This follows my earlier post on The Rosenbach Company.
I had the good fortune to attend a performance of Mark Mulcahy and Ben Katchor's first collaboration, The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, with composer Daniel Felsenfeld, who knows from opera. "A most charming and erudite companion" (to quote my favorite Monty Python episode), Danny enjoyed the show but questioned whether it was really an opera.
For his part, Ben Katchor explained to me, "I call these shows 'music-theater' so as not to scare away people who've had bad experiences with opera and musicals." Ouch.
This may not be what Ben had in mind, but isn't it astonishing that opera is so powerfully associated with social preening, dramatic blankness, and blue-haired irrelevance that it scares people away? Opera is big and bad and dangerous. It tells pulse-quickening tales of incest (Die Walküre), whoring (La traviata), and wanton libido (Don Giovanni, Le Comte Ory); of insanity (Orlando, Lucia), adultery (Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, L'incoronazione di Poppea), and sedition (Ernani, Don Carlos); of the deformed (Rigoletto), the despised (La Juive), and the marginalized (Carmen, Otello). It depicts orgies (Samson et Dalila, Moses und Aron, The Fiery Angel); and when we're very, very lucky, it features dancing boys in leather butt-thongs (NYCO's Platée and the Met's 1973 staging of Les Troyens).
I do think that opera is off-putting when it's hewn of its rough edges and "sanitized for your protection," as happens so often at our major houses. Furthermore, I reckon that opera tends to visit extreme places in part because it came into being as an omnivorous art form that sought to go beyond the expressive capacities of plain words. That's one reason it has such a generic name (from the Latin opus, "work," which derives in turn from the Indo-European root op-, "to produce in abundance"). To quote Marco da Gagliano, an early practitioner of the form:
It is the form in which is united every most noble delight: such as the invention and arrangement of the story, judgment, style, sweetness of verse, the art of music, the ensembles of music and instruments, perfection of song, elegance of dance and gesture; and it can also be said that the art of painting, as in the perspectives [i.e. scenery] and the costumes, plays no small part; so that the mind is able to enjoy at one time all the most noble feelings inspired by the most pleasing arts that the human mind has discovered.
(Gosh, think about it. When da Gagliano wrote those words, Bill Shakespeare was grinding out the hits. Caravaggio walked the earth; Giordano Bruno had only recently been reduced to ashes. Philology and ass-f*cking, two of my favorite pursuits, were flourishing. Why was I born too late?)
Anyway, to return to Slug Bearers: "the art of painting" (Katchor's projections); a story and "sweetness of verse" (his book); "the art of music" and "perfection of song" (Mulcahy's score and performance). Slug Bearers is sung through—though Carmen and other opéras comiques are not, and no one seems to care. Why is Katchor and Mulcahy's fetching work not an opera?
What's more, some early theoreticians of opera felt that the "stile rappresentativo"—a speech-like style of singing over a relatively spare accompaniment—was the key component of dramma per musica. Slug Bearers is an intimate, chamber work, and Ben Katchor told me of Mark Mulcahy: "To find someone who could bring out the music of human speech without making it feel tremendously artificial, that's the kind of composer I was gravitating toward." Aha!
One last thought: opera grew out of pastoral, itself a notoriously hard-to-define and capacious art form. Where other kinds of drama were confined to garden-variety mimesis, pastoral could also embrace "la mimesi della realtà invisibile." (Ah, spare me from rustics who don't know their Aristotle.) Consider Kayrol Island: in the words of Ed Park, "a tropical limbo of mutated crocodiles, smokestacks, and lonely brothels," where the blissful and addictive Kayrol Cola flows freely. Smells like a dystopian pastoral (and an opera) to me.
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