A question for the day: why would I, after having been the recipient of a prime seat to a performance of Puccini’s Il Trittico, emerge from the Opera House spitting tacks and frothing with venom—dissatisfied, frustrated, and even a little revolted?
Certainly the answer is not to be found in the performance itself, exemplary and very much in keeping with the high standards of the SF Opera. The problem, at least insofar as I have a problem, stems from my own reservations about both theater and musical theater. Both make me queasy, even to the point of downright nausea at times.
The theater: People put on wigs and funny hats and funny clothes and smear colored goo all over their faces. They flail and posture around in a brightly lit box that has one side open to observers. As they flail about, they are pretending to be somebody they aren’t, giving voice to thoughts they have not had, stating opinions they do not hold, professing love or hatred for people they neither love nor hate. It’s a nonstop exhibition of lying, faking, and pretending.
That’s bad enough. But then they have the brazen gall to drag music into the mix. How dreadful. To take something as precious as music and to press it into service shoring up puerile made-up stories: this is the work of scoundrels, mountebanks, cheats, cowards, and poltroons. Music’s inherent nature renders it amongst the noblest of the arts; it should not be roped into the cheap-thrills carnival atmosphere of a theater.
Let us remember: the medieval scholars placed music in the quadrivium, where its partners were arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. The trivium consisted of grammar, logic, and rhetoric.
I see no “play-acting” anywhere in either -vium, tri or quadri.
The situation becomes even more dire when the play-acting itself is devoted to grubby shockers, soap operas, or flimsy trivial comedies. Puccini’s Il Trittico, by the way, is a trilogy of one-act operas: the first is a grubby shocker, the second is a soap opera, and the third is a flimsy trivial comedy. Add to that music which is blatantly manipulative and almost wholly derivative, and you’ve got a three-Excedrin headache on the way, not to mention a seriously upset tummy and a mouthful of tacks.
Sheesh, what a sourpuss I am today. I rather wonder if my ancestry—mostly English despite the Germanic last name—is largely Cromwellian, i.e., Puritan. Why else should a professional musician living in 21st century San Francisco take such a jaundiced view towards the theater?