Women Wittering and Men Moaning
What’s the deal with opera?
I can never understand it when someone gets excited up about going to see an opera. What exactly is it they enjoy?
See, from my point of view, when I’ve watched an opera — and yes, I have seen five of them — there are several downsides:
They’re usually in Italian so unless you’re fluent, you’re stumped trying to understand what they’re saying. (I know you’re given a libretto, but that’s at the theatre. You don’t get one when you’re watching on TV)
Everything is sung, even the conversations — and, be honest, they’re tuneless and often very repetitive. Gets annoying.
The stories are fairly trivial.
Female sopranos screech to high heaven. If your young child made a noise like that, you’d tell them to be quiet and sit them on the naughty step.
The whole thing lasts for hours.
BUT — there is one good point about operas.
The arias.
They’re wonderful. Why? Because they’re melodic, they’re sparky and fun, they’re an oasis in a long, weary desert.
My absolute utter favourite is from Rossini’s ‘Barber of Seville.’ Figaro comes on stage and starts singing this wonderfully quirky song about being here there and everywhere and how much he is in demand. It’s absolutely marvellous and whenever I hear it, I have to stop and take a few breaths afterwards to recover.
Everyone knows Verdi’s ‘La Donna e Mobile’ which is another great piece of music. Then there’s ‘Nessun Dorma’ by Puccini, which I’m sure you must have heard. When it comes to Bizet’s ‘Carmen’ there is the stirring ‘Toreador Song’ and ‘L’amour est un Oiseau Rebelle.’
So yes, I absolutely love the arias. They are magnificent pieces of music. But they’re only a fraction of the experience.
I’ve really tried to like opera. The ones I’ve seen are ‘The Barber of Seville,’ ‘Cosi fan Tutti,’ ‘Aida’ (had to fast-forward through a lot of that), ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ and ‘Carmen.’
Musicals are often given a bad press, condemned as trivial and unrealistic — but there isn’t that much difference between them and operas…is there? At least musicals have normal conversation between songs, which is less annoying.
Perhaps if I went to see an opera in real life, it would be different? I don’t know. I’m willing to give it a go, anyway.
