shift from scene to scene, started turning continuously at the end. Stupid plot plus tuneless music does not equal a good time at the opera for me.

It wasn't helped by the performances. The key role, of course, is Ariane, who is on stage singing for almost the entire opera. (Despite being a title character, Bluebeard is a minor role.) The Austrian Renate Behle belted out Ariane, as someone put it, as if she were Brunhilde. Perhaps Carol Vaness would have done better--this was to be her role before she got in a car accident last summer. But she would still have had to contend with the conducting of Leon Botstein, the music director of the American Symphony. More than one person said his interpretation was Wagnerian, when it should have been French.

But I survived. There was some time left before dinner, so we braved the wind and walked over to the New-York Historical Society, to see the new "Slavery in New York" exhibition. It was the last day they would be showing an original manuscript of the Emancipation Proclamation--not that it really had anything to do with slavery in New York. Slavery had been abolished here nearly 40 years previously, and the Proclamation only covered the slaves in states that had seceded anyhow.

But the manuscript was there, on loan for a few days from the New York State Library in Albany. Protected by thick glass and a pistol-toting woman state trooper (Nobody looks good in one of those Smokey-the-Bear hats), Abraham Lincoln's clear handwriting, with Secretary of State William Seward 's penciled modifications, could be seen for half a minute or so by each of the many people lined up. It was interesting that Lincoln used the cut-and-paste method. There were two sections of previous laws dealing with the freeing of slaves, that he had cut out from somewhere and pasted into his manuscript.

There wasn't much time left to see the real exhibition. I barely finished the first two rooms. Fortunately it will be there until March, because I do want to go back to finish it. It is filled with a lot of multi-media works, and seemed to be very well done, from what I saw.

Eventually it was time to go, as we had dinner reservations at Nice Matin. We were lucky enough to get a table at the far end, because it can get very noisy near the bar. I had about the best sweetbread appetizer I've ever eaten. It came with a very spicy sausage, which complemented the bland meat. The whole thing was served over a bed of lentils. My grilled halibut was good, but nothing out of the ordinary. The berries and cream, as well as the coffee, were excellent. And instead of wine, I had a bottle of Lindeman's Lambic Pêche beer. This was the first time I ever had the peach-flavored one, and I found it even better than the raspberry flavor.

Then it was home to watch the second episode of "The Murder Room," the detective Adam Dalgliesh story by P.D. James, part of the PBS Mystery! series on Channel 13. I'll never be able to watch Siân Phillips in any role without seeing Livia from "I, Claudius," though.