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Opera! Now this is in my wheelhouse. Your aside is ill informed.
If you’re an American, public/government funding for opera is truly negligible. There is significant state funding for opera in Europe. But Verdi is to Italy what Havel is to the Czech Republic what Yeats is to Ireland, and what rather tragically Wagner was to the Reich, so there’s more of a cultural cause for continued funding. Gershwin, Glass and Adams, for all their merits, aren’t exactly important to our nation-state the way Thomas Paine was.
Opera was a popular art form heading into the middle of the 20th Century, and experienced a commercial boom in America coming out of WW2. But by the 1960s there were warnings that ticket revenues wouldn’t cover expenses. Now, here in the States, it’s about 50/50 on tickets versus philanthropy, with a sliver of NEA money and the like tossed in.
The poor are not paying for opera in America. The truly rich are picking up half the tab for the middle and upper-middle class. And this is after the culling and consolidation of operas and symphonies in America that started in the 1990s, and was twice accelerated by the housing crisis and pandemic lockdowns.
Every opera company in America, sans one, uses the more economical stagione system, staging one, discrete production at a time. Only the Met in New York has the financial capital to operate as a repertory company, with concurrent productions, whereas this is far more common in the state-funded companies of Europe. That NYC is America’s financial capitol is not coincidence.
Now, if I may gripe as a Conservative, because the art form is so dependent on philanthropy — contrasted against that the Magic Flute was a blasphemous production sung in German as opposed to the proper Italian and staged in a common theater, and the Golden Age and Dark Age of opera both refer to its commercial heyday in Italy where there was so much demand that mounds of forgotten schlock was produced — in America today it’s MFA holders who control commissions and grants, and they award these to fellow MFA holders who know how to write for MFA holders, and the art form is now trapped in an artistic ghetto. A beautiful melody, or asks of virtuosity are deemed common and vulgar by MFA holders, and thus they further confine opera to a commercial decline.
I’ve made converts of friends and acquaintances with recordings of Pavarotti‘s Nessun Dorma, and YouTube clips of Donizetti‘s Cheti, Cheti/Aspetta duet. Anything current? Sadly, no.
Mozart genuinely was a genius, as he made sung German tolerable to listen to 😁 For more converting people, Soave sia il vento, no matter what production design shenanigans, is ethereally beautiful.
And Dante wrote The Divine Comedy in the common Italian of his time, not in proper Latin. "High culture" often only becomes "high" after gently marinating for a couple of centuries.
Terry Pratchett in his novel Maskerade made the point that if you want to make money out of people standing around on stage singing, you write musicals. Opera is a machine for turning money into beautiful music and nothing else. That's why it will always need funding, either public, private, or a mix of both. Unhappily as with all high art, the 'you need to be Educated to Appreciate it' has taken over so, as you say, public taste diverges from what the authorities deem correct, and it falls even more out of favour and needs even more propping up by donations instead of generating revenue (I have tried, and failed, to listen to an entire opera by Harrison Birtwistle).
EDIT: An online acquaintance introduced me to this 17th century piece which sounds surprisingly modern (I can see what Birtwistle is trying to do by comparison but this is more listenable) - the Cold Song from "King Arthur".
Way back, there was an Onion headline to the effect of, “Avant-Garde Director Shocks Audiences With In-Period Staging.”
The recontextualization can occasionally be done well. I enjoyed the 2022 Salzburg Festival’s production of the Magic Flute as bedtime story come to life.
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I would love to read your review of Death in Venice.
I’m laying it on a bit thick there and I hope the above came across; it is a good thing that one of the most-enduring and well-loved operas being performed today occurred because… Mozart needed money, and outside of any commission, wrote an opera with the aim of it being a popular, commercial success. As soon as my daughter is old enough and possesses the patience to sit through it, I can’t wait to take her to see the Met’s annual abridged, English-language production it puts on every December that is designed to be child-friendly.
I read Death in Venice as an undergrad, and I wasn’t a great student, so I’m certain I procrastinated, rushed through it, and now don’t have much recall of it — broad strokes of industriousness versus leisure, the love drive versus the death drive, how our base desires conflict with good manners?
Maybe I'm a philistine but I found the music boring and my takeaway was that Britton was doing a poor retelling of Nabokov.
Opera at its best involves a dramatic heightening of human emotion. Small children often sing to themselves when playing to achieve just this. It is intrinsically in us; part of our souls. If a particular work doesn’t move you in this manner, feel no shame in casting it aside.
There is Britten I love — The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra - — and Britten I like — The Turn of the Screw — but if Death in Venice doesn’t resonate in your heart, then go with your heart.
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Your post intrigues me, and I'd be interested in watching/listening to any specific links you'd care to share. (High) Opera has never been a particular interest of mine, but I do enjoy musical theatre and the occasional Gilbert and Sullivan, so it seems like something I might like with the right introduction.
Seconded. Please make a top-level post about this, @UnopenedEnvilope!
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I'll start with the two mentioned.
A quick setup for what is going on in Nessun Dorma. There is a beautiful princess (Turandot) and the king, her father, does not have a male heir; whoever marries her gets a gorgeous wife and a kingdom. The princess does not want to get married, and especially not to a foreigner because of some past trauma in her family line. So, whomever asks for her hand has to successfully answer a series of riddles. If they succeed: gorgeous wife and a kingdom. If they fail: decapitation. A young unknown prince is travelling, incognito, through this kingdom. He sees the decapitated heads of failed suitors perched atop spikes on the outside of the city walls. But then he sees the princess, and falls head over heels. He successfully answers the riddles, and the princess is distraught at the prospect of actually getting married. So moved by love, he gives the princess a riddle. If she can guess his name by sunrise, he gets decapitated, but if not, she has to willingly(!) marry him. The princess charges all her servants with discovering the prince's name before sunrise, on penalty of death for failing to do so.
In Nessun Dorma (No One Sleeps), we hear both the prince's aria, giving his internal monologue, and in the background the chorus of the princess' servants. Some info on the composition of operas. Almost all begin with a libretto, a kind of poem, to which the composer then sets the music. The supermajority of operas have a different librettist and composer. The composer has great if not total license as to which lines and words within the libretto to emphasize and to repeat. The prince wills the night stars to set. And, when Puccini composed this aria, it was his choice to repeat the last word, thrice, to shape it -- victory... victory... victory!
This is an excellent live recording of Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma and you can use the closed caption option in YouTube to get English subtitles in case you aren't fluent in Italian. I think sports are a helpful comparison when discussing opera singers. There are different kinds of forwards in soccer, quarterbacks in football, etc. And, there are different kinds of basses, baritones, tenors, altos and sopranos. Roles are written for certain subtypes. Pavarotti is a great fit for this particular part because he is both more than a credible lyric and spinto tenor; he's capable of the warmth needed for most of the aria and as a huge-chested man, the power to drive its finale.
Setup for the duet I mentioned: Don Pasquale is a comic opera and if you like a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan this should feel familiar and fun. Pasquale, himself, is the buffoon of the opera, and he's taken a young wife far too pretty for him, and after forbidding his nephew, who is his ward, to marry her even though the latter pair are in love. He is (rightly) suspicious she's still in love with his nephew, and he enlists Dr. Malatesta to help him try and catch the two out. Unbeknownst to Pasquale, Malatesta is on the side of the young lovers, and the small plot he proposes is a setup within a larger plot. Donizetti wrote a duet between Pasquale and Malatesta where both switch between addressing each other and making asides to the audience as the tempo keeps accelerating, ending with both talking over and past one another at breakneck speed.
This is a favorite comic opera of mine but not as famous as many so the recordings on YouTube are a bit limited in terms of quality. Here is one that I quite like, by Hampson and Pisaroni who have great comedic chemistry with one another.
There's a lot appealing about opera if you geek out about it. There's history in it: Verdi's Nabucco, to avoid censorship, smuggled a call for a unified Italian nation state within a biblical story, and Va Pensiero was the unification movement's unofficial anthem. Wagner drew inspiration from the same Nordic myths that Tolkien did, and his works are so dense with symbolism he's been claimed by all different types. Obviously the Reich's interest was horrid, and Wagner was certainly antisemitic, but as an example, prior to WW2, he was a darling of the Marxists (clearly Gotterdammerung, the Twilight of the Gods, was about the death of nobility and feudalism, only to be replaced by capitalism, and Das Rheingold, a symbol of capital itself that allows the industrialist Alberich to oppress the proletariat, Nibelungen).
And there's also at the highest levels stunning virtuosity. Mozart wrote his Queen of the Night Aria for his sister-in-law who was a virtuosic soprano. When testing the upper limits of a singer's vocal rage, taking small steps up to the highest pitch makes hitting those highest notes much, much easier. So, Mozart arpeggiates the approach when he writes this aria, making it brutally difficult to sing. If you see it somewhere other than at one of the major opera houses, there is serious tension in the audience, as everyone waits to see if the soprano singing it will hit her high F in tune. On the other end of things, here is a professional opera singer turned vocal coach breaking down how a truly elite soprano deals with signing the role.
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Funny enough I became a fan of opera for almost precisely this reason. I credit Tom Cruise and "Rogue Nation" for introducing me to Turandot and went to see it performed live at the MET a few years back.
My mother took us to the theater, orchestra and opera as children. The use of Beethoven’s Ninth in Die Hard sparked my love of these arts (and gave me an appreciation for what she was in process of trying to impart). The four-minute highlight edit from the end credits, specifically.
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