A Night At The Opera

It’s fall. In addition to the rustle of leaves and that vague autumn smell of wood smoke in the air, it’s opera season, which brings to mind the parallels of opera to life, not because of drama or plot twists, but because most of the time I have absolutely no idea what’s going on. Opera, like fall, ultimately spells doom. Greens turn glorious colors, then brown and finally, fall dead. Opera, too, comes with its parallel set of harbringers: the ubiquitous fat lady sings amidst the overdecorated sets, while extolling her glorious love affair and then, sadly, comes death.

When dad insisted we learn about ‘real’ music, we whined “why? what did I do”. We were familiar with classic artists: the Beatles, the Stones, the Beach Boys. I demurred, quoting Robert Benchley: “Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings,” to no avail.  

As dad patiently explained, Italian opera was the soul of beauty and simplicity. Act One, boy meets girl; Act Two, they fall in love; and finally, Act Three, one or both of them die; add a couple of catchy jingles and an opera is born. In retrospect, he was right. When I look back on the Italian operas I’ve had the privilege to see and hear, they do tend to follow the same scenario, although I am troubled by the propensity of dying divas. La Boheme: she dies; Madame Butterfly: she dies; La Traviata: she dies; Il Trovatore: she dies; agreeably, in Tosca: they both die, although not so agreeably for the protagonists. 

German opera, on the other hand, is much more tortuous, as are the Germans. They can never seem to agree on anything, even pronunciation of the letters of the alphabet. Germans pronounce V like F, and W like V. Try pronouncing Volkswagen as the Germans pronounce it: “FolksVagen”, but I digress. German opera, and I’m talking about Wagner (again, pronounced Vagner), the father of German opera, is unlike Italian opera. In Act One, half the cast is dead, by the end of Act Two, the other half of the cast has died, and finally, by Act Three, the audience tries to take itself out. Having sat numbly through The Ring Trilogy and The Flying Dutchman, I would have to agree.  

Remember Cher, and her great lines from Moonstruck; as she left the opera, sobbing “She died. I couldn’t believe it. I knew she was sick but I didn’t think she was gonna die. She was coughing her brains out, but she still had to keep singing.”  Death is inevitable, in opera, as in life, although I would prefer my death to be on a quiet note rather than anything operatic.