You should attend the opera. This direct statement, this imperative, this exhortation is not made without cause. As one of our greatest cultural creations—perhaps the greatest of them all—opera is an important part of our cherished cultural birthright, and we should not fail to encounter and appreciate it when and where we can. Lest it be thought otherwise, these conclusions come not from a life-long opera fan, but from one who, until relatively recently, eschewed the opera and gave it little more attention than a studied disinterest could provide.
In my youth, I did not much care for opera. I had been classically taught as a pianist and organist; I gave recitals and taught piano, clarinet, and music theory; I composed music not only for the recital hall but also for the church; and yet, I had no great fondness for vocal music in general, except for the occasional CD release from Enya. Even the intensely popular musicals of the day held little interest for me, despite a trip to Toronto to see The Phantom of the Opera in 1997. It was a spectacle, to be sure, but not a particularly moving one. “The human voice,” I insisted, “is an imprecise instrument.”
Such are the follies of youth. My potential interest was not aided by the difficulties of entering into the genre unaccompanied. Quite apart from knowing the basics of what operas to see and what to expect, there was the logistical difficulty of how to attend the opera if one does not live in a major city that is possessed of a decent opera venue. Moreover, the performance of opera, so often taking place in languages other than English, raised the bar of entry still further. None of my friends—even in classical music circles—attended the opera, although they did attend both the theatre and the symphony. The local classical radio station played precious little in the way of opera music. So it was that, other than having heard the occasional excerpted piece—almost always sung by Luciano Pavarotti or The Three Tenors—my experience of opera was nearly non-existent. In short, I have experienced, and well understand, the difficulties that make entry into this genre more challenging than is the case for classical music more generally.
But to acknowledge that entry into opera is challenging is by no means the same as to aver that opera should be avoided. In fact, it is often the most challenging artistic modes that are the most rewarding once understood. Certainly classical music is a more challenging prospect than pop music, even if one does not go so far as to compare Gustav Mahler to Taylor Swift. The symphony, the concerto, the sonata—all of these forms require more sustained attention and a greater focus on auditory detail than is necessary when listening to even the most sophisticated piece on the Billboard Hot 100 list of songs. But that attention is duly rewarded, because the length and complexity of classical music allows for musical narratives of far greater range, depth of feeling, and expression. This is also true of opera as the form of musical expression intended dramatically to convey emotions at their most intense.
Natheless, I was unconvinced by these sorts of arguments, despite briefly dating an opera singer of no small talent (in her kindness, she tried to teach me to sing, but quickly gave it up as a bad job). I attended the Detroit Symphony Orchestra with a meticulous regularity, but I gave the rising Detroit Opera—at that time the Michigan Opera Theatre under the visionary leadership of David DiChiera—little attention, despite the positive reviews it was generating.
During my college years, two things effected a great change in my attitude towards opera. The first was watching through the complete production run of the 1987-2001 television series Inspector Morse, originally broadcast on ITV in the UK, but available to me on DVDs (as it then was) via Netflix. The series is one of the greatest detective dramas ever made. Its titular main character has sophisticated tastes and a devotion to opera music, in stark contrast with the working-class upbringing of his colleague, Detective Sergeant Lewis. In the final episode, “The Remorseful Day,” Morse has a brief but serious exchange with Lewis about opera music, telling him, “You know, you really should persevere with Wagner, Lewis. It’s about important things: life and death, regret.” The episode is itself an emotionally-laden farewell about life, death, and regret, and I was inspired to take Morse’s advice to heart; Lewis, for his part, got his own sequel television programme (Lewis, 2006-2015), in which it is revealed that he also took up listening to opera.
At around the same time that I was studying Immanuel Kant’s third critique (which, among other things, attempts to elucidate beauty and the sublime) and watching Inspector Morse, I was beginning to listen to the music of composers who worked in minimalism, such as Ludovico Einaudi, Alan Hovhaness, Arvo Pärt, and Philip Glass. Having previously given such music short shrift (I had instead been a sucker for the Romantics), a chance encounter with Hovhaness’ Symphony No. 22 “City of Light” proved life-changing. Here was Kant’s sublime in all of its vast grandeur—a realisation that at once bridged Romanticism and minimalism. When I sought out other similarly soul-shaking works by other composers, I eventually came to Glass’ opera Akhnaten, and at once my view of the genre was mirrored by the opening lines of the libretto:
Open are the double doors of the horizon.
Unlocked are its bolts.
As I listened to Akhnaten, it was as if a pair of great doors had been unlocked and thrown open, exposing me to the wide horizons of opera. But even this epiphany was of only a limited sort, for I still understood opera as nothing more than a musical form. Glass’ minimalist Akhnaten lends itself well to listening to it as music. Other works, particularly the more dramatic works, required an engagement that went beyond the purely musical.
What helped me to arrive at that understanding was engaging, after Akhnaten, with other operas that were equally interesting to me at the compositional level. Amongst these was Gounod’s Faust, an adaptation of Goethe’s Faust, Part I. The music is of the highest quality, and it has a libretto that poses the sort of weighty theological and philosophical questions that I was then considering as a student, first in seminary and then in university. When I moved to Chicago to enter Loyola’s graduate programme in history, I had the opportunity to attend a Lyric Opera performance of Faust that will live long in the memory of anyone fortunate enough to have seen it. Receiving rave reviews, its climax left an indelible impression that causes me still to reflect on Gounod and Goethe fifteen years later.
In the final scene of the opera, Faust bursts into the gaol cell of Marguerite, whom he has heartlessly seduced, impregnated, and abandoned. Maddened by grief, she has killed her infant and been sentenced to execution. Faust, moved by guilt and pity, engages to rescue her. With the help of Mephistopheles, he is able to breach her cell, but he finds Marguerite trapped within her memories of their time together, and she proves unwilling to depart. Although she is deranged—or perhaps because of that affliction—she can see Mephistopheles for what he is. As the executioners approach, she cries out to heaven for protection and suddenly dies. Mephistopheles at once declares her damned, but the chorus of angels, with its heavenly rejoinder of, “Sauvè!” contradicts him and robs him of his triumph. Still, Faust remains to be whisked off to an eternity in torment, and as Mephistopheles rounds on him with a choir of angels singing in the background, the curtain falls.
Gounod left the ending moment—whether Faust is ultimately damned or saved—up to his future interpreters. In the 2009 Lyric Opera production, Mephistopheles triumphantly produced the contract that Faust signed—the literal embodiment of the Faustian bargain—and held it aloft, whereupon it burst into flames. As heavenly light brightened on Faust, he ascended the stairway, following Marguerite and leaving the speechless Mephistopheles quite literally empty-handed. In this moment, which combines Marguerite’s innocence and guilt, Faust’s wickedness and repentance, and the arrogant depredations of evil incarnate, the astonishing limitlessness of God’s salvific plan was thrust to the fore by the music and the choir. Is it any wonder that tears coursed down the cheeks of many in the audience, I amongst them? The applause was thunderous, enduring until my hands burned in pain—and still we clapped, we stomped our feet, we shouted, we roared as curtain call after curtain call came. It is a wonder that we ever stopped.
Fifteen years on, I can still feel the emotional intensity of those final moments in a way that puts in the shade all of the other many emotional engagements with culture—artistic, literary, musical, cinematic—that I have had. That moment awakened me to the dramatic angle of opera, an angle that is wedded to its musical construction. Listening to Glass’ Akhnaten was a wondrous experience; but actually having a chance to see it performed is something else entirely. One can appreciate the Olympian musicality of Wagner; but to see The Ring performed changes the way that one sees the world.
At the beginning of his book, Wagner’s Parsifal: The Music of Redemption, Sir Roger Scruton writes:
Parsifal tells the story of a simpleton, who wanders the world in a condition of ignorance, but who eventually rescues a derelict religious community from the woes that have afflicted it. He achieves this feat through sympathy and compassion, but with only a retrospective understanding of what he is doing. Packed into this story is a mesh of psychological symbols, as well as a unique moral philosophy in which compassion is presented as the sole but sufficient answer to our suffering and the key to the meaning of our world.
Scruton, as a lover of opera, was well acquainted with the especial delights afforded by this art form with its stirring music and high drama. He understood that there are desperately important reasons to make the effort to engage with opera. Nothing less than the answer to our suffering, the meaning of our world, is on offer in Parsifal. For that reason, amongst so many others, we should push through the complexity of opera in search of the path that will open it up to us, whatever that path might be—whether through Glass and Gounod, or through other works and other artists. In this way alone can we understand the value of the immense and unparalleled tradition that has been handed to us, and so preserve its grand designs and unforgettable beauty for generations to come.
