"Opera, to a person genuinely fond of aural beauty, must inevitably appear tawdry and obnoxious, if only because it presents aural beauty in a frame of purely visual gaudiness, with overtones of the grossest sexual provocation…The genuine music-lover may accept the carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within, but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it…The sort of person who actually delights in such spectacles is the sort of person who delights in plush furniture. Such half-wits are in a majority in every opera house west of the Rhine…The music that such ignobles applaud is usually quite as shoddy as they are themselves. To write a successful opera a knowledge of harmony and counterpoint is not enough; one must also be a sort of Barnum."
To which I say: Amen, brother. Over the course of my musical life I’ve made various attempts to come to grips with, or at least make peace with, opera. But while I can sometimes dig opera in the abstract, queasiness remains my dominant reaction. I needn’t look far for the answer: I am noticeably deficient in suspension-of-disbelief genes where music is concerned. In any situation in which dressed-up and made-up people are performing music I cannot let go of the notion that they should not be dressed up like that, they should not be cavorting around the stage like that, they should not be pretending to be someone else like that, and that they simply should not be there like that. To treat music as the accouterment to silly play-acting offends me; to smear it with lipstick and rouge bothers me; to stuff it into brocaded costumes appalls me; to slap a pouffy wig on its head upsets me. I have enough difficulty as it is with some twit in a toga pretending to be Julius Caesar. When said twit is a hefty matron bawling out histrionics in D minor my tissue-thin tolerance evaporates.
Opera simply does not qualify as one of the nobler arts; it is crass amusement aimed squarely at the rubes, in the same general category as slapstick clowns, Snidely Whiplash tying little Nell to the railroad tracks, and girlie shows. In its long-past heyday it carried more than a whiff of the louche and its performers were prized more for their notoriety than for whatever crumbs of musicianship they possessed. Handel’s diva Francesca Cuzzoni is remembered, not for any contributions to humanity’s artistic storehouse, but for bitch-slapping rival Faustina Bordoni right on stage during a show. Most opera plots are chock full of softcore eroticism and lurid crime, with no more artistic value than the blood-and-sex-soaked drivel of TV cop shows.
Opera, as practiced today in most large cities, is ridiculously overpriced and monstrously overproduced. The couturier’s bills alone could feed any number of malnourished children, while the attendant costs of orchestra, stage-crews, makeup artists, fencing masters, fight masters, corps de ballet, prop handlers, scenery designers, directors, ushers, ticket-sellers, lawyers and the like mount up astronomically. And then there are those lavish ransoms paid to the messieurs and beldames who belt it out onstage. They’re really what the crowds come to see, the two-ton Tessies and foghorn-blast tenors. For all most of the audience cares, said star could be singing the bylaws of the Union City Kennel Club; as long as he or she pours forth those torrential operatic gushes and whacks a high Q above M at the end, they’ll be happy. As long as they see at least one crowd of extras toting flags or lanterns or swords they’ll applaud; as long as the stage sports a ton of oversized scenery and is lit up like Vegas, they’ll be satisfied.
That’s the way it must be, however, because very few operas can survive the interrogation-room clarity of being exposed naked before an intelligent audience without all the obfuscating folderol. Stripped to their bare musical essence, operas are revealed as little more than a skinny framework of dippy tunes with no more artistic significance than Floradora. Left entirely on their own, devoid even of music, they are hopeless twaddle.
An ill-gotten twentieth-century movement proposed to ennoble opera by basing it on quality literary sources. Ix-nay on the grand dukes scheming to violate a maiden’s chastity in some Sicilian hilltop aerie. Instead, we proudly present A Streetcar Named Desire. This has proven no-go with the operagoing public, which has elected to continue spending its entertainment dollars on Tosca. This is perfectly sensible; we’ve got Streetcar with Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh, and the play itself is riveting reading. The damn music just gets in the way.
Fine literature no more benefits from operatic treatment than tree-ripe summer peaches benefit from being slathered in mayonnaise. Musical theater works best when the plot is simple, the characters stock, the situations uncomplicated. The Marriage of Figaro would never have made a decent opera without da Ponte’s wholesale gutting of the play’s political elements, which turned it into a good-natured sex farce. And as for Wagner: well…have you actually ever tried to read the libretto of Das Rheingold? Imagine it as straight theater, i.e., no music, if you can.
That holds true for the various Shakespeare-based operas as well; none of them are worth bothering with as long as the original is at hand. I’ve made it—sort of—through Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, but I’ve generally been so distracted by the pederastic homoeroticism on display that Will recedes into the far distance. Verdi’s Macbeth has its partisans, but a few minutes with Trevor Nunn’s stage production with Judy Dench and Ian McKellan, filmed at Stratford’s "Other" theater, makes all comparison pointless. Verdi’s setting reduces Shakespeare’s nightmare journey into a series of songs and sketches. As far as operas go, it’s pretty good, but that’s not very far. When Verdi took on Sir John Falstaff, he stayed safe with the sappy buffoonery of The Merry Wives of Windsor and wisely left the complex and disturbing Sir John of Henry IV alone.
No. Opera works only insofar as it remains fundamentally ridiculous. Five minutes of a Beethoven quartet offer more real music than all the operas ever written. There is nothing in opera that carries the weight of Ebarme dich from the St. Matthew Passion, nor could there be; the transcendent has no place in the opera house, a place consecrated instead to the celebration of the banal, the trite, and the common. Opera can be fun, to be sure, either onstage or listened to privately on CD. But let’s not kid ourselves here: opera reggia, staged ‘works’, aren’t cultivated art; they’re bread and circuses, deliberately and outrageously expensive spectacles that wallow in unjustified pretense. I have no objection to their existence or the enjoyment of same amongst the populace; I merely object to treating them as being any different from Spamalot, The Perils of Pauline, or Debbie Does Dallas.