This is a beautifully written (and delivered) section of Robert Ashley’s opera, Improvement, which is loosely about a wife’s life after her husband abandons her at a rest stop bathroom. Or, as Robert Ashley introduces the piece:

For the sake of argument, Don is Spain in 1492 and Linda is the Jews.

I don’t take well to pieces of music (or anything for that matter) that wears its intellectuality on its sleeve, but this opera is not some lifeless exercise in retelling history through a dissolving relationship, but an obtuse, David-Lynchesque narrative about ennui. When I listen to it, sometimes I try to pick apart the meaning, but most of the time I don’t. It’s just too easy to get lost in the way the characters speak and what they’re trying to say.

It seems absurd that one of the most telling sections of the opera is Linda trying to recount everything that she consumed in the morning.

George: Your morning cigarette.

Linda: My morning cigarette. The newspaper

Chorus: Headlines, pictures, astrology, recipes…

George: You can only count what you put in your body.

Linda: I can only count what I put in my body? What about the pictures?

George: OK, you can count the pictures but not the astrology.

Linda: What about the flowers you gave me? What about the smells?

George: If you count smells you have to count the bad ones too.

Linda: Ok. No smells.

This opera is actually part of a Trilogy of operas, of sorts. Perfect Lives (an opera for television which is a hoot and a half), Atalanta (which is as approachable as a brick wall), and then the third opera is actually four operas he wrote, which Improvement is a part of. Supposedly during a bank heist during Perfect Lives, The character Now Eleanor sees the events of all four operas all at once.

Improvement mixes absurdity and melancholy somewhat flatly, but there’s just something hypnotizing about it.

(Source: Spotify)