Not dead yet!

Today, Lucy of Opera Obsession wisely suggested that, rather than punching the world over the first paragraph of this article, I should post a rant in my blog.  Genius!  I don’t think this will be a long rant (since I’m still grappling with the “good god, just write something” demons), but hopefully it will be thoughtful.

Before I begin,  would like to say that my rant has nothing to do with the end of the Met Futures blog.  I think it’s incredibly silly of the Met to put an end to this blog.  The best excuse the Met put forth is that it sometimes affects negotiations with singers, which seems pretty unreasonable on the singers’ part(s)…  That’s another blog post.  (Personally, I am of the opinion that the Met shouldn’t bother hiring singers who can’t handle rumors in the entertainment industry, but I am also of the opinion that no performer is so special as to be irreplaceable.)  Moving on!

The offending paragraph:

Opera diehards, as a rule, couldn’t care less about the present; it is the past and the future that energize them. At any given intermission, they’ll refer to the performance at hand, but generally just to make the point (A) that someone sang the role better in 1952 and (B) that this awful soprano has no business planning to sing Norma in three years. 

First of all, this paragraph has very little to do with the rest of the story.  It feels like a cheap shot: before we begin, let’s establish that all “opera diehards” having nothing but distain for the world around them.  We are all anhedonic snobs longing for the glorious and much more aesthetically pleasing past.

Yes, there are “opera diehards” who feel that way.  Of course there are.  Those people exist in every culture or fandom that has established some kind of connoisseurship.  But why should they define us?

Okay.  When it comes to opera, I am every bit a malcontent.  I am also pretty obsessed with the past or “history” as it is sometimes called – I like knowing where I came from.  Maybe some people use history for escapism, but I have yet to meet one of those people.  Usually people who love history feel that way because it helps them understand the present that opera diehards apparently couldn’t care less about.

At any given intermission, they’ll refer to the performance at hand, but generally just to make the point (A) that someone sang the role better in 1952 and (B) that this awful soprano has no business planning to sing Norma in three years.

Really?  When I complain during intermission, it is always about the performance at hand given the context of operatic performance in general: How effective is the staging?  Is the lead ignoring their blocking or did the director actually mean to stage two hours of park-and-bark?  Why has so-and-so been made to wear a huge furry coat?  It must be awfully hot up there!  Is it just me or is the tenor having an off night?  Maybe his voice is just a little too Italian for German opera?  These tempos are not quite what I’m used to, but they’re certainly interesting!

I have never walked away from a performance thinking, “Well it was haaaardly Covent Garden 1957.  Mhhmmm, my gooooodness,” nor have I ever heard anyone around me say such a thing.  I think most of my fellow opera diehards would agree that people who talk like that at the opera are horribly tedious, probably trying to impress someone, and rare.

In the forward to Opera’s Second Death, Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek write:

Why, then, opera’s SECOND death? To put it somewhat bluntly: because, from its very beginning, opera was dead, a still-born child of the musical art. One of the standard complaints about the opera today is that it is obsolete, no longer really alive, and, furthermore (another aspect of the same reproach), that it is no longer a fully autonomous art – it always has to rely in a parasitic way on other arts (on “pure” music, on theater). Instead of denying the charge, one should undermine it by, precisely, radicalizing it: opera NEVER was in accord with its time – from its very beginnings, it was perceived as something “outdated,” as a retroactive solution of a certain inherent crisis in music, and as an “impure” art. To put it in Hegelese, opera is “outdated” in its very concept. How, then, can one not love it?

Opera fans pine for something that never existed.  Opera was born of a desire to recreate Ancient Greek theatre approximately two-and-a-half millennia after the fact.  Opera is for the quixotic.  How dare you suggest that we spend our money and our time watching people making themselves vulnerable, sweating and shaking under the exertion of producing some of the most moving, exotic, and unique sounds known to man, telling stories that have borne relevance for centuries, having already made up our minds about the experience we will have?  The performance will probably be lacking in some way.  But if I am a perpetual opera malcontent, it is not over something as simple or common as feeling like I was born in the wrong century; it is because the world is not enough.

And, you know, because we seriously need to consider how we train singers as actors, not to mention our entire attitude towards opera as a form of theatre… but… that overwrought, utopian “impossible dream” thing I just came up with, too.