on opera

A week or two ago I saw Madama Butterfly for the first time. One would think that given simultaneous strong interests in Japan and opera, I’d’ve seen it long before. But no. My interest in opera is worth exploring. It’d be easy to chalk it up to my general tendency to like things that are pretentious, high-brow, and slightly gay. Fair enough. But then too opera is among the gloomiest of arts, so if you’re me, what’s not to like? People are miserable, go mad, and die (often pretty gruesomely) with great regularity, and sing loudly about how that all makes them feel.

And there’s the real point. I have a fair degree of difficulty with emotions. Not the simple ones: I feel sad as well as—better than!—the next guy. And happy once in a while too. I look forward to the rare moments when something makes me angry: I find it fun. But more complicated emotions confuse me. I can pretend to empathize, and most people don’t notice, but I simply don’t understand them. Two of these tricky emotions, the ones for which music plays a vital role in my life, are love and faith.

I think I’ve loved. Once. Maybe twice. Never wisely, and never well. And never, it should be added, requitedly. But once upon a time. But I have trouble with the emotion, and I’ve slowly come to believe, as I survey my life bereft of deep human relationships, that I’ve lost what small ability I may once have had to love someone. So opera. I’ll assert that gloom aside, opera is fundamentally about love, and expresses it in a way no other art form is capable of.

So I go. And I listen, and I watch, as Violetta and Mimi perish coughing blood, As Aida and Radames slowly suffocate in their tomb, as Tosca tosses herself off that roof yet again, as Siegfried and Brunnhilde bring the whole world crashing down around them. All for love. Love and death. Death and love. And for a moment, in the midst of my suspension of disbelief, as a fat woman is a consumptive waif, as an old man is an action hero, I convince myself that I almost understand how love works, and why, and what makes people do such stupid things for it. Of course it doesn’t hurt that after the bows are taken and the lights come up and you rub your eyes and stop sniffling, it sinks in that opera’s not just about love, but more precisely about how much love sucks. It reassures.

Faith is the other hard one. I have a sort of vague deism about me, I suppose, and I’ve flirted with Gnosticism a little. But real faith, like the Christian Right manages…I envy it. To believe with such certainty so much that’s so outlandish. Of course, they’d feel the same about me and evolution, if they thought about it. Which they don’t. Hence the difference between us. But I digress.

Given my fascination with faith, churchy music fascinates me too. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that to my ears the greatest music humans have created has been motivated by faith—and more precisely by Christianity. I comment flippantly sometimes that just by itself Bach’s Mass in B Minor goes a long way toward atoning for Inquisitions and Crusades and sundry other atrocities. But on the scales by which I assess the world it’s true. And so I go to the opera to momentarily suspend my disbelief in love, and I go to requiem masses, and renaissance polyphony, and other, stranger, God-based stuff, to momentarily suspend my disbelief in Faith.

There are very few operas that take on the subject of faith rather than love. I’ve never given it much thought before, but in the context of this essay it suddenly seems very logical that Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites (a gaggle of French nuns meet the guillotine) and Glass’s Akhnaten (a crazy, possibly hermaphroditic Egyptian Pharaoh dumps thousands of years of contented polytheism in favor of one true god) are among my very favorite operas.