Clair asks What is it about opera that you love so much? and Mike asks I can't get beyond those ridiculous artificial warbly voices. (To my mind, at least.) Assuming there is one (and I understand from yours and many other people's reactions that there must be), how do you begin to access the emotional dimension?
(And it's not too late to ask your own question)
General observations. I think that music is something intrinsic to all human beings. No, that's wrong, it's not what I think, it's something that has been demonstrated over and over again, by studying primitive tribes and new-born/unborn babies. More so than words, more so than visual stimulus, second only to touch.
I'm also making the assumption that people who read this blog are into a diversity of Arts - I know Mike's a bit of a Drama Queen, for example. I'm assuming that most people listen to art music, or read literature, or appreciate Fine Art, or enjoy drama over-and-above TV soaps. The extent to which they actively enjoy is a product of time, money, arse-into-gear round tuit as much as rational thought.
I will also add that, with so many interests in life, there's a virtuous circle. If you like something and take some time to find out more, it enhances the enjoyment, which drives you to find out more. I sometimes wonder why I don't make much of an effort to go to straight plays or ballets, and usually get bored very quickly in Art Galleries. I also think, with a lot of things, we may not be into them because we haven't been exposed to them at a time when we might be the most receptive to new influences. I'm thinking mainly of childhood, but also in adulthood, there are times - start or end of a relationship, times when we are disillusioned with life etc when we are open to new experiences. Most of the rest of the time we plod on with the familiar.
Music has always been a 'thing' with me. I grew up in a household where serious music mattered, something that was re-emphasised at school, formally, and in discussions and outings with my friendship group at school and at University, and amongst numerous colleagues throughout my Twenties (So it was a shock to enter a world at the age of thirty where it didn't matter to the majority of people...)
I really got into pop music when I was about 10, in a seriously anorak-ish way - when I was in Top Juniors my ambition was to be a Radio 1 DJ, followed by Prime Minister. Yet, despite my obsession with Pop Music - I am still proudly an Eighties Pop Tart and still believe that 1981 was the best year ever, unsurpassable, for pop music - I learnt something interesting very early on: often songs that appealed on the very first hearing on the radio became very irritating very soon, whereas ones that took time to grow often revealed greater profundities. I would say that there are only two pop songs that I loved immediately that I still do - Whatever You Want by Status Quo and Stan by Eminem, and I'm not sure about Stan.
That early realisation of a seeming contradiction must have sparked a thought. Not that I was probably capable of articulating it, even to myself, but it boiled to the fact that it is worth taking the time to get to know a piece of music, and that the superficial ultimately disappoints.
But it can take time and effort to get into opera. My mate, Ria, summed it up perfectly a couple of years ago. She did A-Level music, but without the resources to buy a massive record collection at home, a lot of it's theoretical - don't forget how relatively expensive records and CDs were just a few years ago. We had full operas at home, but, frankly, there is nothing more likely to ruin your enjoyment than having to change a 78 every three or four minutes. Even LPs weren't that great. I can put all three or four discs of a Wagnerian epic into my CD player and let it play. Google tells me that Gotterdammerung is 6 LPs - that's twelve sides. Too much hassle...
And yet, there was something about opera that drew me in. I have an anecdote I tell, about how, just before I reached my teens, but already displaying all the charm and co-operative spirit of a teenager, I was at home - sulky, bored, fed-up, family-hating, the works - forced to watch middle-aged middle-England telly. Parkinson was due on and he had a line-up of guests including some 'boring opera singer'. I was intending to go to my room and sulk, in a teenagery way, but was forbidden, so I had to watch Parkinson. And, this 'boring opera singer' had an affect on me. Part instant teenage crush, but something more, too. (I am currently listening to a CD featuring him, released last month, almost twenty-five years later...). A few days later he was due to appear in a broadcast on BBC2 of the from Covent Garden. Well, I demanded to watch that and absolutely loved it. And the star. So it would be easy to lay the blame solely with Plácido, but that would be way too simplistic.
I already liked a lot of choral singing, especially oratorio. And I liked musical theatre, so it's not a great leap to get into opera. I didn't devote much time or energy to it in my Twenties and early Thirties. Pressures of working full time and studying for a professional qualification, followed by working full-time and being on the Council. Just not enough time to sit down and concentrate with a CD or a video, let alone go to a theatre. From 1989 to 2002 I lost the ability to sit and just chill. The other night I sat on the sofa and listened. Doing nothing else. I could not physically have done that until recently.
But why is it a sustained interest? At its simplest, opera is a sort-of BOGOF, music and drama combined. And in addition to "music" there is also "singing". Of course, singing is a sub-set of music, and yet, it is also separate. To my mind there is nothing quite like the sound of an unamplified trained voice at its best.
I would take issue with Mike's deliberately provocative 'ridiculous artificial'. 'Ridiculous is an opinion, or a matter a taste, and de gustibus non est disputandum, but the artificial is factually incorrect. It is (a lot of) pop singers who have artificial voices, relying on the head voice, whereas trained singers, which include some pop singers, use a lot more of the chest voice, using the entire diaphragm to support the sound. I exclude counter-tenors, who are different again, and not really to my taste (sorry Gregory - love the blog...). If a singer is warbling, it probably means they have an excess of vibrato (=wobble). The Australian has an interesting article on the ageing effects upon the voice:
The vocal folds that help produce the voice are covered with a type of skin. Like the skin on the face, it loses elasticity with age. The larynx drops in the throat and its cartilages begin to calcify with age.
These factors contribute to the change in colour, or timbre, of the voice as it matures. Muscles in the vocal tract may also degenerate slightly with age. This loss of muscle fitness can cause ... the "big slow wobble", an unattractive vibrato that sometimes afflicts older singers.
But this is where it starts getting technical, and I almost devoid of technical knowledge. I just know the difference between when I use my diaphragm to sing and when I just croak a la Hilda Ogden out of my throat.
The sound of a trained voice does take some getting used to, but when you've heard the best, or even just the fairly good, the empty thin reedy sound of very many pop singers leaves a lot to be desired, especially if they're actually trying to sing, as opposed to someone like Bono, who can't sing and rarely tries, and sounds all the more impressive for not doing so.
Everybody has their tastes. Although I find a countertenor beautiful for an aria or two, I really find that sound uncomfortable if they are a main part in a long opera. I am very picky about my sopranos - the ones I like are those with light or clear tops, I don't especially ones with a lot of colour at the top, and certainly not when they've got to screechiness, as too many do, too soon. I think I actually prefer mezzos and contraltos, but sopranos tend to have more interesting roles. On the whole I prefer male voices, especially the richer end of the tenor range into baritones.
Amplification via TV, radio or record fails to do justice. There is a real problem in the current time that the singers who seem to get the most mainstream media exposure are those that are not very good. Watching the excerpts from last night's Proms in the Parks, and even making allowance for the difficult weather conditions, I was cringing at the sound of Katherine Jenkins and Andrea Bocelli. Their record sales suggest that they are very popular, but if I was at one of those events, or a "newbie" watching at home, I would be so underwhelmed that I am not sure that I would want to hear another 'opera singer' again - yet, despite their marketing, they are not opera singers. Bocelli is a crooner, and whilst Jenkins seems to have a modicum of technique, both of them lack ability. And it's unlikely that either would be hired to sing a role in a major opera house. The ability they lack is to vary the volume, to vary the colouring, to attach any expressiveness, to project any sense of dramatic interpretation, and, in the case of Andrea Bocelli last night, even to sing the aria to pitch. I will grant that this was in pissing-down, thundery, windy weather, but, by chance, one of the arias he sang, E lucevan le stelle, (from Puccini's Tosca) featured on Rolando Villazón's (studio recorded) Italian Arias CD which I has played earlier in the day. In no way whatsoever did Bocelli stand up to comparison.
But aria-singing isn't proper opera, anyway, or perhaps no more than 'the goals' being shown on the Ten O'Clock News is football. The newsgroups and bulletin boards are full of arguments about singers - commonly known as "The Domingo Wars", "The Callas Wars" etc - but are often also filled with hot debates about composers. There is passion on both sides of the debate about Wagner, but, generally speaking, there are people who care greatly or little specifically for Baroque, bel canto, 19th Century, Verismo etc, all broadly defined by the time period in which they were written.
In Baroque eg Monteverdi, Handel and Bel Canto eg Rossini, Donizetti the storyline really doesn't matter too much, being merely a vehicle for virtuous vocal gymnastics. Whereas the for two Greats of the 19th Century, Verdi and Wagner, the story did matter.
Many non-Wagnerian 19th century is adapted from the plays of Shakespeare, Goethe, and other significant playwrights or authors; Wagner wrote his own librettos based, for example, on Nordic and Celtic myth. Some contemporary operas are based on contemporary events - The Death of Klinghoeffer is based upon the hijacking of the Achille Lauro; ENO are due to stage an Asian Dub Foundation opera on Colonel Ghaddafi next year. Next week I am off to see The Bitter Tears of Petra Kant, a brand new opera that sets the entire film-script of the 1972 Fassbender film to music. I will make the assumption that people accept the works of great playwrights, Nordic myths, current events and art film as being "valid" as drama or literature. But I recognise that people will argue - why set Shakespeare's Othello to music when Will S did a jolly good job in the first place?
And this is where blogging about music becomes incredibly difficult. It's a lot easier to describe what happens in a book, or in a play, or even in a painting, than to describe what happens in music. I can read how the composer conveys a specific emotion by using a certain key, but really, that's just words. Sometimes it's very simple - slow strings are more redolence of sadness, or love, then loud fast brass, which may be militaristic or comedic. Depending. In my review of Die Walküre I wrote about an almost Pavlovian reaction to certain leitmotifs, certainly by the third time of seeing it in ten days. It doesn't especially work as a poem, I'm not sure how it would work as straight drama, but using melodies to remind us of something, or to foreshadow something else, has an almost primitive effect on the emotions. That does require some familiarity, whereas I honestly defy anybody to listen to the Love Duet and the Liebestod of Tristan und Isolde without hearing sex building up to a climax. That just requires knowledge of sex.
Some people would argue that something that requires the effort to get to know isn't that great. I would argue the obverse - that the more you explore an epic work, the more and more of its subtleties, contradictions etc become more apparent. If they were spelt out in big letters, they would become dull and repetitive and disposable, and would hold no appeal a hundred or four hundred years after they were written. It's a combination of melody and harmony, with a sometimes achingly beautiful voice on top of that.
Composers like Verdi and Puccini relied a lot more on 'Tunes'. Puccini was the Lloyd-Webber of his day, writing tunes specifically to fit onto one gramophone record. And many of those tunes by them and others are instantly recognisable, partly because they have been adumbrated so frequently for other uses - La Donna e mobile (Rigoletto - Verdi), most recently used in one of James Nesbitt's irritating Yellow Pages ads; Bernstein stole blatantly from Act 3 of Die Walküre for West Side Story; Andrew-Lloyd Webber has built a career on 'being influenced by' Puccini; Sound of Music borrows from Cavalleria Rusticana; The Bee Gees stole Tragedy from Gotterdammerung; and David Sylvian's took directly from Eugene Onegin. And for three-quarters of a century the film industry has used the musical techniques for all those scores in weepy films - or action or whatever that are guaranteed to move the audience. So, I would argue that anybody who 'gets' the emotion conveyed in a film score is pretty much on course to emotionally manipulated by an opera.
Opera is very much a visual art; to some large extent, it is the perfect marriage with DVD, which combines good sound quality (depending on how good your TV is at sound reproduction) with visuals. Being a product of the televisual age, I find it relatively difficult to get familiar with an opera by CD or radio alone, even when the CDs are better performed than the DVD. The best way of all is in an Opera House. And we have it so easy these days, with surtitles unobtrusively translating the libretto, and with an expectation that singers also act, rather than merely stand and deliver. Plus the atmosphere, the feeling of absolute involvement.
I suppose what I like is the overall product, and I suppose like all the rest of "Sports and Ents" there is a whole peripheral, too. Endless comparisons and reminiscing, always something new to discover, gossip, discussions of composers, singers, conductors, characters at trivial and deep levels. Like people spend a lifetime studying the deeper and deeper meanings of Shakespeare, there is a whole industry of Wagner studies alone. And, like drama, or literature, or Fine Art, there are such contrasts. I am currently listening to Tristan und Isolde, which would be very difficult to describe as 'melodic' in the way that Rigoletto is just packed full of fabulous tunes from start to finish. I cannot begin to express in words the extreme visceral, physical, sexual effect that T&I has upon me - in writing a review I combined avoidance of the topic with schoolgirlish sniggering. The only way to get it to listen, really listen. I have read and wrote a large amount of erotic literature, erotic non-literature, and, well, porn, and I simply do not believe that words are capable of conveying what music is. I have a habit of crying at sad books or films, but I believe my emotional reaction to an opera comes from further deep inside, and I feel less like I'm being manipulated, although I suspect that I am actually being manipulated more by music than by books, certainly. In the end, like anything, it's entirely subjective whether or not you like it.
I could write an equally long essay about why I'm not into Fine Art. Quite a lot of that is because I have not made sufficient effort to really find out about it in depth, and, no doubt, if I did, I would find a lot more to appreciate. But there is the old cause-effect issue - I don't have the interest to become more interested. Not due to lack of exposure at various different times in my life from infant-hood to the present day. My mother despairs of me, but I would defend my lack of interest in thousands of words of tedious detail if I had to.
But what does annoy me is that people do not criticise Art for irrelevant reasons, such as 'elitism' or 'expense' as they do for opera. Elitism is a dirty word; if it means the best, take your pick between the National Gallery and the Royal Opera House. The Royal Opera House is much cheaper than Premiership Football*, where, apparently, elitism is 'okay', and some people this summer got to see superb performances of Wagner's Die Walküre and Handel's Giulio Cesare at the Albert Hall for the less than the price of a pizza, which is not considered 'expensive' or 'elitist'. On his 50th birthday, Tony Blair decided that it was perhaps time he got into Classical Music. I didn't really know whether to feel sorry for him, having wasted fifty years of his life, or whether to think that actually, outside of politics, he may well be incredibly shallow... But there again, he gets to be PM, and I don't, so I'm not wasting my pity on him!
It also annoys me when people say "Opera bores me" and I quiz them about what they have seen, and it turns out they haven't seen any. Not one, zilch. Not even on the TV. I also find that they are generally the people who want everything to be instant gratification and will defend McDonalds as quality food, and I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here as having great insights into psychology. Usually, you get out of entertainment what you put in; but sometimes, often, you can try, and, like me with Fine Art, eventually conclude that life's too short.
*Almost all of Chelsea FC's tickets are over £45 plus booking fee, whereas over half of ROH's tickets, even for big names/popular operas are under £50. I have tickets for next season for as little as £11. I couldn't get into Crystal Palace for that, and it is the price of the cheapest adult ticket at Rochdale FC. English National Opera, Welsh National Opera and Opera North are cheaper still.
