I think I’m pretty tolerant when it comes to other people’s musical tastes. However, I refuse to credit purely Pavlovian responses of negativity and disdain, such as, “I like all music except for country and opera.” Anyone with a blind distaste for country probably bases that judgment on FM drivel like Toby Keith, Keith Urban, and pretty much anyone else named Keith who sings and plays with a twang. However, the issue at hand right now is opera: I take issue with anyone who claims to dislike it without giving it its fair shake.
First of all, before you’ve sat through a production of Puccini’s La Boheme (The Bohemian Girl) or Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, you have little basis for your opinion. The Met is unequivocally the best opera company in the world and puts on productions that reach an unheard-of plane of musical bliss. Yeah, it’s highbrow. Deal with it.
Don’t want to spend $25 for a cheap seat? Give me the next 300 words to convince you to.
An avid opera buff I know once told me that opera is the ultimate art form because it combines every other artistic medium. In an opera, instrumental music meets vocal music meets acting meets visual art meets poetry meets storytelling. Opera weaves almost every conceivable form of art into one tour de force that manages to surpass the heights that each form of art would reach on its own.
Maybe an example of a particularly epic opera will make this clearer. The Met’s 2007-2008 season included War and Peace, Prokofiev’s operatic interpretation of Leo Tolstoy’s classic tome chronicling Napoleon’s failed 1812 invasion of Russia. In a wholly appropriate nod to the novel’s epic length—a typical edition features a hefty 1,300 pages—the Met’s production involved 52 soloists singing 68 roles, a 118-member chorus, 41 dancers, 227 supernumeraries, and 1,200 costumes, not to mention a live horse for Napoleon, all on stage at one point or another during the opera’s four hours. The final scene calls for 346 people to be on stage at once. The horse is there, too.
The entire operation involves enough physical risk to the performers to merit the construction of a safety net over the orchestra pit to prevent another one of Napoleon’s soldiers from falling off the stage and into the horn section, as one unfortunate lad did during the production’s opening night in its 2002 debut season.
Of course, not all operas involve such lavish productions, but those at the Met always feature gorgeous sets, soaring arias, and often juicy, melodramatic plotlines. Where do you think the “opera” in “soap opera” came from?
So tell me again—who still thinks opera is boring?
