AN ART CRITIC WALKS INTO AN OPERA
“I keep a tiny “Opera Journal” in which I list every opera performance I attend. (I rarely include recitals.) I list the opera, the house, the principal singers, the date. But there’s no room for evaluation or criticism. The purpose of a list is not to refine or browbeat, but to include, and to move toward a future moment when accumulation stops and the list-keeper can cull, recollect, and rest on the prior amplitude. ”
My first opera was a rehearsal: Rossini’s L'italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers) at the National Opera House Wexford.
Theatre, recitals, musicals, punk, death metal, and mostly contemporary art I have done, but never opera. Not sure why this is the case. Sure, I have had mediated experiences of opera music: I own a recording of Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach; Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde soundtrack to Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia; and Wayne Koestenbaum’s book The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire. (I recommend them all.)
Yet the absence of physical opera in my long and winding repository of cultural experiences is not based on a presupposition as to what I suspected opera was culturally or socially. Not to say that opera is not for everyone, but it is a cultural phenomenon acquired through certain hereditary or environmental circumstances or opportunities. I say this as an art critic, who has become more bourgeois than my working-class origins would forgive. And yet opera still evaded. Until now.
Luciano Pavarotti as Rodolfo in 1983 production of La Bohème (the same year as the film Trading Places)
Social class and elitist attitudes is what clamours first when opera is brought up in conversation. I remember as a teenager Puccini’s opera La Bohème being mentioned by the privileged and pretentious Dan Aykroyd character (Louis Winthorpe III) in Trading Places (1983). In this filmic context, the experience of heredity vs environment is the binary that determines the economic fate of two characters from different sides of the capitalist and racial fence. In one scene, opera is underscored as an experience that is hereditary when a cop mispronounces La bohème ("La boh-EM”) as “La boh-EEM”, which Winthorpe quickly corrects, followed by the classist and unsolicited quip, “It’s an OP-ER-A!
The word OP-ER-A is rife with classist baggage; even more so than contemporary visual art, which is saying something. Unlike contemporary art, which obscures if not outright resists entertainment, opera embraces entertainment. When you juxtapose opera and contemporary art as the difference between a commodified experience (ticket sales) versus a commodified object (art market), you start to get a little closer to what the commodified status of each is in culture. And it is not just down to the high price of opera tickets; or the secondary art market, where art objects remain in shipping crates to be flipped and never experienced.
My first experience of opera was helped or hindered – how is a virgin to know? – by context. It was a rehearsal, before lunch, with no tux. Further, the audience was a clatter of secondary school and Gorey School of Art (GSA) students, the latter whom I was chaperoning among my GSA colleagues. That said, all those coloured caveats dropped away as soon as the conductor entered the orchestra pit, where a skeleton crew of musicians awaited, and whom we had a full intimate view from front row seats.
The conductor (Giuseppe Montesano), holding a baton in unison with a smile, silently gestures to the musicians to awaken their strings and breath, for, what I learned later, is an overture. Rossini’s music creeps and leaps in the ears. The orchestra tiptoes then races towards the drawing of the curtains, while we imagine – always wrongly – what is behind them…
Such as a hotel interior, replete with reception desk, white furniture, ceiling fans, and a necklace of lights joining two tall partitions against an ultramarine sky. It is a set that barely alters throughout the opera’s two-hour duration. Titled descriptively L'italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers), the stage-setting for this comedic opera is not period or strictly contemporary. It is more post-war modern-minimal: think Beckett on the beach.
L'italiana in Algeri, The Metropolitan Opera
The anachronistic setting of L'italiana in Algeri is jarring and culturally complex. The period pomp and exoticism of other versions of this opera (see above) is efficiently but effectively dressed down to Hawaiian hotel. Wayne Koestenbaum, an opera fetishist, and an art writer who has become my guiding voice through this new (for me) cultural territory, conflates opera and hotels in his book Hotel Theory, when he writes of the “opera of hotel consciousness”.
The hotel is not home; it is always a place away from home, an uncanny interlude between home and its sickness. Hotels are places of dreamt-up erotics and fantasies premeditated with excitement and apprehension. They are the scene of the crime and the escape; places of isolation and anonymity, where crime becomes pleasure, versa becomes vice. People, couples, strangers gather in hotels, alone.
The complex setting of the hotel is further reduced and restricted in L'italiana in Algeri to the non-places of the reception or communal areas of the hotel, where no community or home exists or can exist. It is a transitional space – public to private – where people bump but don’t grind. In fact, the chief protagonists of the opera do everything they can, in the name of love, desire, power and honour, to stop community forming through misdirection and disguise. They are all in it for themselves.
If the anachronistic setting is complex, the plot is too, in a Faulty Towers kind of way. Italian woman Isabella arrives in Algiers to find her lost lover Lindoro in the employment of local and married ruler Muṣṭafā, whose advances she fends off through obfuscation to form a ménage à trois of suitors, who massage each others’ egos, all the while vieing for Isabella’s attention through further obfuscation.
National Opera House staff introduce L'italiana in Algeri
We were told before the rehearsal, in a brilliant introduction to the invention and what-to-expect conventions of opera, with the memorable phrase the “corpse of opera” ringing in our ears, that L'italiana in Algeri was first performed in 1883 at the Teatro San Benedetto, Venice. Further, in so many words, it is proto-feminist.
Obviously we are primed and retroactively forced into a feminist reading like this. However the stereotypes of male gaze and the female object of desire, who flirts and manipulates the desire-jaded and power-hungry, to bring harmony to the matriarchal hotel, facilitating the patriarchal world outside, is never absent.
L'italiana in Algeri, National Opera House Wexford, October 2023: IMAGE © Padraig Grant.
That said, the plot and its politics, then and now, is beside the point. The cast of singers project their voices above and beyond words into the seats that encircle the opera house in a competition of decibels and bass, that pummels and breaks the fourth wall over and over again, to leave the debris of illusion in the lap of the audience. Yet I cannot evaluate opera via the vocal acrobatics of soprano, baritone, mezzo, bass and so on. Sure, there are big and vulnerable voices on show here. But it is the collective whole and diverse vocal registers, the gestalt, that makes opera is its own diverse organism.
Just days ago Alan Nielson wrote a review of L'italiana in Algeri for operawire.com. It reads like a report card; paragraph by paragraph evaluating the vocal technique and speed in which the singers enter and exit the stalls like racehorses. Forgive me if this is how opera critics evaluate opera, but I find it strange, alienating and contradictory to what I will tentatively call my experience – as a first-timer – Gesamtkunstwerk.
“The artist of the future is not the individual poet, actor, musician or sculptor, but the work itself. ”
I know Gesamtkunstwerk is a big term, one that Richard Wagner appropriated and defined in the nineteenth century as the ideal of subordinating individual works of art via the theatre to one unifying whole. But my experience of what more seasoned opera-goers might call Gesamtkunstwerk-lite, is coloured by a visual art context.
An 1876 etching of the Festival House in Bayreuth. Wagner built this theatre with Gesamtkunstwerk in mind
During the interval, a n artist colleague and I ventured out into Wexford Town to take a shortcut via what was once a shopping centre or arcade, now inhabited with visual artist studios. Against the first-act experience of L'italiana in Algeri, this space promised a communion of artists and a synthesis of aesthetics. But what it portrayed (to my mind) was how visual art, broken down into various mediums (painting, sculpture etc.) within the ex-retail units, is a very competitive and segregated community. This was ironically compounded by the setting, the ex-shopping arcade, which points towards individuality and the commodification of art as an object to be consumed over a totalised experience.
I am making this all sound very serious, and in a strange way, on reflection anyway, it is. What L'italiana in Algeri provided me was a relational frame and lens through which to look at visual art, my primary cultural love. It’s like what Wayne Koestenbaum writes in relation to the experience of opera as a becoming and a reversing of the “Object/“Subject” relationship of cultural experience:
“How loudly do you play your opera? Loud enough to hurt the car? In the opera house, I distinguish between two kinds of sound: the baritone, mezzo, and bass, in whose presence I remain Subject, knowing the heard voice as Object, and the soprano and tenor, which, as they ascend in volume and pitch, become Subject, incapable of remaining the distant Object. Thus opera interrupts and reverses our ground. ”
It is the inference of Gesamtkunstwerk that has converted me, head and heart, to opera. Opera dissolves the division between object and subject. For instance, in one memorable episode, the singers collectively descend into an entropy of ridiculous noises. Form breaks down to let subjectivity burst open. In visual art circles we would call this absurd flight into nonsense ‘Dadaesque’. And yes, ignorance is bliss. And the veins will harden with every physical experience I hope to have of opera in the coming years. But, for now, there is the shock of the new and the desire for more.—James Merrigan