A couple of nights ago, I attended my first opera! It was cool to finally experience what so many of my heroes and heroines from 19th century British literature experienced – with some modifications, naturally.
The closest I’ve come to participating in musical theater was when I acted in a variety show at my church wherein a group of us girls sang and choreographed a dance to “How do you solve a problem like Maria” from The Sound of Music. We each sang and acted the part of a Catholic nun; it was very cute. We dressed in black graduation gowns and used toilet paper around our faces to help create the wimple. We were a giggly crew before we went on stage as girls’ toilet paper kept unwrapping from their headpieces. The end of the song contained a surprise for the crowd; we held up our gowns (tastefully, of course) to reveal that we were all wearing black fishnet stockings underneath. Let’s just say, after our rendition of that song, Julie Andrews rolled over in her grave--and she was not even deceased; we were more like “sistas” than reverend “sisters.”
Not knowing my history of apparent irreverence toward musicals, the opera folks let me in, and as aforementioned, it was neat to compare it to what I have read about opera-going. The opera was quite the vibrant social scene back in the day, and people went to see and be seen. I suppose those of us in a small town today see and are seen by going to the local greasy diner or worse, Walmart. How far we have fallen!
In my favorite novels, everything that is dramatic and significant occurs at the opera, when a handsome gentleman shares his opera glasses with a beautiful lady, or when the lower class rube enters the box and raises the eyebrows of the social elite within, or when the entire theater’s eyes are drawn to the fair heroine’s entrance into her box, bedecked in sumptuous velvet and sparkling diamonds. The real action at the opera took place not on stage but during the intermissions. I equate this with me at a football game. I can attend a game in person or watch it on TV and be so caught up in the social atmosphere, I barely know who is playing who, let alone the score or anything that happens during the game. During intermissions, the novel’s characters box-hopped. This was an all-important time when the old dowagers congregated to gossip and amorous gentlemen dropped in to flirt.
My opera experience was slightly different from this. I arrived not in a stately carriage arrayed in my finest duds, but in the tired shirt and pants I’d had on for the past 12 hours, the ones I’d taught, driven and eaten in. My jewels consisted of silver earrings and bracelet that needed a good polishing and a necklace of questionable taste. My hair was limp from the humidity and residual makeup had settled into the lines on my face. Moreover, it was student night at the opera which meant that we paid less money and witnessed dress rehearsal mistakes. We sat not in the glamorous raised boxes (those were empty) but in the nosebleed balcony looking down onto the stage. Our intermission was none too dramatic or romantic, either. We quietly single-filed to bathrooms built for twelve and listened to a question-and-answer session with the second-string singers.
Perhaps the lack of drama and excitement in the experience itself made the opera more central than the machinations of the audience. I began to feel transported to 15th century Spain (Il Trovatore was the opera), but then the conductor would bark at some member of the orchestra (once he said to some poor musician, “What planet are you on?!!) and I’d be snapped back to a 21st century American dress rehearsal on a Thursday night at the end of a long day. We were further bound by reality by recurring glitches in modern technology, namely that for parts of each act the English translations displayed on the screen above the stage would vanish and I would be lost. They were singing passionately and gesticulating wildly but I could only guess at what they were saying. Was he upset that she didn’t love him or was he merely telling her she had repulsive breath? Without the translation, the interpretation was completely up to us. Now had I imitated my 19th century sophisticated forebears, I would have either studied Italian or googled the summary ahead of time so I wouldn’t have been lost without the translation.
One more observation from my night at the opera for which my years of reading classic literature had ill prepared me: the incongruousness of appearances. We watched the most unlikely of couples fall madly in love with one another on stage; stout, middle-aged, mismatched characters whom you would never imagine together acted the parts of young, ardent lovers in the story. I believe it was Samuel Taylor Coleridge who wrote that we must suspend our disbelief to accept fiction, but in this case, I was hard pressed to suspend my disbelief and accept the mismatched romance playing out on stage. Of course, in opera, as I had to be reminded, the voice is the thing and the stout unlikely middle-aged singers were the ones with the phenomenal pipes.
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| The screen up top was the one that kept going out at the worst times... |
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| 21st century opera goers |
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| a few more |
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| Can you tell I was really fantasizing about sitting in one of those boxes? I even dared my friend to sneak into one but she dared not. |
