Lots More Than You Ever Needed to Know about the Philadelphia Opera
Written: Feb 19 '01 (Updated Feb 23 '01)
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Pros: If you're in the nosebleed section, you can take out the conductor with a swandive.
Cons: You'll be too sleepy to act on your suicidal impulse.
The Bottom Line: I hated the performances of the Opera Company of Philadelphia as much as I expected, but had to go in order to see why you would hate them too.
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| Sloucho's Full Review: Philadelphia |
Although I hate to begin a review by stating the obvious, I think it's very important for readers and writers to be on the same page, so try not to take offense as I remind you that evil has been given corporeal form in the body of Randy Newman. I realize that more than half a dozen Nobel Laureates have worked out complex equations proving that Newman is evil, but since I don't have the space to include their work here, I will simply ask the reader to trust her own experience in accepting the truth of this proposition.
When I was a youngster, Randy Newman single-handedly destroyed my patience for people who burst into song in a dramatic context. At the time, I thought I hated such songbursts because they seemed so artificial, so non-sensical. But I routinely swallow artificial nonsense, so that isn't it.
The problem is that when Randy Newman writes his songs for muppets or Disney characters, the lyrics are just plain awful. The final rhyme always delivers a joke that the preceding lines have made painfully obvious and mercilessly inescapable. And when the other people in the audience laugh at Newman's jokes, it's hard not to weep. It's particularly hard on children, who are still so young and so full of hope for their species. I suppose Randy Newman is relatively harmless as far as adults are concerned, but I beg new parents to recall their own childhood and to spare their progeny exposure to the Newman taint.
I never recovered from Newman. I still can't watch a Broadway musical because it is impossible for me not to heckle. (We heckle a performance not simply because it bothers us, but because we secretly imagine that it bothers everyone and that to heckle it is to do a service for God and humankind.) I had to walk out of Man of La Mancha and Guys and Dolls even though my wife was having the time of her life. But since I was only allowed to watch Disney cartoons and muppet movies in my childhood, I'm sure you can understand that I'm still recovering from the profound personal trauma that was associated with entertainment.
"So why," you ask--and you are concerned, as you should be, for my very soul--"why would you, our poor, dear Sloucho, subject yourself to the opera of all things?"
Why indeed! Obviously, I subjected myself to the opera because I am nothing but a hick, a hayseed, an essentially backwards-minded bungler from the boondocks who occasionally succumbs to the desire to prove his cultural worthiness by doing whatever it is that the hoity-toity folks do.
And this time I succumbed in a doozy of a way. Season tickets, my friends. That's right: a long-standing commitment to attend five--count 'em, five--of those protracted and unconscionably idiotic spectacles known as operas.
And again you ask, "But why? Why take the plunge of season tickets? Is there anything I can do to help? May I send donations to your home?"
You are very kind. And your sympathy is appreciated. But I fear that money cannot make right what the opera has made wrong. The damage has been done--and will be done again before the opera has finished with me. If I learned one thing from my thrifty mother, it's that whenever one makes the mistake of paying for awful food in order to save money, one is obliged to eat the food in order to learn the lesson of how to spend wisely.
My season ticket plunge was a result of my desire to be thrifty. When I learned that I could attend five operas for the mere price of $80, I tried eagerly to do the math in my head. But when it seemed to me that it couldn't possibly work out to $160/opera, I checked my calculator. "Ahh," I said, "sixteen dollars a show? Why that's only a fourteenth of what I paid for my Pearl Jam tickets." I did a little more fiddling with the calculator and realized it was really only a third of what I had paid for Pearl Jam tickets. And Pearl Jam hadn't been all that great anyway. I saw them in Dallas, the show that was crashed by the irrepressible Dennis Rodman. Vedder did everything he could to keep Rodman off the stage, but the 'Worm' kept worming his way back. Am I losing my focus on my topic? I find that happens a lot when I think about opera--but not nearly as often as it happens during an opera.
Three of the five shows for the 2000-2001 season of the Philadelphia Opera Company came highly recommended by people I admire. Bauhaus philosopher Theodor Adorno had reportedly said that The Magic Flute is the only artwork in history that appeals simultaneously to those who enjoy high culture and those who have only been exposed to mass culture. That sounded like just the sort of opera for a boondock hick like myself to cut his teeth on.
Then there was the praise that Willa Cather has some of her characters lavish on Rigoletto. If a writer as unpretentious as Cather can find a soft spot for opera, then maybe I can too. (Note to self: Always remember the importance of distinguishing between authors and characters.)
But the real clincher was Porgy and Bess. I actually like those Gershwin boys. George knows his way around music; and Ira is no slacker when it comes to words. So I decided to put up with Werther and An Italian Girl in Algiers (neither of which I had ever heard of) and to shell out the eighty bucks for a season pass.
Never let it be said that I am an intelligent man.
Pa Kettle Musters Up the Gumption to Take Hisself to the Opry
Your humble hick made the mistake of going to the opera with certain preconceived notions. I thought people would be well dressed, so I made sure to wear the most uncomfortable clothes I could find to the season opener, Rigoletto. Man did I feel stupid when I realized that most of the people in the cheap seats--and I was in the cheapest seats of all, right where I belonged--were wearing jeans and sweaters.
That shock soon gave way to another. The first strains I heard from the orchestra pit were not from Rigoletto, but the national anthem. I'm deadly serious here. No one believes me, but the entire audience rose to sing the national anthem, like as if we were at a baseball game or something. (Note to all those who are not self: Hicks from El Paso are always very careful to work the phrase 'like as if' into comparisons.)
This was a room full of the hoitiest, the absolute toitiest folks in Philadelphia. And there they were, knowing that some of the world's most talented vocalists were just on the other side of the proscenium, belting out "the rockets' red glare" as if it weren't any kind of a strange thing to be doing at all. It was the most fun I've had in a while. But unfortunately, I guess it's only done for the season opener, as we haven't repeated it since.
Once the national anthem was over, the curtains opened and the orchestra plunged into the euphonic mess that is Verdi. When I took a music history class in college, I was led to believe that Schoenberg was the pioneer of the twelve-tone technique. I was told that the idea of not really relying on melodies, but simply playing notes in a bizarre kind of succession was really an obscure sort of practice that he had only managed to con Berg and a few other composers into adopting.
Not so. Verdi's music is just a bunch of notes. There are A's and G's and some sharps and flats. I imagine there are tempo changes and probably some key signature changes. But there's never anything except the rumbling din of a bunch of musicians hitting some notes.
When the singing began, I became hopeful. I thought perhaps I was about to get me some of that melodic action that I had been looking forward to. What I got instead was an astonishing surprise. There was a huge sort of scoreboard over the stage. As the singers sang, their words were translated on the screen perched over their heads. I don't know much Italian, but I'm handy enough with Spanish to know that the translations were awful. Key words made their way into English. But any of the subtleties that might have made following the lyrical content worthwhile were passed over.
I was annoyed--not at the lack of respect for the writing in the opera, but at myself for having shelled out an extra twenty bucks for libretti. When the opera folks try to sell you a libretto, laugh in their faces. It's too dark during the opera to read. And since they're going to provide you with a translation that's funnier than any of the supposedly humorous things happening on stage, I say you should use the money for marijuana instead. Just be sure to smoke your joint before you go. (As opposed to the general practice at Pearl Jam concerts, you must refrain from sparking up a doobie at an opera. If one of your preconceived notions about opera is that the hoity-toity folks are uptight about doobage, I can guarantee you're right.)
The worst part about my opera experience, however, was not my confirmation of the fact that the artform itself is fundamentally wrongheaded, tedious, pompous, and annoying. The worst part was my seat. If you're hellbent on proving that you're a card-carrying member of the urbane jetset, those super-conscientiously open-minded and upwardly mobile people, then at least do yourself the favor of paying for the most expensive seats available.
In the amphitheatre section at Philadelphia's Academy of Music, seats are cheap because the architect managed to fit more in. "More than what?" you ask. Just more, that's all. More than should be there. More than anyone apart from Torquemada could have conceived of putting there. More and more and more--so many more that each seat only has room for about 65% of the average human. To be seated in the amphitheatre is to spill into the people in the chairs surrounding you--and I'm not talking about the soft, easy spillage of flabby arms and rolling guts. I'm talking about the hard, painful spillage of knees and elbows and--more often than you would care to believe--skulls and spines.
In order to keep the knees of the people in one row away from the heads of the people seated in front of them, rigid partitions have been set up atop the backs of seats. This means that your knees (if they're further than six inches from your hips) have to go to the left or the right. The only thing certain is that they can't go straight ahead.
And that's why intermission is a mistake. During the opera I attended most recently, Mozart's Magic Flute, I wasn't nearly as miserable as I had anticipated being. The music was good; the singing was good. The drama was so fully aware of its own stupidity that I was able to smile and go along with things. I didn't complain about the director's shameless reliance on children dressed up like frogs and fish; I didn't groan in response to the easy laughs that the performers got by occasionally delivering a line in English. When the intermission came, I rose without cursing even once and went to the lobby to stretch my legs. Predictably, I ended up conversing with a woman whose comments should have annoyed me to no end, the kind of woman that one meets at an opera.
She said that the performance couldn't be authentic because one of the characters had fired a gun. "Mozart wrote that opera in the 1790s," she observed, "and I don't think they had firearms back then." It occurred to me that she was right. I remembered how during the French Revolution, the minions of Robespierre had run around with little personalized guillotines taking off the heads of those who opposed the terror and defended themselves with sticks and by throwing dirt into the eyes of their antagonists. I also recalled how so many American children fail to understand that Washington's order for his men to hold their fire until they saw the whites of their enemies' eyes was in reference to their use of the slingshots that enabled the Americans to defeat the redcoats.
When my interlocutor went on to complain about the fraternization between classes as unrealistic because the class distinctions of eighteenth-century Europe were absolutely and unforgivingly inflexible, I realized how important it is for us to dispel this notion of Bonaparte having risen through the ranks to become emperor. Obviously the success that Napoleon enjoyed as Napoleon the First was entirely contingent on the statesmanship of Napoleon the Zeroth.
There must have been something quite magical about Mozart's music, for I felt no compulsion whatsoever to strangle this woman who kept pelleting me with her historical insights and stunning aesthetic perspicacity. I distinctly remember thinking to myself that opera couldn't be all bad, since I wasn't feeling violent at all.
But then came the time-honored signal. The lights dimmed. And my body reacted like the Pavlovian dog that it is. I cringed. I felt queasy. I suddenly wanted to cry. I realized that I was willing to do anything that would excuse me from returning to my seat to play anchovy for the next hour or more. I simply couldn't face the idea of incorporating (don't ask how) the legs of the man who had been sleeping next to me through the first act. As I approached the door to the amphitheater seats, I felt my flesh sliding back over my skeleton, struggling to escape the doom that it sensed was near.
But then I remembered the important thing. There's plenty of room after the intermission because the Opera Company of Philadelphia's performances at the Academy of Music are so painful that a good portion of the audience sneaks out after the first act. This is good news for those of us who stay, but better news for those who have the sense to leave. The best news is reserved for those who had the sense never to buy tickets in the first place.
Recommended:
No
Best Suited For: Singles
Best Time to Travel Here: Anytime
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Epinions.com ID:
Sloucho
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Member: Mike Davis
Location: Philadelphia
Reviews written: 199
Trusted by: 248 members
About Me:
Read my reviews in order to heal the sick and control the weather. Seriously.
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