Copious Notes

• This week, we bring you Live this Weekend video style, with the stars of Lucia di Lammermoor discussing the famous mad scene. Click play to watch the film.

As the plot thickens in Psycho, Norman Bates delivers a foreboding understatement: “We all go a little mad sometimes.” It’s meant as a general — albeit creepy, in context — assessment of life. But if you are an operatic soprano, going mad comes with the job.

The operatic repertoire features several mad scenes of note. The next two weekends, a pair of University of Kentucky sopranos will tackle one of opera’s most iconic scenes of a woman going insane as they take on the title role in Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor.

For Lucia, “the mad scene is a release for all the torments she’s had to deal with the last several months,” says Megan McCauley, one of the sopranos who will share the title role in the 1830s Italian opera.

Darla Diltz, the other Lucia, says, “It’s finding a balance between being angry and delusional, which is really happy. I have to remind myself that if I was really crazy, I wouldn’t always be mad.”

Lucia is a victim of circumstances, forced to marry a man she does not love so that her family can maintain its home and position. To make that happen, Lucia’s brother has tricked her and her true love, Edgardo, into believing that they have renounced each other. Lucia goes through with the marriage, but as soon as she gets in the bedroom after the wedding, she stabs her new husband to death. She comes back out to the wedding party, her dress and the knife bloody and her mind occupied by wild hallucinations.

It’s 15 minutes that look ripe for theatrics. But the singers and director say they have to remember that this is opera. They have to be able to sing the soaring melody while moving erratically around the stage.

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A video production of Our Lincoln is still up in the air, but Lexington filmmaker Michael Breeding has posted a short preview on his website that gives you an idea what the show looked like. Breeding oversaw a video crew in Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts when Our Lincoln, a co-production of the Kentucky Humanities Council and University of Kentucky Opera Theatre, was presented there Feb. 2. But additional money will be needed before the footage can be produced into a DVD and/or broadcast.