Peak Culture? My Night at the Opera

Some of you may have been following my ongoing journey to become a Cultured Person™. In recent posts I have made great efforts in this enterprise, exploring foreign films, classical and jazz concerts, and even Shakespearean theater. I finally had to deal with my most glaring weak spot: Opera.

Even before this compressed adventure, I had attended symphony concerts. I’d watched ballet performances.

I had never been to an opera.

To be honest, though I often listen to classical music on the radio, when a screechy soprano or a whiny tenor comes on, I push the button to turn to the alternative rock station.

But I have a good friend, a member of the same writer’s group I’m in, who’s gotten into opera. He’s a REAL writer who made his living as an editor at a prominent magazine and continues to write best-selling books. And he is just a really good guy. (Pro-tip, to get real Cultured, it helps to have Cultured Friends.) So, I had to take his opinion seriously when he said that opera was worth the time and the effort. He argued that this was the art that, more than any other, allowed for passion and deep feeling to be expressed in a way that no other art allowed. So I agreed to go with him to the opera.

Actually, this night at the opera was the starting point for my recent endeavor. Tim and I bought tickets for ourselves and our wives to see Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the San Francisco Opera. I felt good about this because IMHO, WAM was a pretty good composer. Besides, I’d watched the film Amadeus numerous times.

We drove to San Francisco from Santa Rosa, CA. We went out to dinner at a nice place near War Memorial Opera House. My wife took this opportunity to buy a very fancy dress for the evening. A dress from a thrift store’s bargain basement, but still. I wore a tie, so that’s something. Arriving at the Opera House we discovered there was a great deal of diversity in dress. No men in tuxedos that I recall, but some suits, a kilt or two, and more business casual. A few women wore gowns, one or two with elbow-length gloves, but most were informally dressed.

As we entered, we received programs the size of a 1990’s issue of Newsweek. In it, the stage director (Barrie Kosky) said this about the night’s opera, “The Magic Flute is the most frequently performed German-language opera, one of the top ten operas in the world. Everyone knows the story; everyone knows the music; everyone knows the characters. On top of that, it is an ‘ageless’ opera, meaning that an eight-year-old can enjoy it as much as an octogenarian can.” I think Mr. Kosky knows different eight-year-olds than I know. I think he knows different “everyones” than I know, because I’m definitely not one of his “everyones.”

Not that I know much about traditional opera staging, but this was apparently not a traditional performance of the work. Instead of elaborate sets and costumes, almost everything was performed in front of a large screen. Many of the creatures, such as the great serpent, were animated creations on the screens with the singers/actors performing with and against the animation.

The hero of the play, Tamino, was dressed like Buster Keaton. This made a kind of sense, because the interaction between actors and the screen was very much like the Buster Keaton classic, 1924’s Sherlock Jr., in which Buster as a film projectionist dreams of entering the world on the screen. The heroine, Pamina, was dressed like the silent screen star, Louise Brooks, and she struggled with a villain that looked very much like Max Shreck’s Nosferatu.

The plot of the play is pretty much pure nonsense; the hero and heroine are separated and facing many trials and tribulations from gods and magical creatures before they can be reunited at the end. But it was lively and the music was tolerable to the ears of this non-opera fan.

The most familiar piece of music in the show may be "Der Hölle Rache" sung by the Queen of the Night. Our friends especially enjoyed that moment in the show because their son once performed it in a high school talent show, bringing the house down.

Having survived a night at the opera without the Marx Brothers, I felt I had finally achieved Peak Culture. And yet the next week I would be getting cultured even a little bit more.