“Opera cuts to the chase—as death does. An art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart.”
― Julian Barnes, Levels of Life
Italy invented lyric opera in the 16th Century and has worn it like a Sunday-go-to-meetin’ getup ever since. Expats are in a position to gauge how far it penetrates the country today. They can look back to their pre-Italian time in North America or in Britain-plus-offshoots and recall what the culture of their native country made of Italy’s proud invention. They will find that opera back home was very much a minority taste, filling a burnished pigeonhole. In London you dressed formally to watch a performance at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. It served a sliver of the population but was subsidised long before a penny went to the National Theatre, which aimed at a wider swathe of the public. In summer there were opera compounds, a circling of snooty wagons, in the backyards of stately homes. The elite, working hard not to appear to be snobs, picnicked during intervals on champagne and a hamper from Harrods (“stress free and luxurious”). The strain of trying to come up with something clever to say about the music was relieved when they scurried to get out of the rain.
Meanwhile the huge lump of Brits got close to opera by repeating jokes about it. Try not to wince. “Why do pirates listen to opera? Because they love the high Cs. Why don't bankers listen to Wagner? They soon lose interest.” Or, the stepping-out, aspiring sort, might go to see Andrew Lloyd Webber’s cheesy musical, ‘The Phantom of the Opera’. It became the first stage production to reach worldwide grosses of $6 billion, which it did in the summer of 2014. It was a machine to print money money whose gears were fuelled by a mash of tired cliches.
Across the Atlantic, opera jokes reached the nec plus ultra with the Marx Brothers best film, the sublime, ‘A Night at the Opera’. The 1935 movie was selected by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. MGM’s biggest hit of the year did interrupt Groucho, Harpo and Chico’s antics with some scenes from ‘I Pagliacci’ and ‘Trovatore’ done by trained singers. The movie begins in a storybook Milan and is full of cod Italian characters. The message the Marx deliver is that opera, especially the Italian variety, is the best target of ridicule imaginable.
In those prime years of American cinema, opera as a joke couldn’t be left alone even in dramatic films. ‘Citizen Kane’, the 1941 masterpiece directed by Orson Welles, took time out for giggles. Charles Foster Kane, the magnate satirised—the stand-in for William Randolph Hearst—had divorced his uppermost class wife and married a simple young woman who liked to sing. To make her worthy of his status, Kane tried to turn her into an opera diva. The exasperation of the maestro he hires—a classic stage Italian—to groom her is good for a slapstick interlude. It again affirms that for people abroad, it’s Italy that owns opera. Another scene, this one wordless, hammers home the point. The Kane protégé is making her debut in Chicago’s Lyric Opera House. The camera goes backstage up and up in the fly tower. A technician, another stage Italian, looks down as the protégé’s first notes rise. His nose ripples as he raises his fingers to pinch it.
Like the British elite’s self-conscious curtsy to the lyric genre, America had its own po-faced homage to opera. From 1931 the Metropolitan Opera of New York broadcast weekly on network radio a full-length opera performance. It continues in our day of Funk Hip Hop and Rodeo Pop, its intervals still stuffed with advertising and teaching moments for the plebs.
However, the broader citizenry of the USA, like that of the UK, continued to think of foreign countries in terms of fixed images glued in place by decades of repetition. It’s every nation’s way in these matters. Take views of the French. They once ate unwrapped baguettes. They sometimes doffed beret basques. Paris generated talk of ‘amour’ since WWI ‘doughboys’ fresh from the Midwest discovered brothels thanks to General ‘Black Jack’ Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force. Such mental debris created the Frenchman of myth.
Spoken Italian sounded to foreigners like the chirping of hysterical sparrows. The clean shaven were amused by facial hair in unfamiliar configurations. It was hilarious for the untravelled to imagine spaghetti entering a mouth relentlessly despite hirsute barriers. Strangeness as always was met with laughter. These gabbling comedians with their higher-pitched women founded the stereotype. The Italian figure was a tenor always hitting a high note with a grin while he was eyeing a haystack of pasta and twirling his mustachio. Among the peoples of the earth Italians were the operatic ones. Never mind the Germanic tradition, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Richard Wagner. They were the military ones, Prussian soldiers like Erich von Stroheim, a Viennese Jewish actor in Hollywood who specialised in the role.
Casual questioning of a few Italians gives us a hint as to how operatic the country is today. We inquire of a young lady student from a small town in Salento. She could be termed working class if the industrial world had ever got near her. Her answer came from the tip of her tongue: “Opera is not for us”. Her coevals tended to agree with her. If politically on the left, they might praise some of the Italian ballad singers that share their views. But, right, left or zero in politics, they all seem enthusiasts for current popular music. This originates mainly from the American entertainment industry, which even anti-American young seem to forget. US soft power is unopposed.
If we move on to interrogate a fortyish Italian male, with good basic education and some professional training, the answers are different. He doesn’t attend the opera or know much about it, but is full of unfocused respect. For him opera is like Leonardo da Vinci or Galileo Galilei, his ammunition in any give and take about the prestige of nations. But what about an older, lower middle-class Italian woman? She has been to university and taught school. So it’s no surprise that she’s aware of how Giuseppe Verdi’s operas urged on the formation of modern Italy in the 1860s. Verdi seems to constitute most of her opera knowledge. She will hum his best known arias and is thrilled by great female and male voices. She has attended performances at the local opera house, but with the years her interest has stagnated.
The mention of the local opera house needs explaining. The principal Italian cities maintain opera houses that have a rich tradition and a sheen of venerable glamor. Their opera productions are meant to signal civic excellence, unfaltering continuity. But opera in their hands can often seem like a heritage item that must be conserved as a asset even if otherwise irrelevant. Like the British crown jewels that even the billionaire royal family does not wear, opera is kept under glass for worship like a jawbone or surviving scuffed sandal of a saint. In citizens’ imaginations, opera houses often stand out less than a new, enlarged McDonalds. Drawing a conclusion from our haphazard enquiry, we might say that Italians like so many foreigners do identify their country with opera. But while foreigners take it for a close embrace, for Italians themselves it’s more of a perfunctory hug.
Could it be time to look at opera in a fresh way as a newcomer might who stumbles on it late in life? This was the case of Julian Barnes, music lover and distinguished novelist. For most of his life he found the storytelling of opera clumsy and childish, quite the contrary of the narrative paths he followed in his own work. Then tragedy hit him. He found himself suddenly bereft of his wife to whom he was joined in unusually close intimacy and need. In his 60s he wrote a remarkable essay on grief and mourning. Entitled ‘The Loss of Depth’, it appeared in his 2014 volume, Levels of Life. The essay is both heart-rending and troubling by the intensity of the writing and the refusal of the consoling and exculpatory. Let’s consider his discovery of opera as a narrative form.
Understand that Barnes had entered a new and terrible period. It held nothing but grief for his wife’s death. There wasn’t room for anything else. He contemplated suicide. The sight of ordinary happy people enraged him. When his friends finally managed to coax him out of his den of mourning one evening, he was led to an opera. Now Barnes as an accomplished novelist was a master of plausible narrative. His characters acted within the range of recognisable behaviour. His skill was to reveal what underlay it. He had always found opera dramas constructed like bad plays as far as timing and realism went. The characters’ motives were often preposterous and their emotions overblown to hurricane frenzy.
He was glad when the curtain went up for Richard Strauss’ ‘Elettra’ and the lights dimmed. He could ignore the eager operagoers around him. But the performance that followed was completely new to Barnes. He saw for the first time that the stories he had always scoffed at with their facile coincidences, unlikely psychology and want of poise were true to the new-life phase he had entered. Objections to implausibility fell away and grasping the essential tight was what mattered. Hadn’t he put aside everything as trivial but his having his wife stolen from him by death? The operatic approach now struck him as true. He would soon find Verdi’s Don Carlo right to say, ‘My name is Carlo and I love you” to a French Princess he has just met. Carlo had no time for preliminaries. He spoke what was on his mind, the essential. Barnes reflected:
“Now it seemed quite natural for people to stand onstage and sing at one another, because song was a more primal means of communication than the spoken word—both higher and deeper.”
The new opera fan was no longer put out by the contorted plots of opera dramas. He saw that their:
“…[M]ain function is to deliver the characters as swiftly as possible to the point where they can sing of their deepest emotions.”
Barnes’ change of mind about opera was confirmed when he saw Christoph Willibald Gluck’s ‘Orfeo ed Euridice’. He had always found the Orpheus myth unconvincing. Why couldn’t the bereaved husband keep from glancing a few moments more at his mate who was on the way to being resuscitated? It was the reasonable thing to do. But now in his grief Barnes saw that he too would be unable to keep his eyes off his returning wife for even the length of a heart beat.
So what is to be said about opera? On the one hand it’s a magnificent treasure, one of those things that we can wonder at. How in this universe short of meaning did shirking humanity ever put it together? How did they make it into a mirror of themselves however farfetched it appears? It’s a pity that in our inadequacy we can only make a joke of it or honour it in an absentminded way like a forebear whose shelf-life has passed and the shelf beneath all but turned to dust.
Comments