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Farcical farewells to 2007

Taipei's National Concert Hall has a tame New Year's Eve planned with an evening of Die Fledermaus and a Waltz Masquerade. PHOTO: COURTESY OF NSO

Die Fledermaus (or “the bat”) is the kind of thing genuine opera-lovers love to hate. All the musical profundity and exalted spirituality they hear in Mozart or Wagner is betrayed by this silly, frothy, sexually-repressed bourgeois farce. “This isn't opera!” they protest. Instead, it's operetta, the ancestor of the dreaded American musical, and should, they believe, be banished from the sacred precincts of the Temple of Art altogether.

And they're right. The world of Fledermaus is one of champagne magnums, hangovers, waltzing semi-seductively with your neighbor's wife and — needless to say — money problems. Fundamentally it's the deeply repressed expression of an haute bourgeoisie who still think they can have a good time despite being half-smothered-to-death by convention and being second cousin to the bank manager.

In Mozart's comedies people want to sleep with their servants and score 1003 sexual successes in Spain alone, while in Wagner brother and married sister make out, virtually on stage, in the ecstasy of spring. In Johann Strauss' straight-laced world, by contrast, men party with their flies tightly-buttoned, content to clasp their foreheads the next morning and laugh over how gloriously drunk they've been.

Still, New Year may for some people find its appropriate apotheosis in all this. The National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) is staging the premier on New Year's Eve at 8.30pm, presumably so that it ends as close to the chimes of midnight as possible. Afterwards there's a Waltz Masquerade in the National Concert Hall lobby, to which patrons wearing any kind of mask are cordially invited.

If there's any building on earth less likely to host a good party than Taipei's chilly and aloof National Concert Hall, I don't know it. But then that's the whole point of operetta. You pretend to be having a good time while simultaneously remaining good parents and sound investors, and not daring to even think about what a much better time your clubbing, drug-taking offspring are probably having.

In the continuing absence of a music director for NSO, the production will be led by Chiu Chun-chiang (邱君強), the young principal conductor of Taichung's National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra. Many of the NSO's regular soloists are taking part, and if you think you can romp efficiently in this setting then by all means go along.

So Happy New Year from Austria's original Batman! If high-jinks Tianmu-style, funny masks and a spot of bottom-pinching are your style, then go for it. Your neighborhood critic won't be there, however.

Die Fledermaus plays at Taipei's National Concert Hall Monday at 8.30pm and Tuesday at 7pm. Tickets are from NT$400 to NT$2,000. Call (02) 3393-9888 or visit www.artsticket.com.tw
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