My first
real exposure to opera came when I was eight years old. For years before that,
I would observe my dad sitting cross-legged on the living room carpet, sorting
through his huge collection of records while he listened to famous tenors—Mario
Lanza, Jussi Björling and, most of all, Enrico Caruso, who I understood to be
the operatic equivalent of Babe Ruth. The opera house in Seattle was ninety
miles from our home, but in those days it was a fast ninety miles.
The opera that night was Tosca, and my dad probably summarized the plot for me, but by the
climactic third act my eyelids were seriously heavy. Earlier in the evening I
had been hushed by a well-dressed matron; she objected to my crunching the candy
that my brother and I had procured from the concession booth. The first act had
featured parishioners filing into church, while the villain, Baron Scarpia,
sought to ruin Tosca, a big-time diva in love with the painter Mario
Cavaradossi.
In the second act, Scarpia was having dinner with Tosca at
a long table illuminated by candles, and it appeared that Scarpia wanted
something from Tosca, and that Tosca was willing to give it. The wining and
dining had little to do with sex. Scarpia’s motive was to seduce Tosca into
divulging the hiding place of Mario’s friend, an escaped political prisoner. I
was not clear on what was happening, back in the era before supertitles, but I
did enjoy watching Scarpia, still singing, flopping liked a gaffed fish after
Tosca stabbed him. Ever the diva, she paused for a moment to look down at the
now-deceased villain and artfully arrange glowing candles around his body.
The third act opened with a shepherd boy only a few years
older than I singing his girlish song that welcomed the dawn. Then came the soldiers,
the orchestra heavy with percussion. Mario was to be shot by a firing squad.
But actually, before murdering Scarpia, Tosca had been assured that the firing
squad was just for show, and that Tosca and Mario would be free to leave Rome.
Nope, not quite right. When Tosca kneels down to
congratulate Cavaradossi for his acting ability, she realizes that Scarpia was
deceitful to the end. Those weren’t blanks! Those were real bullets! Mario! Mario!” L’opera e finita!
A quick questionaire: Based on this summary of one of my favorite
operas, what word first enters your mind: Absurd
or sublime?
My wife’s response might be overlong.
Well, we can’t agree on everything. But as I have gotten
older, and particularly since I learned that my life may wind down well before
I assumed, opera’s ability to move me has become more potent. The genre’s cathartic
power is captured in the title of Peter Conrad’s book, A Song of Love and Death. As in other forms of dramatic tragedy, operas
tend to end with the bodies piling up. Drawing on Freudian terminology, Conrad
suggests that “Id in opera never learns to fear the superego; libido never
acknowledges the repressive rule of society…. Music bypasses the rational
quibbles of language to plead on their behalf, and persuades us to envy such
lack of inhibition and maniacal consistency.”
This definition of the genre is contrary to the popular
perception of opera as a rather arid art form, patronized mainly by the
well-to-do, and relying on a repertoire, the bulk of which was assembled in the
eighteenth and nineteen centuries.
But Conrad is correct: Terrible things happen to opera
characters. In Verdi’s Rigoletto, the
ill-fated jester is doubled-crossed by a charming but psychopathic prince, who
seduces Rigoletto’s daughter, Gilda. For puzzling reasons, Rigoletto himself is
complicit in his daughter’s exploitation. But this doting father cannot avoid the
blowback. When Rigoletto contracts with Sparafucile, a hit man, to kill the
Duke, Rigoletto promptly receives the body bag. But then he hears the Duke
singing off stage: a sure sign that the corpse in his bag is his daughter’s.
The grotesque is a common feature in opera.
A couple of weeks ago, ahead of my trip to Berlin and
Prague, I came across a boxed set of Wagner’s Tannhäuser, performed in
Berlin at the direction of the acclaimed Jewish conductor Daniel Barenboim at
the city’s Staatsoper. Wagner’s music is deeply controversial in Israel – it’s
not much of an exaggeration to say that this enormously gifted
nineteenth-century composer provided the score for Naziism. In 2000, Barenboim’s
intent to perform Wagner’s Siegfried in
Israel had to be OK’d by Israel’s Supreme Court. Woody Allen nicely captured
the ambivalence that many people have about Wagner’s music in his movie Manhattan Murder Mystery: “I
can't listen to that much Wagner, you know? I start to get the urge to conquer
Poland.”
Having largely
ignored the efforts of my middle-schooI music teacher, I lack the vocabularly
to explain why Wagner’s music, or Verdi’s music, or Mozart’s music, can be so
powerful. I am a lover of music who is
musically illiterate.
But I know what I like. And when I hear the recording of
Barenboim conducting Tannhäuser, the voice of the heldentenor booming
out of my modest speakers, I welcome the music’s blunt force, its shuddering catharthis.
During my recent trip, I attended two
operas, including a spectacular performance of Bizet’s Carmen, one of the most popular operas of all time. My thanks to my longtime
friend Jeff Kramer for making this trip possible.
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