Stay close
And don’t be afraid of the dark.
A few weeks ago, I went to hear the excellent dress rehearsal of Carmen at the Austin Opera. I love being at Austin Opera performances: I love the view of the city skyline from the Long Center terrace, I love running into people I know from the chorus, the orchestra, and the audience, and I love the quick and intense reunions with visiting singers in the cast. This time, I knew almost the whole crew. I sat next to the assistant conductor during the rehearsal, and as he seamlessly added and subtracted Post-It notes from the margins of his score, compiling information for his colleagues, I was full of happy memories of many nights in many darkened theaters doing exactly that. The evening encompassed everything I had loved best about opera: the virtuosically organized chaos, the ability of mere humans to evoke delight and awe and emotion, people tending to their one small part of the impossibly thrilling greater sum.
I watched the story unfold in the capable hands of my friends, who had arrived a few weeks ago straight from their jobs down the bottleneck of MoPac, down the gauntlet of I-35 from Waco or up the 290 from Houston, delivered to Austin-Bergstrom from Chicago or Washington or New York or Frankfurt or Munich. I could trace a story with each friend onstage threading back through all of those cities and more. Almost all of us are spending significant time on the road away from our homes, which are almost all far away from the places we grew up.
And so I found myself struck with the irony that the opera of the evening was such a deeply conservative story, a dire warning against leaving home. The Austin audience cheered for it, applauding a stage full of happily exhausted artists from all over the damn world.
Even if you’re not a cult survivor opera aficionado like me, you are certainly aware of Carmen or at least some small shred of it - the lady with the hands on her hips and the rose between her teeth, perhaps, or the toreador who should not spit on the floor. Even the small tidbits that you know might have tagged the piece as sexy in your mind, or at least as hella demonstrative. Carmen is sometimes referred to as the first of the verismo operas - that’s an Italian word meaning, essentially, “real-life.” These operas, so the story goes in your music history class, stopped featuring gods and kings and instead depicted slices of real life. Another beloved verismo opera, I pagliacci (non-cultic readers, you also know this one, it’s the sad clown who sings the song we turned into “No More Rice Krispies”) begins with a Prologue that explains the verismo vibe. One of the characters steps out in front of the curtain to proclaim that the story the audience is about to see is real, that the actors are real, that the audience should not hold themselves apart from the flesh and blood emotions about to unfold.
Verismo didn’t really do what it claimed. Verdi and Wagner, the two titanic innovators of the 19th century opera stage, might well have weighed in on its claims had they been on the right side of the ground. Verdi famously put contemporary society onstage in 1850 with La Traviata. Wagner, for all his spears and magic helmets, wrote endless, endless scenes of domestic and political argument straight from the mouths of his own social circle. Before and during V’s and W’s careers, the comic opera stage brought recognizable characters and stories to the public. None of this was particularly new.
What was new, and constantly expanding, was the scale of human movement off of the opera stage. Rail lines grew like kudzu across Europe after 1840, and groaning boats left European docks by the hundreds as immigration exploded. Class revolution and economic turbulence were the order of the day. Many of the cautionary stories that would make it to the opera stage began to show up in contemporary literature. Here are several of the most popular, published within a few years of each other:
La dame aux camelias, 1848 - rich bro tries to have a serious thing with a prostitute, his family steps in to shut it down, she dies. Verdi turned this into the opera La traviata almost immediately, in 1851.
Scènes de la vie de bohème, 1851 - trustifarians and poors mingle together in Paris and get into all kinds of trouble, a girl dies and it’s sad, and the two main bros get jobs and earn money and talk about how it was all just a stage they went through. Puccini made his wildly popular operatic version in 1895.
Carmen, 1845 - a troubled young man has the chance to return to his village and seek his mother’s forgiveness, but he goes after a mixed-race criminal girl instead, and when she gets tired of him he kills her. Bizet adapted this into the opera in 1875, adding a blonde village girl who sings about God for good measure.
True, in the second half of the nineteenth century opera was moving away from a certain grandiosity. Five-act shows lasting four hours or more with giant choruses and huge casts were no longer the fashion. But opera was popular. Opera houses rose up in many cities, attended by the middle class. And an increasingly frequent message found on those stages was this: step outside of your culture, your village, your religion, and the soprano is going to die someone is going to pay a heavy price.
As I watched Carmen in Austin, I couldn’t help thinking that opera really manages to have it both ways. Maybe Rousseau was right:
“The stage is, in general, a painting of the human passions, the original of which is in every heart. But if the painter neglected to flatter these passions, the spectators would soon he repelled and would not want to see themselves in a light which made them despise themselves” - ‘Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theatre', in Politics and the Arts. trans. Allan Bloom (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968)
In other words, all those ticket holders in 1875, just down the road from the trains that could take their children away and the ships that held the promise of anonymity and fortune across the seas, could head into the Opéra-Comique, take in the story of Carmen and José’s forbidden love, be moved by the voices and bodies of the singers, transported by the orchestra, and leave wiping away their tears without their basic worldview wavering in the slightest. In fact, the story is a rather comfortable cautionary tale, a warning against too much passion, too much movement, too much difference.
The dramatic catharsis feels like something has moved in your soul, when for all intents and purposes nothing really has.
What does it mean that same stories are still opera’s most popular a century and a half later?
It’s two and half weeks after that dress rehearsal, and I’ve never felt more connected to operatic legacy than I do right now. This is, to say the least, unexpected. I’ve been feeling so worn out by the long reckoning of abuse in our industry, and going to Carmen made me realize how much I miss my old colleagues and how little I miss a lot of the repertoire.
But I’m in Tokyo doing some work with the singers of the New National Theater’s Opera Studio in preparation for an opera scenes concert they do every July. I had the chance to put some American music on this program, and I chose scenes from Mark Adamo’s Little Women and Jake Heggie’s Three Decembers. These two operas have been performed high and low at home over the last two decades, but they’re brand new to the Japanese singers. It’s joyous to see their response to the music, to appreciate their care with it. But I’m also finding it emotionally intense to be the bearer of legacy in our process. I’m not just an old with experience and knowledge born of learning and doing music over time, but a human person with same-generation, face-to-face connection to the artists that made and premiered this music. Every day I’m reminded of how much 3-D information can’t be flattened into the pages of a score. Every day, I offer up stories and observations from the people I’ve seen, heard, coached, and collaborated with on this music, trying hard to position this information as illumination rather than law. The process is reconnecting me with the individuals who played this kind of part in my own development, and it feels cathartic to remember the deep and lasting gifts of legacy in an era of exposing that legacy’s grave harms.
In rehearsal the other day, the singers asked me, how can Jo forgive Amy? I laughed and said that’s the same question young women in my country have been asking since the first cool aunt gifted the Louisa May Alcott classic to a bookish niece.
But I’ve been thinking about it since then, about the lovely solutions at the end of both operas. “Four sisters, one soul,” sing the March girls in Adamo’s piece. In Heggie’s, ghost mom shows up at her own funeral to bless her difficult daughter and take the last word of the show. I love both of those endings, they bring me to tears. Do I leave the theater changed, though? Or am I just beautifully consoled?
I’m not sure - truly, I’m less sure than ever.
What’s opera for? The buzzword for a while now has been storytelling. Centering storytelling and, by extension, storytellers, has been an essential part of supporting movements toward greater diversity of creators and performers. Important critiques, however, are emerging about how those stories and storytellers are being handled within the industry.
We want to include more of our nation’s stories, but can we? Do we need a completely new kind of theater? And will theater that does not ultimately flatter and console the audience be a theater that survives?
My country’s full of people who left somewhere else: travelers both willing and deeply unwilling, visionaries and shysters and victims, people trying to sustain families and others trying to escape them (in organized, peaceful Japan, where there are no sharp elbows, I’m aware every day of open cruelty’s absence). Yet we don’t bring this American armor into the darkened space of a theater. Our most beloved Broadway musicals tell us, among other things, that 9-11 united the country and that racism is an amusing incidental side-dish to evangelism. We’re as bougie as the Old Country.
Is it bad if all we get at the theater is consolation? We certainly need it. Ach, maybe I’m still just stuck on an idea that theater is or should be powerful in a certain way.
Here’s the thing: I do know that the theater changed me. Opera changed me. But it wasn’t repertoire did the changing - it was people. I was and am changed by the work we did and do together.
Maybe the most important part of theater - plays, musicals, operas, circuses, people spray painted to look like statues - is community itself, absent any message or lesson. I don’t mean that theater’s only entertainment, though entertainment is certainly good. I mean that it’s significant when we come together to experience something, to potentially share delight and surprise. When a group of us opens our senses to something unexpected or expected, we probably won’t be unified in our motivations, but our engagement will connect us, however imperfectly.
When the curtain goes up, some may grab onto a common thread of experience, some may like the lights and colors, some may thrill to the talents of the performers, some may be thrumming next to a lover or an enemy, some might attend out of civic pride or duty, some may be grateful for a dark space to breathe in, and some may be distracted, rehearsing some other part of life in their heads.
But there they all are, together.
If we’re lucky.
And if it really is all of us.
Gather us around, goes part of another Heggie opera. Keep gathering.
brilliant.