Bringing Opera to the Common Man
The arts are on the ropes. Once necessary ingredients in the savory gumbo of a rich inner life – novels, poetry, the visual arts, sculpture, ballet and the like – they are now consigned to an afterthought, if they are thought of at all.
Opera is the most besieged. While the others can still claim some slight relevance to ordinary life, opera was a gaudy phantasm right out of the gate.
Opera’s point of view is that you never know what is enough until you know what is too much, and you can’t clearly see the state of ordinary life until you see its emotions, relationships, consequences, triumphs, and downfalls magnified ten times larger than usual.
By this interesting process of enlargement it schools you to see the grand in the mundane, as though only by observing an exaggerated representation of life can our deadened senses be awakened to the heady carnival of human nature all around us.
The audience, in opera’s heyday, was all in.
A person in, say, 1953, upon arriving late to the proceedings at the Opera House due to a busy day at the office, might read a quick summary from the program of the doings in that part of the plot which he is about to walk into.
Sarastro’s slave Monostatos pursues Pamina but is frightened away by Papageno. The birdcatcher tells Pamina that Tamino loves her and is on his way to save her. Led by the three spirits to the temple of Sarastro, Tamino learns from a high priest that it is the Queen, not Sarastro, who is evil. Hearing that Pamina is safe, Tamino charms the wild animals with his flute, then rushes off to follow the sound of Papageno’s pipes. Monostatos and his men chase Papageno and Pamina but are left helpless when Papageno plays his magic bells. Sarastro enters in great ceremony. He punishes Monostatos and promises Pamina that he will eventually set her free. Pamina catches a glimpse of Tamino, who is led into the temple with Papageno.
“Got it!” says this dedicated consumer of culture from earlier times, and settles happily into his red velvet seat, now up to date on the plot.
Why so happily?
The music, the music! It is lavish and ravishing. It carries you away with its grandeur and pathos, and, along with the richness of the costumes and the largeness of the gestures and the depth of the feelings engaged and the convolutions and (often) essential sadness of the plot, the emotions just wash over you.
Well that was then, when opera was going strong and there were powerful social currents advising us to always be on the lookout for chances of self-improvement.
You never knew when your new and improved self might be needed, so it was best to keep the current model up to date, in the manner of software upgrades today.
Those times were wonderful!
But we are living in a different world today.
Today we are advised to ask ourselves if this artistic experience or that fully explores the gritty underbelly of society, whether it rubs our nose in the dirt of unsuccess, whether it reflects the grinding realities of the members of a frail species who for all we know are simply random scraps of protoplasm floating through a senseless universe.
All of this is for our own good of course.
Well, let opera lead the way, I say.
No need to follow or to hold back. Instead, let us bring these librettos up to date so that the common man can relate. This will rivet him in his seat.
We can picture in our minds our main character, a suburban man of a certain age, standing on stage, alone, lit perhaps by a single spotlight.
It seems obvious that he is just home from work, and perhaps we sense that it has been a good day, or at least that no one directly yelled at him today.
Such is the standing of our hero in his company that this counts as a good day indeed.
He appears to be enjoying a rare moment of contentment. We are led to believe that it is not a common thing for this fellow to feel this emotion, and he seems intent on relishing it to the max.
He sighs happily, and as if in support of the mood the orchestra brings forward low sweet passages in the strings and the woodwinds, a kind of soothing musical offering, one in which the main character, and by extension, we, are in alignment with the universe.
You might want to hold on to that theme, since you’ll never hear it again.
Suddenly there is an ominous throbbing in the double basses, accompanied by a discordant shrill sounding in the piccolos, not yet a scream, but one of those musical signals that says, “watch your back, buddy, it only gets worse from here.”
In sync with the music two guys walk out on the stage. They both have their first names stitched into their workingman’s shirt, likely a first for opera, which has traditionally overlooked this perfectly practical way to keep track of everyone on stage, and on the back, in larger letters, are the words Carl’s Auto Repair.
I cannot say how it is in opera but I can tell you that in real life it is always bad news when two of these guys walk into the waiting room from the garage where they have been examining your car to pin down exactly why it is making a noise similar to the noise of a submarine in a submarine movie which has dived too deeply and the metal skin is now being crushed inward.
Is one of them there to catch you when you faint?
This has a convincing air, for the one without the clipboard seems to be there in some supportive or therapeutic role, and we see the same dynamic play out here on the stage.
The music is now frankly ominous, and more so the closer they get to the main character.
Turns out the universe is not in alignment at all!
The car certainly isn’t, along with the several dozen other things that are checked on the list on the clipboard.
Those items are not being checked “OK,” no, no, they are being checked as having to be attended to today in accordance with state and federal law.
Does the car itself in the background rise suddenly on its pneumatic lift up into the air, dripping every kind of fluid? Dramatically lit and framed by doomy type music, looking like a pagan god rearing up demanding vengeance?
Perhaps, perhaps.
In fact, I say yes! I mean, this is opera! Home of the dramatic gesture and the outsized staging. Of course we’ll have the car on the stage.
I cannot say how exactly the exchange of information is handled, via recitative or aria, I leave that to the musical pros. But there they are, the one guy bellowing as he goes down the list, the other looking gravely on, perhaps emitting dirge-like moaning at appropriate intervals.
The main character for his part looks like a mortal that has suffered a blow from the demi-gods, throwing his forearm up to his brow, warding off the two workmen – named TJ and Earl, by the way, perhaps their names came be worked into the text in an interesting way – and futilely plugging his ears so as to not receive their dire message.
I do not know the Italian words for ‘that will run you right about a billion dollars,’ but we can tell from the action that this is the kind of message being delivered.
It seems to be the end of the action, with our hero standing firm, or semi-firm, against the Storms of Fate.
As if.
Come on, this is opera.
One by one other players come on stage, each with their own message to deliver.
A fellow from the Department of Transportation informs the hero that his house in being condemned on behalf of the new interstate that will run right through his front yard – ‘right here,’ he helpfully remarks, pointing to his bed of roses – in a century or two. He seeks only a signature or two in order to give the hero the pittance that the state has decided that his house is worth. He fishes in his pockets for some loose change which ought to just about cover it.
A young woman, giving evidence of being the hero’s daughter, lets him know that she has made plans to join a cult and wander around the country with Kurt, who joins her on the stage, singing away, just singing away, taking pains to show that he has tattooed on his knuckles the words Peace and Love and Brotherhood, only he has run out of knuckles before he has run out of letters so that it reads Peace and Lo…, which doesn’t show a lot of forward thinking. They hold hands, just two crazy kids against the world. God help us.
A smallish fellow wearing a green eyeshade comes out holding a tax form and he sings a question to the hero: “I know you’re the client, but do you know what exactly a deduction is? I mean, exactly what it even is? I was hoping you could tell me!” and close behind him, chasing him in fact, is a hard faced woman from the IRS waving paperwork that clearly signals that an audit will be taking place.
You never really want to have your tax returns audited, and the main character fellow slumps a little more as the Storms of Fate seem to keep coming faster and faster.
They’re piling up on him.
A woman comes out, giving evidence of being the guy’s wife, and lets loose with an aria describing how she can’t take it anymore and has had all the linoleum flooring taken up and replaced with priceless teak imported from an ancient temple smack in the jungles of South America. She has probably broken international laws erected against The Transport of Antiquities, and has certainly, as a down payment only, already spent more than the GDP of the country containing this precious temple and the damnable wood it is built from.
The hero tries to get off a musical response, saying in effect that he has always liked linoleum, it has always had a charming retro feel to him, but he is quickly out-noised by the orchestra and the now rather large crowd of people singing dramatically to him or at him is more like it.
He gets off a lively anthem as though in defense against this chanting mob, who are rather demonic in nature by now if you want to know the truth, but it does no good against the previously mentioned Storms of Fate which, if anything, seem to be gaining wind speed.
Things seem as though they can’t get worse, but things can always get worse in opera, and they do so here.
This is one of those hyper-modern pieces. You can tell because now, joining the chorus there at mid stage comes a grouping or a covey you might say, of major appliances, the sump pump, the refrigerator, the stove, the hot water heater, all of them moaning in unison that they all have or are about to crap out.
The music has sought to keep up with all this mayhem, with a lot of backbiting between the sections and new compositional methods employed that remind the listener of fingernails raked across a blackboard, taking the opera lover through every dissonant chord and grating conflict between instruments that there is, leaving no doubt that the universe is now in complete disorder.
And that’s just the first act!
It goes on from there.
Well, you see here how we can bring these revered art forms up to date. The listener leaves at the end of the evening shaken, but his compassion has been stirred, and whatever his problems he can think to himself that at least he doesn’t have it as bad as that guy on stage.
For as Aristotle says, this is the aim of art, to first excite, and then to quell pity and terror, leading to a sense of doomed acceptance.
For a lot of viewers it’s the crapped-out furnace that tumbles them right over the edge into doomed acceptance. The guy bought the damned thing just two years ago and wouldn't you know it, the warranty ran out yesterday!
It is the kind of piece that the art world is just waiting for if it only knew it, and surely worth a few grants in the several million dollar range to pull it off.
This librettist is standing by.
