Let the Darkness Do the Rest

Sometimes when I think about how everything is meaningless and the world is probably ending anyway, I’m like, Fuck it. Who cares. Place is a trash heap anyway. I invite the sun to explode and swallow up this whole stupid mess!

Except, oh my God, the opera.

Last night Inspector Corset and I saw La Nozze di Figaro at the Met, and it was pure fucking magic. There was more beauty in the curtain call than in most of the books I’ve read this year. I wanted to eat it.

Figaro is an opera buffa, a comedy in which people scheme and bumble and misbehave and wrong one another in all the usual ways. Every character wants some very clear and simple thing, and everything gets ridiculously, delightfully fouled up. The lechy Count tries to seduce the pure-of-heart servant girl Susanna, who only has eyes for Figaro, while the concupiscent teenage page Cherubino hides under a sheet, hearing all. The wily old maid Marcellina tries to force Figaro to marry her because he never paid her back the silver pieces she lent him, but he loves Susanna. And Marcellina is actually Figaro’s long-lost mother! The Count gets wind that Cherubino is hot for his wife, and the kid has to jump out a window to escape him. The Countess and Susanna switch dresses to ensnare the count (We’ll trade clothes, and let the darkness do the rest) but then Figaro spies the Count seducing the Countess-as-Susanna in the pine grove and he is so mad! ETC.

And in the end, a string gets pulled and everything gets smoothed out. True identities are revealed, misunderstandings are cleared up, lovers are reunited, and rogues are forgiven. You clap and cry and think, It’s a crazy world.

Other than Corset, I don’t have any peers who are into the opera. I mean, Mr. Pistol will go with me without complaining but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t love it. Once I got excited because this dude I know said he liked opera, but then it turned out he meant only certain obscure twentieth century Russian operas, aka hurt-your-ears opera, aka huh? He asked me what I liked, and I listed what I’d seen so far: at that point, all Verdi and Puccini.

Italian opera, he said, is horrible. Melodramatic, over-the-top, easy. (I imagine he’d put Mozart in the same category.) What did I like about it?

I got defensive and froze up.

What I should’ve said was, I like how it makes my heart explode.

Of course it’s melodramatic! Of course it’s over-the-top! It’s the opera! And indeed, it is easy. If you’ve never been to an opera before, that might surprise you. But it really is. Easy like a needle in your arm. The characters are utterly flat–gloriously flat! They’re archetypes that march around like pieces in a chess game. March around singing. It’s insane and it’s absurd and it shouldn’t work. But it does. And it’s so fucking intense and immediate you sometimes feel like you’re going to choke on it.

And what’s wrong with easy, anyhow? Has Dude ever heard of rock and roll?

There’s an article in today’s NY Times Magazine about the flashy Russian opera singer Anna Netrebko, which isn’t all that revelatory–especially since the opera is magic to me and I don’t want to know too much about it–but it did send me to YouTube in search of clips. Here she is at Salzburg, Violetta-cum-Marilyn-Monroe, singing the famous brindisi–drinking song!–from La Traviata.

The big clock is a nice touch.

La Traviata was the first opera I saw at the Met, and I cried the whole time. In it, the beautiful and charming Violetta wrestles with whether she should continue her courtesan’s life of glitz and fun and easy pleasures, or take a chance on Alfredo, who loves her. Except this is a tragic opera, which means that no matter what, Lady is doomed, doomed, doomed.

At the end, she dies exquisitely of consumption. I challenge you to sit through that dry-eyed.

We are all opera heroines, of course, which is why I incite you, my peers, to go see La Traviata this spring at the Met. Spend the big money for orchestra seats if you can. You’re going to be dead someday.

by Pistol Whip | 2 December 2007 | music, rapture | Comments