Listening to: Giuseppe Verdi, La Boheme (Krajan, BP, 1972, Pavarotti & Freni)
One person in a hundred here will know that tomorrow, at 1:30 P.M. (my time), the Met will present this year's last performance of La Boheme on it's Saturday broadcast. Confessin' the blues, I'll be listening, to see if Ruth Ann Swenson's "Mimi" has evolved into anything spectacular. The initial reviews were "eh-eh, we'll see". I want to see. Or hear. See.
The wonderful thing about the Met on Saturday's is you never know if you're going to get that performance that makes you pump your fist into the air, "Oh YEAH!!!" you howl while doing a victory dance on the coffee table.
As I've admitted here before, I'm queer. I like opera, ergo, I'm a fairy. The Stonewall Riot occured after two NYC cops eavesdropped on a couple of immoral deviants talking about opera, which clued the cops into the notion that they might be sitting in a gay bar. Talk about opera, you're queer, QED.
Well, tell Dr. Dobson that absorbent and yellow and porous is me because tomorrow, I'm tuning into the Met.
My introduction to aural sex and rampant rhapsodomy came when I was a mere lad of seventeen, a drama jock (my emergence as a drama QUEEN would not commence until I'd heard the pink propaganda opera music), one of those sensitive and poetic dark types at the cofee shop, except on water skis, at the lake. The downtown sophisticates and deviants in the local community theatre used to meet on saturdays for the Met, playing it loud and drinking prodiguously, cheap wine, homemade kahlua and sticky, green mota.
Sufficiently doobaged and drunk, I was primed to be pumped by opera, oh god, I was greased and ready to go. Give it to me. Bitch. Oh yeah. Opera lovers had recruited me into their dissolute circle of giddy aestheticism. Been so tainted ever since.
The Saturday Met broadcast ritual continues to this day, pared down, sans bacchanal. Likewise, my household gets it's fair share of opera, from time to time. No one covers their ears and everyone endures.
Sometimes Lilly says, "Play some opera except none of the singing." That's silly I say, opera is all about the singing.
I don't mind exposing my children to subversive, depraved music. Sure, there's a lot of death and dying in in opera, so what? Death in opera is where everything culminates, art and narrative and beauty and everything ends, intimately, comprehensively, emotionally. In opera, death is not just a statistic, no atonal media freak show; it matters. I would rather my children witnessed a thousand stentorian deaths in opera than one second of sterilized carnage on television.
Life is not cheap in opera. If you're one of those people who say they'd rather die than sit through an entire opera, think about what that really means. Really means. And then see if it's not worth a listen.
2 comments:
I'm not so much an old-school opera fan, but I like modern opera - I've actually flown to Boston to catch performances to John Adams's Nixon in China and Philip Glass's Akhnaten. Seriously good stuff.
BTW did you hear about HST? I weep, my friend.
Bloody brilliant. I agree with you so thoroughly that I have no words.
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