Your first opera: What should it be? And why? | Classical music
Tom Service on classical musicClassical music This article is more than 9 years oldYour first opera: What should it be? And why?
This article is more than 9 years oldAhead of our exciting Inside Opera live-streamed event on 10 May that will showcase some of the dynamic and complex productions in opera houses today, Tom Service considers which would be the best opera to take a first-timer to. What did you see first?
The UK's opera chiefs on their own beginners' choices
What should your first opera be? That’s a pretty strange starter-for-ten, when you think about it. No-one ever asks, “what should your first movie be”? Anything from Bambi to Star Wars to The Lego Movie to Solaris (well, alright, maybe not that) would do, and whatever your response, no-one would ever claim that their first film had either converted them completely to cinema or put them off it for life. Likewise books. Or TV. Or pretty much any other art form. The very question itself is part of the opera's image problem.
Guardian
Another is the false perception of its essential disengagement from the real world. When you enter the Theatre Royal in Glasgow or the Wales Millennium Centre, you’re passing through portals into another world of heightened sensuality and surreally enhanced emotions. Or at least you should be, if the performance you’re seeing is any good. And that’s where, as an art-form, opera’s true engagement with the world is to be found: in heightening the love stories, myths, tragedies, and comedies of human existence, opera is more real than real life. In its potential for expressive intensity, excessive emotional impact – its direct human engagement, in other words - there really is nothing to compete with what opera can make you feel.
The trick is to get there in the first place, which returns me to the initial question, which opera should you see if you’ve never been before? My own induction aged 10 was Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, and while I didn’t then understand all the machinations of the plot (mind you, I’m not totally sure I do now), the sheer ravishment of the music blew me away. I didn’t then recognise Figaro’s seditious humour, its critique of Enlightenment values, or the characters’ darknesses, pains, and sensualities, but that’s the piece that started a lifetime of operatic discovery for me, and I would definitely recommend it.
Probably the most important thing to remember is that no single opera can hope to sum up the whole art-form. If you’re bored to the point of chewing off your limbs sitting through Wagner’s Parsifal rather than Puccini’s La Bohème (or the other way round!), don’t despair. You’re in good company if you can’t get on with Wagner and/or Verdi, or if you find Handel just a trifle tedious, or think Berg is just too violently excessive and excessively violent. In fact, the great opera composers aren’t really engaged in the same art-form at all: a Handel opera is as different from a Wagnerian music-drama as a pop-up book is from a 3D movie (nothing pejorative there; you could make a case for either metaphor for working for both composers). However, there will be something out there in the operatic canon that takes you into that magical, hyper-real place, I promise!
Nonetheless, you can give yourself more of a chance if you identify with the following operatic characteristics: if you’re an artistic adrenaline junkie, the composer you have to hear is Janáček, whose operas cram all of the intensity and story-telling of much longer operas into music that’s shorter than your average Hollywood release. Try the tragedy of Katya Kabanova, the laceratingly moving, I find, The Makropulos Case, or the earthy anthropomorphism of The Cunning Little Vixen. All of those pieces have the potential to change what you think you thought about opera, since they’re compact, their energy never flags, and they’re completely compelling stories. And if you enjoy Janáček, you have to hear the joyous, transcendent chaos and intensity of Irish composer Gerald Barry’s operas, like his The Importance of Being Earnest.
Often, it’s the cosseting accoutrements of the operatic experience that are off-putting, which is where contemporary opera has much of its power, since many new operas speak a language that cuts through centuries-old operatic conventions. If that sounds like what you want, try and hear or see Harrison Birtwistle’s operas or smaller-scale music theatre works, such as Gawain or Yan Tan Tethera; get along to ENO’s production of Julian Anderson’s Thebans; listen to George Benjamin’s eviscerating Written on Skin; or hear Thomas Adès’s magical The Tempest.
But for more conventional introductions to the world of opera, Verdi’s Otello is one of the most thrilling stories ever told in music, I reckon; mind you, as is his La Traviata or Falstaff. Then there’s Puccini – Tosca! Turandot! Madama Butterfly! And Wagner. Why not plunge straight in at the deep end and experience The Ring cycle? It was written to change the world, after all, so it should change yours, and there’s no more arresting opening or ending to any operatic drama than the start of Das Rheingold or the climax of Götterdämmerung. And the 15 hours in between aren’t bad either. And then there’s Britten; the outsider drama of Peter Grimes, the ghost story of The Turn of the Screw, the sea-lashed but claustrophobic drama of Billy Budd. You see? And that’s merely a scratching of the operatic surface; I haven’t even mentioned Monteverdi, without whom none of the above could have happened.
Opera is the hardest art-form in the world to pull off, with its multi-dimensions of music, sets, lighting, stage management – and a bit of singing too... And if I had to recommend one company to see over all the others to make opera the visceral, meaningful, contemporary experience that it always should be, it would be Graham Vick’s Birmingham Opera Company. The BOC do things with operas from Mussorgsky to Stockhausen that no other company in the country is managing, turning these gigantic pieces into experiences that are made by, and matter to, the community of professionals, amateurs, volunteers, and audiences, whether they’re staged in disused factories or tents in local parks. BOC productions really show us what opera can and should be.
What was your first opera? Did it generate in you a passion for more, or did it bore you to tears and put you off for life? What would you take a friend to who says he hates opera but has actually never been to one? Tell us below, and join us on Saturday afternoon for Inside Opera: Live.
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