OPERA

The last wistful phrases of the prelude of La Traviata waft out of the orchestra pit and wend their way to the far reaches of the MET’s cavernous backstage, where they dance around with the melancholy ‘ghost tones’ of the thousand other Traviatas that have lurked in the floorboards, curtains and crevices since the piece was premiered at the MET in 1883. The plaintive tones gently descend onto the 100 or so performers on the stage and the 15 piece backstage orchestra, all standing around chatting softly about nothing in particular as the stage managers walk through he throng anxiously imploring everyone to be quiet, “you can be heard in the house! shhhh!!”

I am part of the backstage orchestra. This ‘little’ banda (of 15 musicians!) plays a total of perhaps 3 minutes total, only sporadically in the first scene of the opera and their musical contribution is barely audible to the audience (the MET doesn’t believe much in amplification.…if it worked in 1933 why change?) The banda stands just off stage, stage right quite far upstage. We can clearly hear the uproarious singing and drinking party in full swing on the stage but we can only see the very back of the set where a few chorus people and supernumeraries (spear carriers in this case doubling as waiters) intermittently making their way on and off stage. Every night, a ‘stage waiter’ comes back to the banda with a plate of hor d’ouvres (real food!) and shares a few morsels with the musicians. The musicians always look forward to this Traviata ritual, thoroughly enjoying the opulence of the ‘spread’ offered to them as a matter of course, something that happens all the time in the world of theater.

I describe this scene from 15 years ago, my final season with the opera, the end of a 29 year run, my last Traviata. I remember this performance distinctly. I was in awe at being both part of this giant undertaking, a small cog in the giant wheel which is grand opera, and a bystander watching the glorious pageant slowly pass by, soon to be gone from my life forever. My last Traviata was a death of sorts and to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, ‘death tends to focus the mind’.

I looked upon this grand spectacle, 100s of people: singers, dancers, musicians, stage managers, carpenters, electricians, dressers, costumers, children’s choruses, prompters, coaches, who every night work diligently to mount this grand extravaganza and think to myself, “in fifty years, no one will believe that such a giant labor intensive, excessive in every way enterprise in the service of an art form featuring the music of old white guys, music which doesn’t turn a profit, could ever have existed.” The lavishness and expenditure of grand opera would probably strike the citizen of 2068, who is experiencing musical spectacles via holograms and VR platforms, as something akin to the ancient Egyptians building the Pyramids: an amazing achievement for sure but one which begs the question: what would compel people to expend so much effort and treasure to build such magnificent edifices of sound and stone…and not turn a profit?

In the case of the Egyptians, the Pyramids were the enshrinement and glorification of their culture: as a stunning architectural achievement, as a shining beacon (originally the Pyramids were covered in polished white limestone) celebrating their geometric and mathematical knowledge through precisely calculated proportion, as an astronomical observatory, and as a vehicle where the pharaoh and his carefully guarded treasure was transported to the next life, all encased in a structure meant to last forever.

In the case of opera, Verdi, Mozart, Wagner, Puccini are the ‘flying buttresses’ holding aloft the magisterial Church of the Western musical canon. These composers, and of course many others, built the edifice which celebrated the voice and brought it to its pinnacle in timeless tales of love and death. Traviata has been performed in its original form since it was premiered in 1853 at La Scala in Italy. The performance I describe took place in 2003. There would be very little difference in a performance from 1853 and one 150 years later in 2003. Many of the MET orchestra parts, the written music the orchestra musicians play from, are from the 1880s when the opera was premiered at the MET! Only recently did the old crinkly yellow paper on which these notes were printed have to be replaced.

In this quotidian Traviata performance in 2003, ironically, my last and most special one, I felt I was part of a tradition which was carefully nurtured and preserved by the musicians and singers who loved to perform Traviata, by the public who continued to support performances of La Traviata all over the world and by a cultural elite who believed that these works of genius, performed in all their glorious excess were important cultural treasures which needed to be preserved.

But times have changed radically.

“In 1887, when Edward Bellamy wrote his utopian novel Looking Backward, ready access to music played a major role in the author's vision of an ideal future. In the year 2000, Bellamy argued, music would be piped into the house from central concert halls, where a small army of musicians would assure that a steady stream of live performance would be available to everyone for a "small fee." The novel's protagonist, born in the benighted nineteenth century but privy to Bellamy's fantastic future, describes the musical "telephone" this way: "If we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limit of human felicity already attained, and ceased to strive for further improvements.”” Phillip Kennicott, from Opera News 2012.

Why leave the house when I can hear and see the opera in the comfort of my own home? And I can even break away from Lucia’s last act meltdown to watch the 9th inning of the Yankee game and then return to the opera to share the pain of murder and Lucia’s suicide after the Yankees blow a 3 run lead.

As I write in 2018, Mr. Bellamy’s musical utopia has been far surpassed. While musicians and singers still love performing La Traviata and other masterpieces from the Western canon, the public has grown less keen to attend opera performances and the so-called ‘cultural elite’, which has essentially ceased to exist, has focused its munificence elsewhere. (TEXACO, an oil company now a subsidiary of CHEVRON, sponsored MET opera broadcasts every Saturday afternoon for 63 years and then abruptly stopped, saying they are moving “in a different direction philosophically. We’re investing in workforce training and job skills development for workers of the future”. ) TEXACO had moved on from supporting the great tradition of Western music to training workers to run machines and move information, goods and service efficiently from one place to another in cyber space.

Technology has begged the question. Now, the white people who used to comprise the ‘cultural elite’, educated people of the world with money, are content to gorge themselves on the same popular entertainments and spectacles as the rest of the world’s ‘unwashed’. Musical content is now limitless. The public desires a more immediate, 1-3 minute emotional charge, not a 3 hour epic tragedy without a single computer generated explosion. The introduction to many arias is longer than 3 minutes! The fervor to protect ‘high cultures’ crown jewels seems rather quaint in 2018. ‘High culture’ and ‘cultural elite’ are terms never used anymore because the use of these monikers is sure to elicit cries of “out of touch globalist” or ‘‘white privilege’’ or ‘‘what about all the overlooked music of women, people of color…”. There is truth to these criticisms but in no way does this in any way diminish the genius of the exquisite works by these old white guys. But history moves on, the trajectory of the timeline shifts and our attention is directed elsewhere. Exclusivity is no longer defined by ‘culture and money’. ‘Culture’ no longer can be defined by any one group anymore. Technology has made ‘culture’ a completely fluid term. It can be rightfully claimed by any group of people anywhere on earth…if it sells. If not… on to the next cultural artifact. It’s only about money now, tradition be damned.

‘White culture’ has become a pejorative term now. The yahoos who now lead the defense of ‘white culture’ define themselves only in terms of not being the ‘other’ — black and brown interlopers. The ‘outrage culture’ of social media has artificially divided us into essentially two camps, the ‘woke’ and the ‘white’. European culture has devolved from celebrating and honoring the profundity of the greatest of Western art and music to preserving statues of Confederate ‘heroes’. As if opera did not have enough existential problems, now opera has to dodge bullets in the crossfire between the ‘woke’ and the ‘white’. Its continued existence is by no means assured.

Opera used to be the biggest spectacle in town.. a hundred years ago. This is no longer true. There are any number of spectacles that surpass and even dwarf grand opera, from block buster movie franchises (Star Wars, Spiderman, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones etc.) to Beyonce half time shows at the super bowl, replete with holograms! The Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence universes about to explode on the consciousness of the entire globe will only make these extravaganzas more extravagant. And shorter in length, the perfect drug for the world’s ever decreasing attention spans.

So I piss into the winds of the hurricane threatening to blow us all into cyberspace and bear witness to what it used to be like in the ancient world of grand spectacle and pay tribute to all those who came before me and those intrepid souls who will come after me. It was the greatest fun to be part of building musical pyramids and majestic temples of sound. I honor an art form that will cease to be in its present iteration. But opera will never die. The music is too great. But it will certainly change its shape.