Personal Cultural Inadequacies, Part 1

Here is yet another example of my own cultural inadequacy. I watched The Metropolitan Opera’s live presentation of The Magic Flute on the telly last month. I stuck to it for almost an hour, waiting for some sort of appreciation to set in. Didn’t happen. This production has been edited down to 90 minutes; its costumes, set and direction are by Julie Taymor (of The Lion King fame on Broadway). It was supposed to be magical enough and short enough and accessible enough (and sung in English) to attract the under-10 set so I thought maybe I could, yet again, learn something that I’ve been missing.

Try as I might I just cannot learn to understand and, therefore, appreciate opera. It’s long, it’s badly acted, the librettos are idiotic and yet this is all supposed to be mitigated by the sound of glorious (in)human voices raised in gorgeous splendorifisciousness (I might have made up that word). Pardon me, boys, to this untrained ear the sopranos are screaming and the basses have their heads in a barrel and they, and everybody inbetween, are just way too loud to an excruciating level. And, worse, they just go on and on, seemingly forever. (Joni Mitchell, where are you when I need you?)

The Magic Flute was pretty, some of the scenery and puppetry was cool and, yes, it was short and sung in English, although you couldn’t prove that by me. This problem was obviously considered by the Met powers-that-be because the English was supported by subtitles so you could follow the plot (what there is of it). So why bother singing it in English since the original Italian (or whatever) would have probably sounded better? Do Italian operas broadcast from La Scala have Italian subtitles? Search me. Opera singing is meant to produce glorious sound and I suppose understanding the meaning of the words is secondary. But, again, I don’t get that philosophy or that type of singing. Luckily, plenty of people do because otherwise they’re wasting lots of big bucks. Oh, well, I might as well stop trying and learn to live with my cultural inner dork. Sorry, Luciano, I never knew ye and, under different circumstances, we could have been such good friends.