Intermezzo

    I love opera. The original multi-media event – actors and costumes, staging and beautiful sets, huge audiences and of course gorgeous music. They don’t call it “Grand Opera” for nothing. It’s timeless. Literally. During these uncertain and grim times, music is a palliative. Whether your tastes run to Lady Gaga or Tony Bennett, Beyoncé or Bach, The Temptations or the four lads from Liverpool, music bypasses the brain and goes straight to the heart. These days, I binge-watch opera.

    Family lore has it that my mother, then a music major at UCLA, would travel north to Berkeley to visit my dad, a pre-law major living in a raucous fraternity. She’d bribe, cajole, or otherwise entice my father to grab two rugby-type brothers and take them across the Bay Bridge to the San Francisco Opera House for a night of symphony and sometimes opera. Whether apocryphal or true, as a boy it was not uncommon for me to hear my dad whistling Un bel di, vedremo while tying his tie in the morning before heading off to work. So-called “classical” music was a staple in our house, and none more so than opera. When my dad passed away, I listened to Nessun dorma over and over, and sobbed. It was his favorite long before Pavarotti made it his signature piece. My musical rescue lately has been the Metropolitan Opera’s streaming videos of past memorable performances. A different one any night! Also ARTE from Europe, medici.tv, the Seattle Opera and others, plus YouTubes galore of iconic performers – all have all brought me comfort and hope.

    If your exposure to opera was a Bugs Bunny cartoon with a buxom, horn-helmeted woman and the Wascally Wabbit warbling “Feee-garrow, feegaro, feegaro,” you started down the wrong path. Instead, restart with one of The Big Five: Madame Butterfly, Tosca, or La Bohème (Puccini), La Traviata (Verdi), or perhaps Carmen (Bizet). None of these has been out of the repertoire over the years since being composed. They are the operas that leave you humming a theme you can’t get out of your head as you walk out of the theater. Spoiler alert: there are no happy endings – seppuku, TB (twice), a stabbing, Tosca jumping off the parapet into the Tiber – but don’t let that put you off. The music is glorious, and a good cry is not bad. There is lighter fare. The Marriage of Figaro or its kin, The Barber of Seville; Don Pasquale or the weird The Magic Flute. Wanna get serious? Richard Wagner is the champ: Tannhauser, Lohengrin (think Wedding March), Tristan und Isolde; or dive into the deep end and tackle The Ring of the Nibelungen, all nineteen hours over four operas! Puccini and Mozart each wrote about a dozen; Verdi, at least twenty; Beethoven, only one (Fidelio), but a masterpiece. No surprise. Opera is universal. A visitor to Italy should seek out a ristorante where the waiter, usually a tenor, sings his favorite aria as he delivers the spumoni and biscotti. I’ve watched videos of flash mobs in Paris and Petersburg and London.

    Is it an acquired taste? Perhaps. So try acquiring it. Do sopranos warble? Only the bad ones. Correctly done, it’s called vibrato, and many a good pop singer has mastered it.

    Whatever, hold any music close ... along with thoughts of loved ones and strangers in need. No less an authority than Igor Stravinsky improbably said, “I haven’t understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.” 

    [Two tickets, virtual second balcony, please.]