Rant in D Minor: A Night at the Opera

Friends, I’m no opera buff. Never consciously avoided it, but never went out of my way to attend it either. Nevertheless, reviewing duty called, and a recent windswept Monday night found your reporter battling the drizzle and negotiating the winding streets of Wexford town in search of the spanking new opera house.

It’s quite a shock to the system to step in from a narrow backstreet, expecting to land in somebody’s sitting room, but instead find oneself in the foyer of a labyrinthine state-of-the-art building that cost some €33 million to build. And if it’s not vulgar to say so in the current recessive climate, it was worth every penny. The new venue is like a rabbit warren – provided the rabbits are the size of woolly mammoths – and the top floor alone affords a panoramic sweep of the town, across the rooftops all the way to the quay.
We were there to attend the full bells-and-whistles dress rehearsal of The Mines Of Sulphur, the 1965 opera written by English composer Richard Rodney Bennett, a gothic romp pitched somewhere between The Masque of the Red Death, The Seventh Seal and Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, with a bit of Bronte and Burton thrown in for grand guignol. A spoonful of story makes the medicine go down: it didn’t hurt that there were screens sidestage broadcasting subtitles for us dummies who couldn’t follow the plot. Every little bit helps, because even still, the mention of the word opera frightens the faint-hearted among us whose closest brush with the form was Tommy.
And with good reason, it must be said. There’s a central credibility issue in any modern operatic performance, namely the antiquarian delivery of dialogue in full-throated three tenors mode. Because there’s been so much invested in preserving this style in the manner it was first rendered back in the middle ages, because opera singers attend conservatories and spend long years perfecting a mode of expression that was forged centuries ago, the form has not evolved in the way that folk, blues, jazz, classical, rock, pop and avant garde forms of musical performance have. It’s trapped behind a glass case. Sure, everyone remembers the arias, but the rendering of expository dialogue in the classic operatic style is, let’s face it, unmelodious, and just a bit ludicrous, too. Maybe opera would better flourish with us commoners if modern composers were to render the story elements in a more naturalistic style.
That said, the grand spectacle of any opera is quite a thing to behold, and there’s much visceral pleasure to be had in experiencing the orchestra in full flight (nothing can quite match the sheer wallop of kettle drums and brass in unison). No wonder it’s become a cinematic clich&eacute to stage the climax of any mafioso saga in such surroundings. I look forward to the day when I’m cultured enough to appreciate the high drama of the form on its own terms, rather than as a plot point in The Godfather. Until then, I’m down in the gutter with the philistines, gazing at the stars.