The Fat Lady Sang

Psst, don’t let it get around but we went to the opera on Sunday for the first time and I still don’t like it. Granted it was a performance by a community college with several rather weak voices and Cosi Fan Tutte may not be one of Mozart’s finest. If he had set music to any unlikely story-writ large, the experience would have been no different for me. Perhaps the small absurdities of plot must be subordinated to the larger truths of the music. Yet silly, melodramatic and un-nuanced are adjectives that come to mind. Having said this I should add that my learned friend, Earl, tells me Mozart gave no stage directions for the ending which has subsequently been performed with three different resolutions.

It may be said that I haven’t earned the right to make a judgment. Three hours is like reading three pages of a novel and denouncing not only the book but the entire art form. Yet I fear I’m beyond redemption. As a cultivated taste, my ear, in its foliage, may be beyond cultivation. You can’t take the rabble out of the boy.

I realize I’m treading on highly sacred ground. Opera holds an elevated place in haute culture. Some of my dearest friends are drawn to opera and I risk everything by my admission. Maybe after continuing exposure I may come around. I reserve that right. In general my sensibility runs toward the small epiphanies on the page or close-ups on the screen and away from the extravagant and grandiloquent.

However I was glad to find a fellow un-appreciator in Mark Twain when he wrote, I attend operas whenever I can not help it. I am sure I know of no agony comparable to the listening of an unfamiliar opera…that sort of intense but incoherent noise which always reminds me of the time the orphanage burned down.
I enjoy listening to Mozart’s orchestral music, his string quartets and sonatas but I was too distracted by the antics on stage to fully hear the arias, in tranquility. Next time I won’t divide my attention with sub-titles or even the over-sized gestures. Someone said it doesn’t mater what language an opera is sung in as long as it is one he doesn’t understand. Wagner, himself, said, The aim of Opera has ever been, and still is today, confined to Music merely so as to afford Music with a colorful pretext for her own excursions.

Again, Mark Twain…There isn't often anything in an unfamiliar opera that one would call by such a name as acting; as a rule all you would see would be a couple of people, one of them standing, the other catching flies. Of course I do not really mean that he would be catching flies; I only mean that the usual operatic gestures which consist in reaching first one hand out into the air then the other might suggest the sport I speak of.
That word, unfamiliar, may be key. The pleasure in most music is the anticipation by the ear, heart and mind waiting for what is to come and riding with it when it arrives.
Some might say that the reverence, with which opera is regarded, is a badge of distinction attainable only by the sophisticated few and is accompanied by a smidge of condescension. Of course I would never say such a thing. Sir Kenneth Clark wrote that, Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process. If the art form belongs more to the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, leave it to opera to claim one of the longest deathbed scenes in history. This bespeaks of elements more enduring and universal, which I must have missed in my first experience. Its strangeness may be one of them.

The elite status dates back to its early patronage by the monarchs of Europe and continues to this day with prices ranging from a week’s to a month’s groceries. Recently it has been made available to a wide audience in movie theaters with tickets gobbled up faster than Figaro here, Figaro there… and I expect to give it another go…..if they’ll let me in.