jupitersterrain four

scrowwwwow the raucous hiss 
it tears into the other cat a sticky mess
of fur and mucus ulvular racking cries ulular

the furrball plumes like a cloud of feathers 
a sphynx howling on a plinth

a screeching column of sound like something wakened from a grave  

spirits of the unborn incarnate 

pneuma mist 

18.33, 13.12.12. © Lizarikk, All Rights Reserved


grand opera gnostic

high pitched canticle

Extreme singing, testing the limits of vocal endurance, and extreme drama. Robert le Diable is Faust, after all, not history, and here its spirit is captured by audacious but well-informed staging

still rattles the soul

soprano sotto voce 



11.32, 13.12.12. 

all the fashionable elements of early Romantic opera - medievalism, supernaturalism, redemption through religion - to a Manichaean battle over one man's soul

becomes the plaything for an overarching and curiously Freudian struggle. The characters who act as the evening's puppet-masters are Robert's sister, Alice, representing virtue and his, Bertram, vice


(and considering the opera appeared amid the hackneyed repetitions and knowing artifice of the operas of Rossini and Donizetti)

it's not hard to see why people so hungered after this more spontaneous and intensely felt new drama