I realized the dangers of opera too late to be saved

February 13, 2024 12:00 PM

I preferred these sensory and sensual phantasms to the everyday reality of school life, and I knew that fact was so shameful it needed to be hidden. Back then I couldn’t put my disability into words, but I felt it keenly. My habits were not just escapist pastimes. They were abnormal passions. I was a mutant, a monster of sensibility, a changeling with a freakish vulnerability to beauty. Years later I found a name for my debilitation—I was an aesthete. from The Imaginary Operagoer: A Memoir by Dana Gioia in The Hudson Review
posted by chavenet (14 comments total)

She told me I was impossibly greedy and advised me to confess the sin. I knew she was right. My desire was selfish and disgraceful.

Desire, especially opulent desire, is selfish and disgraceful. If it stops being selfish and disgraceful, you are at risk of being a monster.
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:24 PM on February 13 [3 favorites]

My folks weren’t like other parents. In a world of ants, I was raised by two grasshoppers. I felt loved and secure. I didn’t yet know that ants ruled the planet.

Relatable… feeling deeply out of step with peers because the experiences you have at home are more stimulating than the ones you have with kids your age or at school… knowing that this marks you as weird, effete, etc. Learning to suppress it and to pretend to like stuff you don’t like…

My parents weren’t sophisticates; they were educated red necks. But art made them feel and they passed that on to me.
posted by ducky l'orange at 12:41 PM on February 13 [13 favorites]

There's a lot of personal detail in this article, but one general thing I found interesting was the reference to the Victor Book of the Opera, which is in the public domain and available in editions describing 70 operas (with clear illustrations) and 100 operas (with scan issues affecting the illustrations). It's probably not the best representation of the genre, but something that introductory is where I am on this.

I'll admit to having had preconceptions about opera until recently--not dissing it so much as assuming it's a relatively inaccessible domain for classical music with a social mythology of distinction attached to it that's often parodied. For my own reasons, I found myself down for some 17th C. narrative content and decided to give it a try, so I just, like, googled up Fiona Maddocks's top 50 operas at The Guardian and started watching them on Youtube.

Maybe it's not a very insidery way to appreciate it, but I thought the film version of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo was good--and I watched it just in time to see how similar it was thematically to two 16th C. parlor games as I translated them, "The Game of Ceremonies" and "The Game of Hell" (both of which are even more similar to early 17th C. masques; FWIW what's been called the "first surviving German opera" was also preserved in a book of parlor games). Likewise, Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas" was great--technically in English, but since the subtitles for it are in French here's the libretto to follow along. I'm sure I'd heard "Dido's Lament" somewhere before, but the context was nice for appreciating modern versions by Tift Merritt & Simone Dinnerstein, Annie Lennox, et al. Aside from a trailer, it's been taken down now, but I also enjoyed Handel's "Giulio Cesare." So, good job, Fiona Maddocks--3 for 3, IMO, at picking out some good stuff to start with.

I don't know how much farther I'll go with it, but a while back, I did bother to look up a bunch of ways to stream opera online: Met Opera on Demand; Operavision; Medici TV; Royal Opera House; Opera Streaming; SF Opera; Paris Opera; etc. I also subscribed to r/opera where by chance the streaming question came up yesterday.
posted by Wobbuffet at 1:15 PM on February 13 [13 favorites]

I still have my videotape of Zeffirelli's "La Traviata" although I don't have a machine that can play it. In any case, I was greedy, too, as I used the long play feature so it also has "Purple Rain" and part of "The Hunger" on it as well, all of it fuzzy and glorious.
posted by winesong at 2:10 PM on February 13 [4 favorites]

During the pandemic I subscribed to The Met online thing and Marquee TV, mostly for mr hippybear to watch. The other service was much more thrilling with a gigantic selection of productions from all around the world, many of them quite experimental.

At some level, if you truly believe that opera is all about the music and the lyrics, you should be able to tolerate if the entire set is made of inflatable dinosaurs or crumpled junkyard cars or whatever and some of these productions actually challenge that. But others are delightful, and inventive.

If I were going to resubscribe to one of these services it would be Marquee. It had a much more interesting variety of content. The Met is great, but... it's all a bit samey after a while.
posted by hippybear at 2:54 PM on February 13 [4 favorites]

I can relate to the essay. When I was growing up CBC radio played Texaco Met on Saturdays (sometimes followed by a country music show) and it all sunk in by osmosis. I ended up trying to convince my high-school heavy-metal buddies that hard rock was influenced by opera, but they remained skeptical. But it was true that some metal musicians listened to opera (and more often classical music in general).
posted by ovvl at 3:50 PM on February 13 [2 favorites]

We went to see LaBoheme stoned. Hey, we were young, it was the 70's, then we went to some gay bar that catered to daddies and twinks. Ah, youth is wasted on the young..
posted by Czjewel at 3:52 PM on February 13 [2 favorites]

This sent a surge of thoughts swirling through my head, and I can only capture a few of them.

I was first reminded of a number of science fiction films, V for Vendetta, Equilibrium, etc where people with a broader understanding of the sensate and artistic, of the wondrous possibilities of art and culture, are always attacked by totalitarian authorities. In equilibrium the repression is linked to expressions of religion, the main character is a Cleric who hunts sense criminals. In V for Vendetta those that challenge the state are linked implicitly and explicitly with queerness. And I wonder, in this age where trans people and queerness and our artistic expressions are under assault, if the same kind of cruelty faced by the character of the memoir writer is not being used, as it ever is, to demand conformity and control. Opera is like Drag, is excessive, emotional, seductive, artistic, sometimes raunchy, sometimes silly, but worst of all, passionate.

There's a few lines from a little poem by orwell, that have stuck with me that that impulse reminds me. Orwell included the poem in Why I Write which might be a counterpart to this essay, where he talks about how he might have, in some imagined past, have written for joy and ego and truth, but instead his main consideration is his political impulse, his work against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.

It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them;

And I wonder, as I think about how art and passion informs politics and protest, if there isn't a deeper connection between passionate art and politics than Orwell admits to. That yes, there are good reasons that we fight, but the reason we can find it within ourselves to keep going is because of art and passion, that it is because of them we know our joys, however imperfectly or briefly.

I think that's why the ending kind sticks in my craw, hurts something deep inside me, almost the same way it hurt when I read about what happened to Isabel Fall from her own perspective. The boy ends up deciding that those around him are right, that he's dangerous, that he should hide who he is, at least for now.

Zooey Zephyr, who represents the 100th district in Montana, and is trans, says that queer joy is the things they can't take away from you. But they can still take the things we love and make them shameful, small, sordid, and dangerous. They can make us weak, and weird. They can call us children and victims Or they can call us monsters and mutants and predators. It's strange how closely the boy in the essay echos the words of Filisa Vistima, as quoted by Susan Stryker, " I’m a mutant, Frankenstein’s monster." she wrote, and he, "I was a mutant, a monster of sensibility,".

Both are denied agency. They can make us maim our joys, or hide them... but only for a time. Where Orwell looked backward to some imagined pastoral peace, I hope queer and trans people can look forward, like the boy, in hope. He would, someday, go to the opera. Where will we go?
posted by Chrysopoeia at 3:57 PM on February 13 [10 favorites]

Our campus was treated to some arias last night-Dr. Naomi Andre from UNC Chapel Hill was presenting onOpera’s New Realism:Expanding Narratives and representation, and learned so much about Black opera, with a chorus from Treemonisha and arias from Nate/Highway 1 and Mother from Blue - there was a decent audience and some of the students mentioned seeing X (about Malcolm X) at a simulcast…so there are some growing audiences. There is enraptured listening with the emotional range and vigor-it’s been known to keep students off their phones…

I need to see when the next Met simulcast is at The Charles…
posted by childofTethys at 6:27 PM on February 13 [1 favorite]

Ahh, this makes me think of my college boyfriend, a Midwestern kid with a wild passion for opera. (You might infer from this that "boyfriend"...didn't stick.)
posted by praemunire at 6:37 PM on February 13 [1 favorite]

being taken with my whole third (?) grade on chartered buses to see a mid-day performance of Aïda was certainly a formative experience for me (although i utterly lacked opportunity to repeat anything like it until years & years later), & thinking back to the rudimentary but powerful aesthetic encounters i received from public schooling in the 60s, i wonder if kids today with their iPhones & TikTok or whatever platform can be affected in the same way, when it's but one screen-moment among many instead of a burning bush in the wilderness.
posted by graywyvern at 5:53 AM on February 14 [1 favorite]

Thank you for mentioning Marquee.tv, hippybear. I am giving that a try.
posted by JanetLand at 7:03 AM on February 14 [3 favorites]

Opera is like Drag, is excessive, emotional, seductive, artistic, sometimes raunchy, sometimes silly, but worst of all, passionate.

BTW, Chrysopoeia, I don't know if you've ever read Koestenbaum's The Queen's Throat, but, if you haven't, you might find it relevant to your thinking.
posted by praemunire at 8:57 AM on February 14 [1 favorite]

Nope, but I'm always down to explore more queer theory, even if it's not directly related to my experience, TY for the recommendation!
posted by Chrysopoeia at 8:55 PM on February 14 [1 favorite]