On Thu, 6 Apr 2000, Jocelyn Gooch wrote:
> Anyway, aside from the technical difficulties, including preparing for a few > C's that are new to me, I'm confused with the non-singing role of Estella. > There is nothing in the score to tell me who she is. Her neice? Her > neighbor? A student? Her illegitimate child???? Miss Havisham calls her 'my > sweet, my pretty, my coney' and then gives her unsolicited advice about men. > Is there information out there somewhere? Anybody got a bead on Dominick > Argento? I looked him up on the internet, but there is nothing about the > intricacies of the plot.
Miss Havisham is the "villainess" of Charles Dickens' novel GREAT EXPECTATIONS. Estella is her niece, who Miss Havisham has raised to have the same disdain for the male half of the population that Miss Havisham has. Miss Havisham, years before the novel opens, was left at the altar by her fiance, and that event was THE seminal event of her entire life. It totally unhinged her psychologically, and became her obsession. Which is why, by the time the novel begins, she is living as a recluse, still wearing her by then faded, tattered (and I imagine really smelly) wedding dress, and why she has never had the wedding breakfast cleared from the table in the dining room.
Miss Havisham "sics" Estelle on the hero of the novel, Pip, with the intention of having Pip fall in love with Estelle, who will then, of course, reject him and break his heart: Miss Havisham's vengeance on Men. Miss Havisham also allows Pip to go on falsely believing that she is actually a benefactress to him. All in all, she is a psychologically dubious, malevolent character.
If you really want to prepare well for the opera, you should read GREAT EXPECTATIONS. If undertaking a novel of Dickensian length is more than you want to do, get hold of the recent BBC dramatisation (it was shown on Masterpiece Theatre a few months ago) on video and watch it; alternately, the classic film with John Mills as Pip and Dame Edith Evans as Miss Havisham is also quite good, albeit not as scrupulously true to Dickens as the BBC version. Plus the BBC version has the "plus" of starring Ioan Gruffud, who played Horatio Hornblower on the fantastic dramatised series of C.S. Forester novels shown on Arts & Entertainment last year.
Karen Mercedes ----- Ich singe, wie der Vogel singt, Der in den Zweigen wohnet; Das Lied, das aus der Kehle dringt, Ist Lohn, der reichlich lohnet. -- J.W. von Goethe, WILHELM MEISTER
My NEIL SHICOFF Website: http://www.radix.net/~dalila/shicoff/shicoff.html
My Website: http://www.radix.net/~dalila/index.html
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