by Judy Jones
Like Italy herself, La Scala traditionally operates in perpetual crisis mode, dominated by local politics, saddled with hordes of state employees who can’t be laid off, and dependent on government subsidies that have been shrinking steadily for years. Whoever is mayor of Milan automatically becomes president of the opera’s governing board, and the theater’s administrators are appointed by the city council. As a result, critics complain, aesthetic decisions have too often been made along party lines. Still, La Scala is La Scala, as legendary for the passion of its loggionisti—holders of cheap upper-circle tickets—as for its high production standards, and forever synonymous with the glory days of Italian opera. When the theater reopened in 2004, after a three-year renovation, its front-of-the-house silks and velvets had been faithfully restored and its backstage machinery thoroughly modernized. It now ranks with the Opéra Bastille and the refurbished Covent Garden as a state-of-the-art opera factory capable of staging three full-scale operas a day, provided it can find the money to pay for them. With an expanded season, we can hope to see more of La Scala’s famous opening night ritual, in which Milanese big shots and their bejeweled, fur-dripping consorts settle into their box seats as ostentatiously as possible while unemployed auto workers and animal-rights activists wave banners and hurl insults in the streets outside the theater. ROYAL OPERA HOUSE, COVENT GARDEN
(LONDON)
Now the dowager queen of British opera (albeit a dowager queen who recently underwent an extreme makeover), Covent Garden didn’t really come into its own until after World War II. Although it was traditionally known for its star-studded seasons and blue-blooded audiences, its performances were generally dismissed as more social than serious, its productions as more opulent than tasteful. During the war, the theater was converted to a dance hall, thanks to a lack of public support that still makes English opera buffs wince in humiliation. After opera was reinstated in 1946, the resident company had to contend with a virulent inferiority complex due, in part, to the stream of foreign guest artists by which it was continually being upstaged, and in part to the way everyone kept pointing to the humble Sadler’s Wells company as the place where British opera history was really being made. During the 1950s, however, singing standards at Covent Garden were upgraded and production standards became, at the very least, dependable.
The present theater opened in 1858. It’s the third incarnation to exist on the site, two earlier versions having both been destroyed by fire. Covent Garden, by the way, was originally a convent garden (hence the name) and was, until 1974, the central fruit and vegetable market of London.
Never quite as secure as the Royal Ballet, with which it shares headquarters, the Royal Opera was, by the latter half of the twentieth century, so plagued by management and financial crises that it was almost as well known for its frequent near-death experiences as for its productions. In 1996, thanks to funds allocated, somewhat grudgingly, from a national lottery, the theater closed for renovations, promising to reinvent itself as a “people’s opera.” When it reopened at the end of 1999, however, spectacularly over budget and not quite ready for prime time, neither the price of a ticket nor the flow of Perrier Jouët in the dazzlingly refurbished Floral Hall was calculated to make the masses feel welcome. New management has since succeeded in stabilizing Covent Garden’s finances and offering more affordable programs, but the Royal Opera House is still up against a lingering reputation as a clubby affair that caters mainly to stuffed shirts and society matrons. STAATSOPER (VIENNA)
One of the most venerable opera houses and, according to some, the most important, the Staatsoper (or State Opera) has three distinct advantages over its rivals: (1) its location in what has been, since the seventeenth century, the music capital of the world; (2) its resident orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic, which has been called “the world’s supreme musical instrument”; and (3) a combination of generous government subsidies and high ticket prices, which allow it to hold a super-long annual season and to present more operas during that time than any other house (in some years nearly twice as many as the Met). On the other hand, the Staatsoper, and the Viennese in general, are notoriously conservative; although they insist on high standards, they won’t brook innovation. Consequently, history is preserved here, not made, and the Staatsoper’s reputation, for better or worse, is based on rigidly traditional productions of the classics, especially works by the perennial Viennese favorites: Wagner, Mozart, and Richard Strauss.
The original theater, built in 1869 to house the already successful Vienna Court Opera, was partially destroyed during World War II; although the rebuilt version, which opened in 1955, still boasts an ornate facade and a lobby and grand staircase not unlike those of the Palais Garnier, the auditorium is pencil-plain modern and not particularly attractive. FESTSPIELHAUS (BAYREUTH, GERMANY)
Technically, Bayreuth, as it is universally known, is a festival, not a house, but it is one of the great operatic centers of the world, so let’s not split hairs. Remember that it’s pronounced “BY-royt,” unlike the capital of Lebanon, and that the name is virtually synonymous with that of Richard Wagner, who envisioned it as the ideal theater, supervised its design and construction, and ran it until his death. (His body, along with that of his father-in-law, Franz Liszt, is buried on its grounds.) After he died, Bayreuth was run by successive generations of Wagners and, since its opening in 1876, has been devoted exclusively to the production of Wagnerian opera. Design-wise, the theater was revolutionary for its time. It was, in a sense, the first democratic opera house, eschewing the old Baroque box-and-tier system in favor of a fan-shaped auditorium with continuous rows of seating that provided uniformly good sightlines and spectacular acoustics. Under the direction of Wagner’s grandson Wieland, Bayreuth exchanged opera’s traditional naturalistic, painted backdrops for minimal sets and sophisticated lighting, calculated to evoke atmosphere and universal themes rather than specific locales. After Wieland’s death in 1966, his brother Wolfgang took over and, by bringing in directors from outside the family, managed, more or less, to maintain Wieland’s high level of technical innovation, which set the standards for modernist theater production throughout the world. Over the years, Wolfgang, now in his mid-eighties, also managed to alienate nearly every other surviving Wagner, setting the stage for a nasty battle over succession. Or so festival-lovers have long feared. As it happens, Wolfgang has a promising young opera-director daughter and, it appears, a plan. In the meantime, Bayreuth continues, season after season, to be swamped with half a million applicants for a tenth as many seats.
L’OPÉRA NATIONAL (PARIS)
Probably the most sumptuous opera house in the world, the Palais Garnier was, at its 1875 opening, certainly the biggest. Designed as a monument to Second Empire architecture by Charles Garnier, the house peaked between 1885 and 1906, then promptly went into a seventy-year decline. Its enormous stage and machine-laden backstage area, tailor-made for the spectacular processions, elaborate special effects, and ornate ballets the French had loved so much during the heyday of grand opera (when Verdi, working in Paris, contemptuously referred to the theater as “la grande boutique”), now played host to an endless string of shoddy productions complemented by second-rate singing. By the mid-twentieth century, l’Opéra had become just another elaborate piece of bric-a-brac in the Parisian landscape, as essential to the production of opera as the Eiffel Tower to the sending of telegrams.
During the 1970s and early 1980s, however, l’Opéra’s honor was restored; not only did the house make a comeback, it made a name for itself as a showcase for experimental operas and for innovative, often controversial restagings of the classics. In 1989, the Paris Opéra relocated to the ultra—not to say brutally— modern new hall at La Bastille. Despite an abundance of bad press during its first few years, the mammoth Bastille, with its industrial-strength production facilities, programs to suit every taste, and inhouse Métro exit, soon succeeded in establishing itself as the “people’s opera,” attracting both younger,
hipper patrons and tourists from the provinces. Now the Paris Opéra encompasses both the Opéra Bastille and the Palais Garnier (also home to the Paris Opéra Ballet), and, for at least a decade, has had no trouble packing both houses. Stay tuned, however; in the hands of its new, radical-modernist director, that could change. METROPOLITAN OPERA HOUSE (NEW YORK)
The original opened on Broadway in 1883 when a group of wealthy businessmen, irritated because they couldn’t get boxes at the Academy of Music, decided to start their own theater. Despite its early policy of producing all operas in German, the Met had, by the turn of the century, shown a knack for attracting the biggest operatic guns of Europe (Caruso, Mahler, and Toscanini, among others) and the richest patrons of its hometown (the Vanderbilt clan alone took up five private boxes). In 1966, the company moved to contemporary glass-and-marble headquarters at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. The new theater drew raves for its acoustics, its huge warren of backstage rehearsal and administrative rooms, and its state-of-the-art technical facilities (the New Yorker music critic called it “the most efficient factory for the production of opera ever devised”); some pans for its less-than-perfect sightlines; and a mixed bag of gasps and snickers for the two huge Chagall murals adorning the Great Hall. Today the Met is one of the two or three wealthiest and most prestigious opera houses in the world, although, dependent as it is on private sponsors with pronounced likes and dislikes, it is hardly the most adventurous. Next door, at the decidedly less glamorous New York State Theater, the plucky New York City Opera has long played Betty to the Met’s Veronica. Word is, however, that it will soon be moving to new digs.
A Night at the Opera
Granted, you’d feel more comfortable if you’d absorbed opera etiquette as a tot, sitting between Mummy and Daddy at La Scala or Covent Garden. Just remember that the prospect of going to the opera is a lot more intimidating than the actual experience, and that, in America at any rate, at least half the audience will be made up of late bloomers like yourself. It does help, however, to know the rules of the game:
Memorize the plot before you go. This will only take a minute, given the complexity of most opera plots (but watch out for Rigoletto), and nearly everyone’s written a book summarizing them. Opera, as you’ll recall, is supposed to be the perfect combination of music and drama (nowadays, throw in film, sculpture, fashion, and occasionally sword swallowing, but that’s for a later book), and you’ll find it enormously helpful, as the curtain goes down on Aïda, for instance, to know why that nice young man and his girlfriend are still hanging out in the basement.
Bring a libretto. If you can’t borrow it from the local library, you can usually buy one at the box office on the night of the performance. Cram during intermission. No one will expect you to understand even a third of what’s being sung on stage, but after all, the librettist didn’t deliberately write the lyrics in a language you wouldn’t understand; he meant them to enhance the appeal of the songs, and, as the best of Broadway musicals, they often do. If you’re going to a major opera house in a big city, however, forget all of this; there will probably be subtitles flashed on a screen above the stage (or on the back of the seat in front of you, if you’re at the Met).
Don’t clap until the people around you do. The moments of silence in an opera don’t always signal breaktime; very often, the singer pauses for effect, or to indicate that something dramatic is about to happen, or to heighten the intensity of an orchestral interlude, which, by the way, is to be paid attention to. Opera orchestras, unlike Paul Shaffer and his boys, don’t expect to have to play through applause.
Go ahead and voice your enthusiasm, if the spirit moves you, at the end of a well-executed aria. Strictly speaking, you’re supposed to shout “Bravo!” if the singer is a man, “Brava!” if it’s a woman, but American audiences tend to take a unisex approach, shouting “Bravo!” to everyone indiscriminately, and the singers don’t seem to mind. (Just, please, refrain from yelling “Bravissimo!” which is simply pretentious. Some of the people around you may be doing it, but you don’t want to know them.)
Don’t spend a lot of time worrying about what to wear, unless you’re going to La Scala or have an invitation to share a box at the gala with the Duke and Duchess of Bedford. Jeans, of course, are inadvisable (although not unheard of). And while we agree that arriving in diamonds and satin with a liveried footman to help one out of one’s carriage can make the whole opera-going experience more meaningful, outside Milan, and especially in America, most people opt for comfort and just try to have clean hair.
Don’t choose Wagner your first time out. Later, maybe, you’ll come to relish sitting in the dark for four hours contemplating the erotic implications of death and listening to music that (to the untrained ear) all sounds alike. Right now, it’s OK to go for one of the crowd-pleasers, maybe something by Puccini or Verdi (although, if we had to choose between them, we’d recommend the Verdi; they’ll both make you cry, but even a novice will sense the presence of Quality). Some other obvious possibilities:
Carmen, the world’s most popular opera, and one of the most accessible; this is a real musical, complete with Spanish dances and lots of gypsy flavor. It does, however, bring with it the risk of shoddy production values and overweight leading ladies.
The Magic Flute, a spectacular fairy tale, written to please ordinary people, not just opera buffs. The plot’s so harebrained that you won’t lose anything by not understanding German, and as pure entertainment it, like any Mozart, rates two thumbs up.
Norma, one of the greatest “singer’s operas.” It’s harder to recommend this one; the plot’s clumsy, you may not go for the bel canto style, and who knows—you could find it offensive to Druids. Given the right cast, however, the music will take your breath away.
*Jon Pareles is a music critic for the New York Times.
Philosophy Made Simplistic
Philosophy is the study of everything that counts, just as those ancient Greeks, who were as interested in the structure of matter and the existence of God as they were in the nature of good, always said it was. Today, though, what with the pressures of specialization (not to mention the glut of Ph.D.’s), the physicists have walked off with matter and the theologians with God, leaving the philosophers either to go on pondering “What is good?” or to become computer programmers. Don’t tell them that, though; they still think they have the last word on anything that falls within one or more of the following five areas of classical philosophical investigation:
Logic: What’s valid, what’s invalid; what can profitably be argued and proven, what can’t; how to test a categorical syllogism; how not to keep making silly mistakes all the time. Or, as Tweedledee says in Through the Looking Glass, “Contrariwise, if it was so it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”
Ethics: Which actions are right and which ends are good. Moreover, does the rightness of actions derive from the goodness of their consequences? And while you’re on the subject, is the virtuousness of a motive to be inferred from the rightness of the actions that it tends to prompt? Also, is it less bad to shoplift from Kmart than from the corner hardware store even though the salesperson at Kmart explained the fine points of home rewiring to you and the guy who runs the hardware store doesn’t know a switch from a socket? And other more or less practical aspects of human conduct.
Aesthetics: Beauty and art and taste, standards and judgments and criticism, Aristotle and Oscar Wilde and Sharon Stone. Why do we like what we like? Does art per se exist, or is it just patches of color and hummable tunes and words in a row? Is the point of a work of art that it be representative of something, or that it express its creator’s identity, or that it engage its audience? And is there a relationship between what’s beautiful and what’s good?
Epistemology: Do we really know anything and, if so, what? And how do we know it? And how do we know that we know it? And how do we know that we know that we know it? etc. Note: Ever since Wittg
enstein (see page 329), formal philosophical inquiry has been centered less on classical epistemology and more on language, less on the question “How do you know?” and more on the question “What do you mean?”
Metaphysics: The big one: The search for (and ransacking of) ultimate categories, with its goal an understanding of the all-inclusive scheme of things otherwise known as the world and of the part man plays within it. Past discoveries have included existence, essence, time, space, God, self, and cause. Stay tuned. But don’t hold your breath: A lot of philosophers now characterize metaphysics as “overpoetic” and “prescientific.”
Got Another Minute or Two?
Philosophy is, as befits the so called queen of sciences, rife with ologies and isms. Of these, let’s take a closer look at three of the former (and you’ve already had epistemology, don’t forget) and two of the latter.
Ontology is literally the study of being (the cancer speciality is oncology), and is sometimes used interchangeably with metaphysics. Depending on whom you listen to, it’s either the most generic and abstract of all intellectual inquiries or it’s a compilation of pseudo-problems only a fool would tackle. If you must field (or wield) the word, keep in mind that it implies getting to the heart of the matter, to the very essence of something. So, an ontology of the cinema would proceed by taking the thing called “moving pictures” and contrasting it with still photographs and with paintings, with television, with the landscape viewed through the windshield of a moving car. It would talk about other activities revolving around lenses and editing, and other art forms, most notably the theater, undertaken collectively and enjoyed communally. (What it wouldn’t deal with: Eisenstein, Hollywood in the Thirties, David Lynch’s career, censorship, the “zoom,” what makes a movie fun to watch, or the insipidity of Oscars night.) Careful: “Ontology” is a word strictly for intellectual big spenders.
