Der Rosenkavalier

This weekend I attended an opera for the first time in my life. Thanks to the generosity of a faculty member in my department, I saw Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier for free. In the past, I have listened to recordings of opera and have luckily been coached a little by an Italian friend in the art of listening to one. So on entering the Chicago Lyric Opera house, I was not entering a completely foreign environment. However, during the course of watching a plot unfold in the what appeared to be 17^th or 18^th century Vienna of an opera written in early 20^th century Germany, I couldn’t help but notice that opera must be without a doubt one of the few remaining art forms that will always resist attempts at modernization. There is to my knowledge no such thing as a recent, up-to-date opera, because the moment one were composed, it would cease to be an opera and become a musical or an English opera, which, I understand, hardly counts. Even Der Rosenkavalier with its comic moments and free and easy treatment of adultery will always seem quite old, being a period piece, to a general audience. Normally, I wouldn't mind, but since a performance happens in real time, it struck me as eerie for it to have have the quality of a relic.

I find especially sad the wasted theatrical potential. Great talents spend their entire lives training to sing dialogue in order to preserve a dead art for a self-absorbed audience. Excluding attendees like the faculty member from whom I borrowed the tickets, the audience was mainly white and upper class with aristocrat pretensions. Opera for them appeared to be a form of conspicuous consumption, so I have to feel sorry for all these world class singers who perform for what is mostly an under-appreciating audience. On my way to the restroom, I overheard several conversations that began, “So, fine performance, eh?”… “Without a doubt” only to have their subject immediately changed--“How’s that wife of yours?” What the hell kind of question is that?

Personally, I don’t dislike opera. In fact, I adored almost every second of it. To be sure, I found the development of the aging theme to be quite affecting. Especially the way its seriousness in the first act in the monologue of the stately and glamorous Marschallin of Werdenberg is tempered in the third by a cross-dressing Octavian’s parroting of the same theme in his attempt to fend off the advances of the crass and lascivious Baron. And the final trio between the three lovers taught me more about opera than Gianluca, my Italian friend, ever did: I discovered that it’s like a story dotted with poems, each song working through complexities of the gradually mingling and developing themes. This dynamism of the relation between song, music, and narrative was fascinating. I’m not sure I can even grant musical numbers the same status. Although fun, what does "Good Morning, Good Morning. We talked the whole night through" have to do with anything?" There’s something much more dramatic and heart wrenching about the emotional struggles that occur within and between the deep and conflicted worlds of the characters in opera. Don't get me wrong, I still prefer musicals.

So, I guess I really like opera, but feel saddened by the glass case aura of what is supposed to be a live performance.