Opera Used to Sound Stupid
Never, ever did I ever reckon that vocal classical stuff - operary type pieces - would ever seem appealing. For years it sounded pretentious, too throaty and rich to have any depth. The timbres and stereotypes masked the fact that maybe Real Stuff - or stuff at hand for me, a burrower in the muck - was there to see. I don’t know exactly 
what that sentence means. I guess the real big pithy point to it was that, well, opera was women in horns singing about people dying, or about themselves dying: “opera is where people get killed and sing instead of keeling over”.
This changed… when did it change? Perhaps when I really heard some of the stories behind the Ring? I know that a big step was when I discovered Wagner’s through-composing: he doesn’t do this recitative - aria - ensemble business, it’s one continuous sweep. That was a step but it doesn’t feel complete, that didn’t convince me all the way. Perhaps being forced to see a recreated, rediscovered Italian opera for my music class last year did it. I saw that the singers moved with humor, and the lines were clever, funny, relaxed. That helped.
The two pieces which capped it off, drove the nail right through my head (in a good way, not the usual negative way that nails go into heads) were Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13, Op. 113, and Romances on verses by Alexander Blok, Op. 127. The latter gets extra enthusiasm due to being immediately after the Second Cello Concerto, one of my ultra tip-top favorites. We saw the Alex Blok performed at Ithaca College and it was heart… winding. That’s better than claiming heart-breaking - it’s more accurate. The audience was stunned at the end: it’s dazzling in a scary, dangerous kind of way. Coming out of it I felt like I had just missed hitting a person in my car, I had glimpsed a deep fear and realized the seriousness and danger of the situation I had previously taken for granted.
Listening to these sung poems make me feel sick and on edge, like life is a dangling walk along a precipice edge. It makes me look down and see the drop. That fear is heady, but enriching and fascinating.
At dawn there appear blue chimeras, reflected in the bright skies.