Operatic bicycle anachronism
01-24-23, 03:26 PM
#26
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No, they just walked the bikes offstage. The stage itself is sloped toward the audience--something like a low-slope roof--for visibility. So it would be really risky to try to ride a bike across it. You'd be likely to lose control and end up in the orchestra pit, possibly impaled on a cello bow.
01-24-23, 03:33 PM
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I second Squirtdad!
01-24-23, 03:41 PM
#28
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1880-1892: Penny farthings (highwheelers)
1885-today:'safeties', chain drive with equal-sized wheels, however, what we would recognize as a 'diamond frame' was rare before the early 1890s.
RBR (Rideable Bicycle Replicas) builds a reproduction 1891 New Mail which would have been appropriate for the opera:
1885-today:'safeties', chain drive with equal-sized wheels, however, what we would recognize as a 'diamond frame' was rare before the early 1890s.
RBR (Rideable Bicycle Replicas) builds a reproduction 1891 New Mail which would have been appropriate for the opera:
01-24-23, 07:01 PM
#29
Bikes are okay, I guess.
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01-24-23, 07:25 PM
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Well, the world is full of nerds. We're bike nerds, so naturally we're all over any improper uses of bicycle in opera (okay, some of us are). But everything else goes over our heads. Somewhere, there's a bunch of upholstery nerds who couldn't care less about the bikes, but are waving their arms around and shouting to one another about a button pattern on a sofa in Act I that the best authorities all agree was not used until at least 1920.
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01-25-23, 06:30 PM
#31
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Had to roll through this shot a few times back in 87 when The Last Emporer came out. There's a brief shot of Peter Otoole rolling this Hirondelle up the to palace. It was a fixed wheel too. I always wondered how period accurate that bike was. It looks freakin amazing.
03-01-23, 09:33 PM
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My wife had a university student in voice come to her high school and teach private lessons. This young lady, it turns out had been a soprano / sometimes coloratura in several Ontario and Quebec opera companies before doing her PHD at Univ of Michigan near us. We heard her sing in the high school choir room many times, some Queen of the Night, but all of her role from Pagliacchi. I'm a singer myself but nowhere professional league, I appreciate how hard is what she and her peers acheived. But she's a voice professor now in a university in St. Johns, Newfoundland.
