Opera lyrics redux

[chickenfeet]

Last year I offered you an opera lyrics quiz so I thought I'd do another one. None of the operas are duplicated from last year.

So, here are ten libretto excerpts, translated into English where that is not the original language. Your task is to identify the operas in question.

1. Ascend, O my beloved. Ascend the highest place of imperial sovereignty

2. Your daughter is monstrous

3. Torture of every kind may await me

4. I shall lament my fate so cruel and so pitiless

5. The wind is from the west, a lazy sea, the sky overcast, a stagnant smell from the lagoon

6. Bravely blended, brotherly love born in the drink from our blood

7. I shall dry these weeping flagstones. With my own lips they shall be dried

8. We return to our lasses like fortunate traders, triumphant with the spoils of the vanquish'd invaders

9. Shepherd cease your singing, for all our gaiety has turned to pain

10. If the water is deep we will swim. If it is too fast we will build boats

Comments

[shezan.livejournal.com]

8. Aida?

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Not even close!

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

Sounds like genuine English, and probably comic, though I don't recognise the lines.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

It is English though not intentionally comic.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Gilbert & Sullivan?

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

ouch!

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Well, if not (and really, it could apply to any G&S opera), working from the subject matter of English operas, it's either Purcell or Britten.

(Say, you know the Gilbert-Wagner Secret Letters (http://www.jlittlewood.com/discuss/humour/gilbert_sullivan.htm), right?)

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

I thought about Purcell, but Aeneas's Trojans don't vanquish any invaders (they've been vanquished by invaders and go on to invade somewhere else), and they don't return to any lasses they haven't brought along on their ships. Aha. King Arthur?

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Aha. King Arthur?

Well done!

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

I confess, having had the idea, I went and looked it up. I've no idea what happens in King Arthur, except that a recent production here junked the plot as irrelevant.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

It's probably the only Arthur play/opera/whatever that tries to be vaguely historical though current scholarship tends rather to debunk the Saxon invasion altogether.