Nights at the Opera
Music may be the food of love but not everyone loves opera yet it's a powerful way to tell a story and move us so why the 'elite' label?
Hello Story Lovers! I’m home again, in time for the turning of the autumn leaves and the low sunlight that enhances their brilliant colours. Also. in time for the Wexford Festival Opera.[1] This year I have been lucky enough to do some journalism to help promote the festival.
I am not a musician and certainly not a singer (I was thrown out of singing class in school, to my great relief). Nevertheless, as I have been a regular visitor to Wexford since childhood and have family ties to the town I am acquainted with the festival, and I enjoy an evening of opera. In recent years we have had the opportunity to watch opera broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, La Scala in Milan and Covent Garden in London, all at our local cinema. Â
 Among the articles I wrote this summer were interviews with the directors and conductors of the three operas due to be performed in Wexford this year. I loved listening to them speak with real enthusiasm about their work and their ideas for the productions. In the process, I learnt much about the history of the form, as well as its challenges and delights. One of the conductors, Francesco Cilluffo, insisted that opera, often regarded as an elite entertainment, can be appreciated by everyone. All that is required, he says, is to educate people from an early age to enjoy it.
In many ways the Wexford Festival has set out to dismantle the idea of opera as rarefied, opulent and inaccessible. Seventy-three years ago, the festival’s founders wisely recognised that a provincial seaside town, and its small Victorian theatre, could not compete with the grand opera houses in major cities. Consequently, they chose to produce little-known operas.
Today, the town boasts a splendid modern venue, the National Opera House, whose acoustics, the conductors say, are perfect. Members of the local community have always volunteered for the chorus, as stage hands, and front-of-house staff. For two weeks the town buzzes with activity, enjoying recitals, small format operas, art exhibitions and creative shop window displays, a merry fling before winter sets in.
Yet, to return to Cilluffo’s point about the perception of opera as elitist, this view seems to originate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Prior to that, from its origins in Italy in the sixteenth century opera moved from being a court entertainment to a popular one, similar to modern musicals. Travelling companies set up in towns and villages, much like the early travelling players, maybe performing an opera only once. Singers took precedence over the composer, even choosing their own arias to display their vocal range. Later again, it provided background music in casinos and cafés. In Mozart’s day people wandered around the theatre during the performance. Apart from the idea of opera as esoteric, there has long been a school of criticism that finds it absurd, but surely that is no less the case in a musical, where the characters move from speaking to singing to express their feelings.
 The combination of music and drama dates back to the ancient Greeks, whose plays featured a chorus, often just one person, commenting on the action. Chinese opera, which unites music, movement and elaborate symbolic costumes, is at least a thousand years old. Whatever you may think of the sung variety, there’s no denying the popularity and accessibility of soap opera, now morphed into Netflix, or other streaming, series. ‘Soap’ referred to the early sponsors of radio serials (soap manufacturers) and ‘opera’ to the melodramatic and improbable plots.
One opera-lover of my acquaintance synopsised the classic plot as ‘murder and adultery’. For him, the music was all and the greatest instrument was the human voice. When I objected once to the cruelty of the plot of Rigoletto a young opera singer friend responded that extreme feelings bring out the greatest music. Certainly, many of the most popular operas, Carmen, Aida, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, La Bohème, tell of thwarted love and end tragically. There are also, to be sure, many comic operas too, Figaro, The Barber of Seville, The Merry Wives of Windsor.  Â
From the storytelling point of view, what in particular does opera offer that prose, poetry and drama cannot provide? Some of my interviewees pointed to the completeness of opera as an art form, bringing music, visual art in the sets and costumes, movement, language and drama together in one event. For some, like Samuel Beckett, who was a good pianist, this was too rich a mix but in 1967 Wolfgang Fortner made Beckett’s play That Time into an opera.
This work fits into the tradition of ‘literaturoper’, a late nineteenth century development in which a text is transposed, with little change, to an opera, dispensing with the librettist, and poetry. Beckett’s play, which comprises three voices speaking from different parts of the stage in a poignant counterpoint of memories, is constructed with an inherently musical logic, allowing for intervals of silence and the breathing of ‘Listener’ centre stage. The stage directions read: ‘They modulate back and forth without any break in general flow except where silence indicated.’
 A musical structure is not, however, an essential criterion for the successful transposition of a text to opera. Modern and contemporary composers have worked from sources as various as a Henry James story (The Turn of the Screw by Benjamin Britten) to a memoir by New York Times journalist, Charles M. Blow (Fire Shut up in My Bones by Terence Blanchard) and an original libretto in Sanskrit by composer Philip Glass and Constance de Jong, based on the ancient Indian text Bhagavadgita, dealing with Ghandi’s theory of passive resistance, Satyagraha. There are many operas based on the works of Shakespeare and other playwrights, not least R.B. Sheridan, whose satirical play, The Critic, is the basis for one of the operas in Wexford this year, composed by C.V. Stanford.
 With the exception of Satyagraha, these works already succeed well in their original form, but they also make for wonderful operas. Perhaps, then, it is best to regard their operatic versions as separate and self-contained works where the music, especially, but not exclusively, the singing, raise the emotional temperature beyond the page or the stage where they first appeared. In doing so, they reveal new facets of the stories.
There are, after all, no new stories, only new ways of retelling the old tales. Opera is thus another way of shaping a well-known narrative. Words often fail us or fall short of what we mean, or want to say. Music can fill the space between the words and imbue them with new nuances or shades of meaning which address a different part of our brain. As the composer Micheál Ó Súilleabháin said, music changes the way we think and therefore it changes the way we feel.
The story finally is not the point, its truth resides in the emotion and insight it uncovers in us. An ancient myth can be rendered as an intimate domestic drama. The ‘élitification’ of opera may have distorted the popular view of the form, to the point that some people imagine it must deal with larger-than-life characters, or buffoons, and render emotions in exaggerated flights of music and song. Music is the articulation of silence, as Beckett well understood, and to the extent that it resonates inside us, it moves and inspires us.       Â
Are any of you opera buffs? If so what is it that appeals to you in the form and if not, why not?