Emmeline

My friend E and I went to dinner at The Block before the opera.  I hadn't been there in quite some time, and I sure do like it.

I started out with the bartender's cocktail of the evening.  I don't remember all the ingredients, but it was a citrus-inspired vodka concoction, and just what was needed on a humid evening.  E and I shared the flash-fried Brussels sprouts as an appetizer.  I realize that nearly every ounce of health-food-i-ness is removed from Brussels sprouts when they are friend, but I don't care because they were delicious.  I had their nightly special, and E and I shared a delicious bowl of ice cream before dashing off to the show.

SPOILERS FOLLOW, but it's a true story as well as being an old fable.  Consider yourself warned.

Emmeline is a tragic but true story of a girl sent to work in a textile mill in Lowell, away from her family.  The (married) mill owner took a liking to her, and she to him, and Emmeline became pregnant.  Her aunt, with whom she was living, hid the pregnancy and gave the baby daughter up for adoption to a couple who was moving to the west.  Twenty years passed, and Emmeline found herself back home with her family, caring for her aging mother.  Her younger siblings had married and had children, but Emmeline remained single.

Emmeline's family took on boarders to help cover expenses.  Emmeline and a much younger man fell in love.  They married.  Emmeline's mother passed away, and the aunt who had cared for Emmeline when she was young came for the funeral.  Much to Emmeline's horror, she discovers that the child she had had so many years earlier was a boy, not a girl as she always though.  Her husband was not 27 as he said, but 21.  His family came from Kansas, and Ohio before that, and Massachusetts before that.

He was her son.  How very Oedipal.  Everyone's eyeballs stayed in their heads, but the son ran off out of shame, and Emmeline was cast out by her family and the townspeople.

The first few pieces in this opera I did not like at all.  They were discordant and harsh.  But even as the first act went on and we got away from some of the choral pieces into duets, the situation vastly improved.  By the second act, even the choral pieces sounding better.  Though the show was extremely dark, I was entertained by the performance, and by the fact that the mill owner was booed by the crowd when he came out for his bow at the end of the show!