Life, Love, and Death at the Operahouse
Zyl and I went to the opera tonight. Regular readers of this blog already know about my predeliction for opera and they're good enough not to be too harsh about my lack of modern cultural literacy (I don't even own a TV, for goodness's sake, but I do like to go hear the Verdi), so I'll spare you the full-blown account of tonight's awesomeness. Suffice it to say that Hei-Kyung Hong was uncomfortable on the high notes; Wookyung Kim was a very, very solid Alfredo; Charles Taylor made a fantastic Germont with an easy, rich, well-developed baritone; the set was as impressive as ever at the Met; and somehow Zyl managed to score us seats in the center of the front row of the balcony at a Metropolitan Opera production of La Triviata. Surely these were the best seats in the house.There is a fine line between being so brilliant that people don't understand what you're saying and being so crazy that they don't believe you even when they do understand. Most of the time, I think, Fred Ahl finds himself on the more desirable side of this line (though he certainly has his wacky moments). Operas tend to end in ways that are rather melodramatic--and rather depressing. There are exceptions, of course (The Magic Flute comes to mind), but even when circumstances turn out exactly as one would hope, the main characters tend unnecessarily to die and to do so in dramatic fashion. This is especially true in Triviata, where Verdi manages to stretch a death scene into a whole act, and where about seven times you are convinced that our heroine is well, is cured, is feeling better, is renewed by having the love of her life back in her life, etc., only to suddenly see her collapse once again and then finally die with her repentant lover by her side. It could have been such a happy ending! And the give and take, the "now-I'm-feeling-better-and-I-shall-go-out, oh-wait-now-I'm-feeling-ill-again-and-I'm-sure-I-shall-die" literally made me laugh aloud at the operahouse. Verdi must have had a grand time watching his first audience react: "Oh no! She'll die!" "No, wait, she's well again!" "No, she's deathly pale!" "Yes!" "No!" "How will it all end?" The whole thing is very silly.
Fred Ahl (remember him?) introduced me to the very clever notion that Frenchmen and Italians are far more likely to think of love and death as ready compliments, while ourselves and the Germans are wont to find this notion a bit odd. This is for the simple reason that "l'amour" is nicely alliterative with "la mort" (as is "l'amore" with "la morte") while "love" and "life" (and "liebe" and "leben") are natural poetic partners in our more Germanic, less Latinate language. This has snowball effects: we might not remember Marlowe's
Come live with me, and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields...
But his turn of speech has made it down through the years and is engrained in popular culture. Indeed, we hear resonances of the same idea all the time when we urge others to "love life" and even when we talk about our "love lives." Love and life are very close things in our language.
Not so for those who speak romance languages. For them, rather, the poetry of the ages is more "L'amour et la mort" (a real poem by 19th-century poetess Louise Ackermann) than "Live with me and be my love." This darker love-and-death set of associations has also entered popular culture, even yielding entire academic subcultures focused on the natural polarity of love and death.
I myself have nothing brilliant to add to this (I'm no Fred Ahl), but perhaps it does give some insight into the French and Italian operatic obsession with killing off all the main characters just before the curtain falls.
Oh, and if you want an example of good thinking taken just across the borders of craziness, feel free to check out Fred's (very interesting, very clever, and, ahem, rather overly bold) Sophocles' Oedipus: Evidence and Self Conviction.
posted by Skay @ 1:10 AM
2 Comments:
Nothing especially brillant to add to Fred -- but might one also throw into the mix the Liebestod, and all its implications - musical and linguistic - from Tristan? (By the by, how did you end up liking the Bohm recording?) But all that obviousness aside -- nobody can do catharsis at the opera house quite like the Italians, can they?
No indeed, SEC. I never realized you were named after a financial regulatory board before. :)
For those who don't know, this is a very good question. The Liebestod is the last aria of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, and might be translated as something like "love-death." At this point, Isolde is seeing her (dead) lover in a dream, and sings about him, before dying herself.
In fact, this whole opera is really about darkness and death. The two lovers only get to be truly themselves in the darkness; they refer to the daylight as false and unreal, because their illicit love cannot be shared in those hours. Long before the final scene, we hear that they will ultimately be united only in death.
So here we certainly do have a very Germanic dark unity of love and death. We even have a word for it that has come into popular usage.
I've been thinking about this, and the truth is I don't have a very compelling reading of it. Perhaps it just goes to show that poetics can only take us so far.
But that seems so unsatisfying.
(Also, I like the Bohm recording very much, by the way. I listen to it, or to parts of it, actually quite often.)
Post a Comment
<< Home