Most days when I walk listening to my Ipod, I choose the very funny NPR News Quiz show: "Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me" or upbeat quick music to inspire an equally quick pace. But sometimes, I like to surprise myself with something like Rapture.
Classical music is an acquired taste. I still remember my parents trying to foist it upon us - completely unsuccessfully. One week we got to the TV Guide before they did and saw a full-page ad for Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic the next Sunday. In desperation, we tore the page out of the magazine, hoping they wouldn't notice.
And if classical music is a hard sell, opera is just a big joke - everyone's favorite thing to imitate and make fun of.
I first got a glimpse of its power and depth in The Shawshank Redemption, a prison movie from which my favorite scene is when the hero, a literary, poetic man convicted for a crime he didn't commit, manages to broadcast a Mozart duet (The Marriage of Figaro/Duettina: Sull'Aria) to the prison yard. Men of all kinds - from hardened criminals to juvenile offenders - slowly stop what they are doing to listen as the music swells and grows from the loudspeakers. The looks on their faces change from surprise to confusion to astonishment and, as one of the oldest prisoners recounts, though no one had any idea what those two ladies were singing their hearts out about, no one wanted them to stop.
That song is on this album. I still don't know what they are singing, though I know I could google the title and get a translation. The thing is, I don't want to know. I just love the emotion that comes through in the voices, the rising and falling chords of music, the depth of understanding and longing and majesty the whole piece conveys. The words might just spoil it.
I play opera when I need to be inspired, when I want to be drawn out of my ordinary existence and reminded of the heights the human spirit is capable of, the great leaps of imagination, the plummets and cascades of disappointed love, the sadness and the grief, the joy and the wonder.
I played it in the background when my children were young (they called it Mom's AHHHH music) and I never forced them to listen. While at university, Anand had a part-time job selling subscriptions to the Handel and Haydn Society and was their all-time top performer (old ladies would call the next day to make sure that nice boy ANN-AND got the bonus he was entitled to for convincing them they couldn't pass up this chance to hear such sublime music). Cathleen sings soprano in her parish choir and loves the more intricate compositions.
Me, I just wander around my neighborhood late at night, listening to Mozart, Puccini and Handel, rejoicing.
2 comments:
Beautiful ..
Wish to reproduce excerpt from James Michener's autobiography ..
If opera has had the moral effect on me that I have just started , as in the case of O’welche Lust’, how dare I say, as I did earlier, that it was a destructive vice ?
From that moment when I first heard the quartet from Rigoketto, I was enmeshed in a form of art which is inherently romantic, passionate, absurd and illogical.
The stories upon which opera is founded are so preposterous that no rational man or women should really bother with them. I have never met a person with a really first class mind who wasted his or her time on opera; it is a make-believe world, reserved for us lesser types who can anaesthetize our sense of reason, who can take the nonsense so seriously that we would memorize scores and texts – betraying an inability to separate common sense from the sheerest fantasy.
I have been damaged in some ways, by my fixation on opera, for it has helped to delude me into seeing human experience in a more dramatic form than facts would warrant; it has edged me always closer to romanticism and way from reality; it has made me a confirmed liberal when saner men, pondering the objective record, tend to be pessimistic conservatives; and it has encouraged me toward artistic conventions that I might have done well to avoid.
For example my love of the operatic aria has encouraged me to allow my characters to declaim at length when a brief speech might be more effective, and my enormous respect for the great duets tempts me to have two characters speaking to each other just a bit longer than the literary scene would warrant.
I almost every respect my dalliance with opera has influenced my understanding of the problems of art. That sunny afternoon when Uncle Arthur lugged his fateful Victrola into our home, he condemned me to some wrong values and set my small feet upon some improper roads.
And yet much of the mindset that has enabled me to enjoy a creative life was acquired through my intensive study of opera.
I absorbed the verities expressed in the individual arias, taking seriously the lessons championed there, and I think it is fair to say that I have been guided in my moral decisions as much by the lessons I acquired from opera as by the preaching of either the Old or the New Testaments
- James A. Michener
Beautiful ..
Wish to reproduce excerpt from James Michener's autobiography ..
If opera has had the moral effect on me that I have just started , as in the case of O’welche Lust’, how dare I say, as I did earlier, that it was a destructive vice ?
From that moment when I first heard the quartet from Rigoketto, I was enmeshed in a form of art which is inherently romantic, passionate, absurd and illogical.
The stories upon which opera is founded are so preposterous that no rational man or women should really bother with them. I have never met a person with a really first class mind who wasted his or her time on opera; it is a make-believe world, reserved for us lesser types who can anaesthetize our sense of reason, who can take the nonsense so seriously that we would memorize scores and texts – betraying an inability to separate common sense from the sheerest fantasy.
I have been damaged in some ways, by my fixation on opera, for it has helped to delude me into seeing human experience in a more dramatic form than facts would warrant; it has edged me always closer to romanticism and way from reality; it has made me a confirmed liberal when saner men, pondering the objective record, tend to be pessimistic conservatives; and it has encouraged me toward artistic conventions that I might have done well to avoid.
For example my love of the operatic aria has encouraged me to allow my characters to declaim at length when a brief speech might be more effective, and my enormous respect for the great duets tempts me to have two characters speaking to each other just a bit longer than the literary scene would warrant.
I almost every respect my dalliance with opera has influenced my understanding of the problems of art.
And yet much of the mindset that has enabled me to enjoy a creative life was acquired through my intensive study of opera.
I absorbed the verities expressed in the individual arias, taking seriously the lessons championed there, and I think it is fair to say that I have been guided in my moral decisions as much by the lessons I acquired from opera as by the preaching of either the Old or the New Testaments
-James Michener
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