Someday We'll Live In A World Without Love
While we're on the subject of the opera, I think the amount and prevalence of love in operas is shameful. I don't mean to say that love itself is unappealing, or that musical productions should be interrupted for car chases and gunfights (although I'm not not saying that). I don't mean to take a seven year-old's attitude towards love. I think it's just fine for two people to love each other. But almost every opera that I can think of bases its plot around love. Love frustrated, love triumphant, love love love. I'm sure this appeals to some people (board of directors, I'm looking at you), but for various reasons it strikes me that love and operas don't mix.
Operas provide us with two or three hours, a fraction of which is used to establish each character, and an even smaller fraction of which may be used to establish interpersonal relationships. All the falling-in-love, all the sweet nothings and all the loving must happen in real time. There can be no montage in the opera world. With these time constraints, the figures in an opera can scarcely be more than types. Reasons of plot or character may require one cipher to love another, but it's hardly enough to build a whole theme on. Even if the characters are well-drawn, and characters seldom are, it can hardly be anything novel. If you've seen two people in love, you've seen them all.
Perhaps I hold a minority perspective. The general public can't seem to get enough loving, whether on stage or screen. Notwithstanding that it's good to be in love, what is there to say? If two people are in love, they really really like each other, and that's all there is to it. The public's apparent desire to see an endless series of fundamentally similar love scenes play to predictable and familiar conclusions suggests a more lurid form of entertainment. I, for one, don't want to watch sublimated pornography.
Without really inspired wordplay, it's difficult to infuse new interest in the tired idea of love. Operas, however, are seldom known for their lyrics. (Quick! Name a librettist). While most librettos are merely a series of by-the numbers emotion songs (e.g. The Queen of the Night's famous aria: "I am very angry" ), a creative approach would do well to ditch love altogether. Countless books, plays, poems and screenplays have been written in which love is completely absent. Although the move away from romatic plots has been greater in modern times, several of Shakespeare's plays, including some of his most popular, have scarcely any love. Julius Caesar, King Lear, and Timon of Athens, not to mention Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe and etc. manage to concern themselves with plots less trite than questions of who thinks who is sexy.
So I ask you, why are operas stuck in this romantic ditch? I assume some of it relates to the need to find meaningful roles for women, and in the past, women were known primarily for their lovin'. (Although King Lear, which is chockablock with women, has never been made into an opera). Perhaps it is merely a sad fact of history that women's liberation happened after classical music died a natural death. As for modern operas, Nixon in China abandons the concept of love, but it throws out the baby with the bathwater, being too modern and minimal to have much of a plot at all.
Maybe it doesn't matter. John Adams can do what he wants, but opera is as dead as Caesar, and everybody knows it. It doesn't really matter what anybody does now; that canon isn't getting any bigger. People may think they know why the grand opera died out, but if you ask me, twas beauty killed the beast.
Operas provide us with two or three hours, a fraction of which is used to establish each character, and an even smaller fraction of which may be used to establish interpersonal relationships. All the falling-in-love, all the sweet nothings and all the loving must happen in real time. There can be no montage in the opera world. With these time constraints, the figures in an opera can scarcely be more than types. Reasons of plot or character may require one cipher to love another, but it's hardly enough to build a whole theme on. Even if the characters are well-drawn, and characters seldom are, it can hardly be anything novel. If you've seen two people in love, you've seen them all.
Perhaps I hold a minority perspective. The general public can't seem to get enough loving, whether on stage or screen. Notwithstanding that it's good to be in love, what is there to say? If two people are in love, they really really like each other, and that's all there is to it. The public's apparent desire to see an endless series of fundamentally similar love scenes play to predictable and familiar conclusions suggests a more lurid form of entertainment. I, for one, don't want to watch sublimated pornography.
Without really inspired wordplay, it's difficult to infuse new interest in the tired idea of love. Operas, however, are seldom known for their lyrics. (Quick! Name a librettist). While most librettos are merely a series of by-the numbers emotion songs (e.g. The Queen of the Night's famous aria: "I am very angry" ), a creative approach would do well to ditch love altogether. Countless books, plays, poems and screenplays have been written in which love is completely absent. Although the move away from romatic plots has been greater in modern times, several of Shakespeare's plays, including some of his most popular, have scarcely any love. Julius Caesar, King Lear, and Timon of Athens, not to mention Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe and etc. manage to concern themselves with plots less trite than questions of who thinks who is sexy.
So I ask you, why are operas stuck in this romantic ditch? I assume some of it relates to the need to find meaningful roles for women, and in the past, women were known primarily for their lovin'. (Although King Lear, which is chockablock with women, has never been made into an opera). Perhaps it is merely a sad fact of history that women's liberation happened after classical music died a natural death. As for modern operas, Nixon in China abandons the concept of love, but it throws out the baby with the bathwater, being too modern and minimal to have much of a plot at all.
Maybe it doesn't matter. John Adams can do what he wants, but opera is as dead as Caesar, and everybody knows it. It doesn't really matter what anybody does now; that canon isn't getting any bigger. People may think they know why the grand opera died out, but if you ask me, twas beauty killed the beast.
posted by apk01004 at 5:13 AM
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