Opera Rat: The Blog

HOW TO BECOME A WAGNERIAN

The opera season is over for me at the Lyric in Chicago, having been at opening night of the final run, Peter Sellars' beautiful, haunting, but too often plodding new production of Handel's understandably neglected "Hercules." It was not my favorite year at the Lyric or in opera generally. Some of the Lyric shows simply fell flat, especially the two openers I saw in a two-night marathon, a rote "Carmen" and a turgid "Macbeth."

But part of it was my fault. I've become too familiar with my favorite Italian classics to get chills from anything but an unusually fine or innovative performance. As an opera lover I feel a growth spurt coming on. There's no other explanation for a season in which my favorite show turned out to be, of all things...

Wagner.

If you know opera and me at all, you know I have the markings of a quintessential Wagner hater. I like my opera with two gin-and-tonics. I like to hum the hit melodies on the way home. I complain all the time about acts and shows being too long. I trumpet emotion over taste and heart over intellect. I yell bravo and brava when performers are carried off the score into flights of non-composed fancy by a mad scene gone AWOL. I derive a keen and morbid satisfaction from the deaths of major characters. In short, I am vulgar.

But I've been exposed to opera, sometimes against my will, since the cradle. After 50 years of it I wouldn't say my taste is becoming less vulgar. But I'd say my vulgarity is maturing, in a way that puts Wagner firmly into the repertory for the next act of my life.

People wonder how Wagnerians reconcile their love of the music with their disgust at the composer. I don't think reconciliation is the point. Drama is the point.

Watching Lyric's phenomenal "Lohengrin" a couple of weeks back, I got my first Wagnerian spine-tingles - not just from the performance, but from the utter morality of a masterwork by a man who was, by all accounts, a monster. Wagner exhibited the symptoms not of mere immorality, but of a chillingly recognizable über-morality easily twisted on the rigid letter of its law. In life, that made a mess. In opera, that made magic.

Opera is about contradiction. We don't need art for anything that makes sense in real life. Wagner may not strum the heartstrings like Verdi or Puccini. But if you listen carefully, in Wagner's relentlessly gorgeous music - eat your heart out, Mozart - you can hear a plaintive cry. If only I were a character and not a man. If only I could write me instead of be me. I would be Tristan. I would be Lohengrin. I would be a hero.

ONLY IN OPERA: A WESTERN WHERE NO ONE DIES

"The Girl of the Golden West" (a.k.a. "Debbie Get Your Gun") closes tonight at the Lyric in Chicago. I saw it the night it opened and it was one of the bigger surprises I've had as an operagoer. I hadn't been familiar with the music, and hearing it so beautifully and convincingly sung in this production, it's clear music isn't why this opera is considered only a minor masterwork. The ballads in particular are heart-melting.

But after the deliciously dark foreshadowing of the middle act - what's a worse sign for a relationship than winning your man from a sheriff in a poker game? - my heart was congealed to lukewarm by the tossed-off preachy-peachy ending Puccini and his librettists sadly kept intact from the David Belasco play. In fact, the ending was the reason Puccini chose the play - after the demises of Mimi, Tosca and Butterfly, he wanted something more upbeat. Aaugh. Is there anything worse in art than upbeat?

This has been the most enjoyable outing of a mixed season so far at the Lyric. In the end, though, it serves as yet another example of why the opera repertory needs fresh blood, and why companies like the Lyric are turning outside the repertory to challenge their patrons. Audiences have matured; the operas haven't. "Show Boat" may be entry-level when it comes to music, but as a work of drama, it makes "Girl of the Golden West" feel like Disney entertainment.  

'SHOW BOAT': NOT ON BOARD

I'm big on democratizing opera, not just for opera, but for the world, which could use a lot more of what opera offers. By that I mean an emotional connection with the essential drama of life, as opposed to days filled with clicking and friending and liking and updating. So if putting on a musical can help people come to opera, I'm down with that.

But I'm not sure my beloved Lyric Opera of Chicago, or its new creative consultant, Renee Fleming, have picked the right musical in next season's recently announced "Show Boat." Nor am I sure the next musical on their radar, "Oklahoma!", is right either. I don't think either choice addresses what's keeping people from opera in the first place.

My non-operagoing friends think opera is musty - a bunch of old, overblown productions without any relevance to life today. Whereas new opera is all experimental, atonal, "not music." So I find myself wishing, if the Lyric is going to do musicals, that they'd pick something that wasn't written when new opera was still vital, and hasn't been done by every community theater in the country since. I find myself wishing they would pick a newer production to feed the audience's hunger for modern music with melody.

"Show Boat" and "Oklahoma!" are great theater - the advance publicity calls "Show Boat" operatic - and I won't be surprised if the Lyric hits them out of the park. But I fear the audience won't look much different than the one in the Civic Opera House on any other evening. Then, what has the Lyric gained? What has opera gained?

This will sound crazy, but if I could pick a musical for the Lyric, it would be "Avenue Q." But that's not operatic, right? Precisely the point. If a company could make a show like "Avenue Q" operatic - if it could raise a modern, relevant-to-today hit to the heights of Verdi, Wagner, Puccini - the opera skeptics might open their minds to those musty old composers too. And once those minds are open, look out. Opera will knock 'em silly.

That's how musicals can help save opera. And the world.

 

A BETTER-SOUNDING WORD FOR EVERYTHING

A reader messaged asking why my mother (or anyone) would emigrate from Umbria, especially once the war was over. Well, details are sketchy, and in the absence of being told I've been reluctant to press. But here's what I've been able to piece together.

My mother was born in 1927 in Assisi, home of St. Francis, where she considered becoming a Franciscan nun. World War II disrupted that and everything else. There wasn't anywhere to work or much to eat in Spello, the hill town near Assisi where the family settled after the early death of my mother's father. So my mother, in her teens, was sent away to work as a domestic for a wealthy family in Livorno, a larger city not so hard-hit by the war.

Mom wasn't happy in Livorno. She has hinted the head of the family wanted more out of her than cooking and cleaning and sewing, which is sad but not surprising - she was as beautiful as a starlet. She was rescued by the attentions of an American GI, whom she married, and joined after the war in his hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Then they had me, right? Bzzzz.

The GI, apparently, turned out to be not much nobler than the prior employer. My mother knew just enough English to understand when the neighbors tipped her that the ex-soldier, in waiting for her to arrive in America, had amused himself with a few other women, and was holding onto the collection. With their help she was able to verify this first-hand and in short order. That was the end of him.

But it had impressed her quickly that American women, even in the 1940s, were able to spend their lives doing something other than cooking or cleaning or sewing or, um, other things, for men. And she had her green card. She became fluent (more or less) in English and the workings of the keypunch machine, the supercomputer of its day, and settled with some other young women, college students, in a house near the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

After an unwitting brush with the darker element of Milwaukee's Italian community - she had never heard of the Mafia in Umbria - she began socializing with Americans, and picked my father out of a throng of aspirants. He wasn't quite the most handsome, she would tell me later, but he was the nicest. He was also German, which wouldn't have been her first choice after the war, but he was two generations removed from the country that had oppressed hers, and at any rate, avoiding German men in Milwaukee at that time would've ruled out half the population. In their 80s, my parents still re-enact the war regularly in the kitchen of the house where I grew up, though the armistices are more favorable and touching.

Only now do I appreciate how fortunate I was, growing up as the only child in that cultural mashup of a house, a calico dot in a vast white-bread suburb. In a rich town we weren't the richest family, but I had most of what my friends had, and so much they didn't - opera, lamb shanks, clothes that fit, and a better-sounding word for everything. Including my name. In America I'm plain old Bob, with a German surname few can or care to pronounce. In Italy, and to my mother, I'm Roberto, with a lyrical surname shared by the greatest librettist in Italian opera history.

Thanks for wondering. 

WHAT'S NOT OPERATIC ABOUT ITALY

Here's some advice about Italians: don't believe a word they say. 

On the surface, Italy is like opera: complicated, embellished, emotional. Television talk shows and newspaper stories are sprayed with exclamation. Football (soccer) players writhe in agony at the touch of a cleat. The only better show in Italy than opera is the lovers' quarrel in public, which plays with regularity in all the best town squares.

Like opera, though, all this is theater. The TV guest says the opposite thing next show. The politician recants his quote. The football player pops up in an instant. In private, the lovers make up; the quarrel was a demonstration of their passion. They didn't mean the words.

It's best to treat the words of Italians as dialogue, as drama, rather than literal truth. Only without words is the profound and simple heart of Italy revealed: in the fashion, the art, the food. A truly operatic people would obsess over the colors and patterns of their clothes, not the fiber and fit. A truly operatic people would produce ironic paintings and realist literature, not the other way around. A truly operatic people would produce French cuisine, not Italian. 

I think Italians are skeptical about words, and for this, I applaud them. In trying to pin my mother down on something, she once uttered an Italian aphorism that translated roughly as, if it's worth saying, it can't be said. This is the misunderstood essence of la bella figura, the beautiful appearance Italians are renowned for keeping up regardless of reality. It's not that Italians don't want to reveal themselves. It's not that they don't want to tell the truth. It's that their truth is too deeply felt to be told. Never mind the petty dramas of everyday life. Here, eat this plate of pasta. That's intimacy. That's the truth. E basta, enough.

THE SEPARATION OF ART AND STATE

The British people have just awakened to the fact that they're paying Antonio Pappano more than four times as much to conduct the Royal Opera as they're paying their prime minister to conduct the nation. Stay tuned for more on the Outrage Channel.

As the son of a business owner I grew up a free-market acolyte. Then I went to work in my state's legislature and learned the hard necessity of regulation and taxation. Some states don't tax or regulate much, and their people enjoy freer lives. But they suffer a lower quality of life by most measurable standards - income, education, crime, even divorce rate. So I've become a decided political moderate. Any society must manage a natural tension between freedom and comfort. State involvement should be about balance, not ideology.

Art, though, is the highest form of expression. I think my country has it right that expression needs special protection from the state. Therefore art should have the most special protection of all. It belongs in the unfettered market of truth.

When art sells its soul to government, what is happening at the Royal Opera House becomes inevitable. Not that art has no public worth. On the contrary, art's public worth is incalculable. The moment we try to calculate it, we undervalue it. Only the objective, invisible hand of taste can put a fair price on the baton of Anthony Pappano. I fear Britain will lose its masterful conductor, unless the Royal Opera House can shoulder the Sisyphean rock of public resentment on top of the already heavy burden all opera companies face to survive in a largely unartistic world.

When society aims to oppress, artists are the first to be silenced. Mr. Pappano won't be sent to the Gulag. But the effect of his loss on Britain would be the same: one less first-rate artistic voice to ring its undeniable truth above the cacaphony of mere public discourse. That truth, in the end, is what scares the state - and delights the masses - about art. Government can offer only a finite illusion of support to a force that cannot be tamed to serve it. In the end, the bargain is Faustian, and art is damned to eternal mediocrity.

 

IS OPERA TOO LONG, OR ATTENTION TOO SHORT?

Commenters on the BBC Radio 3 message boards didn't take strong issue with the assertion here that the opera is too damn long, but implied the problem lies not with opera, but with us. Said one:

"The electronic media have totally transformed our expectations and demands, haven't they? I'm aware of this in myself: I sit in the opera house or theatre and want to adjust what I'm hearing: more volume, a touch less bass, widen the stereo image, alter the balance - all things that I can do easily, and do do habitually, at home. And surely if attention spans have become shorter, that's down to the same reason: with drama of all types available at the touch of a button, to be sampled, paused, rewound, abandoned, and revisited at the viewer's convenience, is it any wonder that some people, even those sympathetic to the genre, can struggle to enjoy a full-length opera in the theatre?"

Perhaps. But let's not be too hard on ourselves. When Carmen appeared in 1875, live performance was the only performance. When opera came around, audiences were eager to soak up hours on end. We are not so easily entertained now. One could say our attention span has been narrowed. One could also say our taste has been refined. It's not just a matter of pause and rewind. The greatest voices of all time, in their peak moments, await us in rows on our living room shelves. It's no wonder we find it harder to tolerate a dramatic lag in the opera house. Modern opera companies have a duty to adjust.

WELCOME BBC RADIO 3 LISTENERS

The previous post has sparked a discussion on the BBC Radio 3 message boards about whether the opera is, indeed, too damn long. And a spike in blog traffic from across the sea. (I wonder if the British visitors understand the allusion in the headline.) Welcome, BBC opera and classical music fans.

THE OPERA IS TOO DAMN LONG

Took in Carmen last Friday night at the Lyric, and while departing the house heard repeated variations on the well-worn theme, "I liked it, but it was a little long..."

Seriously - how many thousands of times do we have to hear this from operagoers before WE JUST CUT THE DAMN SHOWS? This is killing opera. The composers are dead, OK? They aren't going to mind. Among the living you'll offend 18 purists and draw cries of gratitude and relief from everyone else. I love opera but there isn't a show in the repertory that runs more than three hours without stretches that drag. Let's get rid of those stretches. Please.

SOUND AND FURY, SIGNIFYING NOTHING

Yesterday brought my first opera of the season, a matinee of Verdi's Macbeth at the Lyric in Chicago. The singing and acting were first-rate. The opera, not so much. Macbeth lacks that melody (or several) you wait for beforehand and hum for two days afterward. And it has some serious dull stretches, exacerbated by an act structure that kept us imprisoned for nearly an hour and a half before the single intermission. (Note to opera companies everywhere - it's still legal to cut the score, y'know?) 

I did get a few of the requisite chills at the end, as house snow fell on the victorious king and celebrants. And let me say this about Nadja Michael: wow. Still and all, the fact that a minor Verdi like Macbeth gets as much play as it does this many years after its conception is yet another illustration of how the opera repertory could use some - pardon the Shakespearean double entendre - fresh blood.