The strangest art

A superb new history of opera argues that revivals of classic works are keeping the genre from flourishing today. Not so

by Wendy Lesser / December 27, 2012 / Leave a comment

A caricature by Gustave Doré from the 1860s: “People who sing opera generate huge acoustic forces”

A History of Opera: The Last 400 Years by Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker (Allen Lane, £30)

Opera must be one of the weirdest forms of entertainment on the planet. Its exaggerated characters bear little relation to living people, and its plots are often ludicrous. Yet it demands from its audiences real involvement, real sympathy, even real tears. Mothers constantly fail to recognise their sons, sisters their brothers, husbands their wives, but we, sitting at a distance of hundreds of metres, are expected to penetrate all the thin disguises. Women dress as men posing as women—mainly in order to make love to other women—and nobody turns a hair. And on top of all this, people sing all their lines: not in the way you or I might sing, in a lullaby-ish, folk song-ish mode, but inhumanly, extremely, with a visible awareness of their own remarkable achievement.

No rock musician miming sex with his instrument or destroying it on stage, no art installation that creepily mirrors its visitors or pummels them with senseless questions, is nearly as crazy as opera. And yet, because it has been around for so long, and because its devotees pay so much money for their seats and then sit passively in them for such inordinate lengths of time, nobody seems to notice. The formal rules disguise the strangeness. The unnatural is successfully passed off as routine.

It is to Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker’s credit that in their new book, A History of Opera: The Last 400 Years, they notice all this. Despite their evident love of their subject, they are willing to acknowledge up front that, “the whole business is in so many ways fundamentally unrealistic, and can’t be presented as a sensible model for leading one’s life or understanding human behaviour.”

After observing how physically extreme the act of opera-singing is—“people who sing opera generate… huge acoustic forces; if they turn their voices on you at close range, you have to retreat and cover your ears”—they genially ask us to perform a thought experiment. “Think for a moment about what it would be like to inhabit a world that is operatic,” they write. “A world in which everyday life takes place and ordinary time passes, but in…

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Comments

Rochelle
December 14, 2012 at 02:15
The most important point of opera is the music. We're willing to put up with the absurdity of the plot because opera is about the glorious music, which can transcend the absurd plot or outdated staging.
John Borstlap
December 14, 2012 at 17:28
The objection that opera is so far removed from human reality, rests upon a misunderstanding. Like all art, opera is a stylization of reality, a re-interpretation, a mental space created with the intention to present real life experience in concentrated and aestheticized form. What we see on stage is the outer reality of a situation, what we hear is its inner reality, as experienced by the protagonists and shared with the audience through the music. With good opera, the music gives us entry into the inside of characters and plot, and it is THIS which is the exciting thing of the art form. Let's not forget that in real life, we have only exteriors to navigate upon; only our own inner life is - more or less - known to us. With opera, the barriers of physical reality are down and we experience the essence of life. And then it appears that there, extremism and absurdity reigns, which is just what full reality is about. That there are not many new operas which can stand comparison with the existing repertoire, is simply due to the development of modernism in music, which rejected notions of expression and continuity, without which no real opera can be composed. A purely materialistic sound language - 'sonic art ' - cannot function as operatic music, because it cannot share the inside of what happens on the stage. That is why 'new opera' is so often boring, merely a play with some illustrative sounds underneath. And the Glass things are boring as well, because that kind of music (appropriately called 'minimal music') produces a glassy sound wall between stage and audience. It may be entertaining but it is not an idiom suited to opera. New classical music like Nicolas Bacri's (France's new great talent, convert from modernism) offers better opportunities in the future.... or new generations of ocmposers who have no interest in modernism.
Matt Patton
December 15, 2012 at 18:54
This makes me think of Robert Benchley's great parody of opera scenarios written some 80 or 90 years ago, particularly The Ring Cycle, which, having put the characters through complications only SLIGHTLY more absurd than what Wagner did, ends by noting "Immgergluck never marries . . ."
Norman
December 20, 2012 at 06:40
If you want to witness the horrible state of 'modern' opera and be horified at what discerning audiences can choke down try Thomas Adès’s The Temptest that the Met is putting forth. The singers sound like they are doing scales preparing for a real opera and the libretto is on a par with high schoolers practicing poetry. A friend who is an opera lover said she loved it but it wasn't Puccini. Bet your sweet ass it wasn't Puccini.