Personal Voice

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My first experience with opera was a disaster. My wife and I joined the godparents of our oldest child at the Metropolitan Opera, America’s greatest stage for this exuberant and pretentious art form. I was bored and mystified. Barely visible humanoids shouted at each other at the bottom of an open pit mine. We were perched at the mine’s upper rim, trying to decipher the red supertitles that flickered on the backs of most seats.

We left at the intermission. My wife wanted the pleasure of high culture no matter how boorish her new husband was, so she dragged me along. In preparation, she’d taught me to love Moonstruck, which treated La Boheme as an object of otherworldly beauty. The Met in person, to my young adult eyes, couldn’t compete with Cher and Nicolas Cage.

When my wife got sick years later, I yearned, heartsick, to live thoughtfully and in the presence of beauty beyond the everyday. If mortal life will be so fleeting, so uncertain, so painful, then at least we should celebrate what is truly beautiful. I’d long loved sacred choral music and have generally preferred hymns to sermons. I wondered whether I’d done right by opera with that first assault on the Met. I’d seen an occasional poster advertising high-definition opera broadcasts to local movie theaters. I decided to give it a try, just the once. On the off chance that opera was, in fact, beautiful.

I was spellbound. Wowed into silence, I could only watch and listen as Pushkin’s old poem, Eugene Onegin, came to life. That proud, dumb man and the glorious woman who grew beyond his dismissal acted out that story in melodies and harmonies mapped out by Tchaikovsky.

I loved it all. Those voices. The effulgent, thrumming harmonies of strings and singers. The visual imagery. The costumes. The stage. The gentle, haunting exoticism of sung Russian. I even, I confess, loved the smell of the popcorn in my lap.

I began to discover that opera is a total art form. Opera spoke to me on so many levels at once that I worried about utter sensory overload. In a more hopeful key, I felt that I had made my own, halting contact with the glories of the synesthesia—perception of a given object by multiple distinct senses—so powerfully and coyly described by the novelist Vladimir Nabokov in his gorgeous memoir, Speak, Memory.

If Nabokov could perceive the color of the letter A or the sound of a quiet morning tulip with his inborn synesthesia, I could at least enter the combination of singing, orchestral music, costumes, stage, and story. I imagine to myself that, at least artistically, I was thus witness to the vast community that we believe constitutes heaven, a network of radically distinct individuals united into consummate harmony. That effulgent harmony, after all, is what drove my fascination with synesthesia in the first place.

I should confess, though, the Achilles heel of opera. The plots themselves are laughable. Half of them are as dimwitted as men snickering in a locker room. They’re mostly quick sketches of sex, violence, betrayal, and mistaken identity. The few plots that take the time and energy to really aspire generally end up convoluted and overwrought. Richard Wagner is notorious for such unwieldy plots, groaning under the metaphysical weight he piles on top of them. A friend of mine, an accomplished singer herself, complains to me that she hates how stupid, thin, and often scandalous the opera stories are. She’s totally right about that fact but has thereby, I think, missed the soulful work of opera.

My friend is right that opera combines devastating aural art with stupid stories. But this juxtaposition of the brilliant and the banal stands at the very center of our mortal lives. This is the miracle of Incarnation. This is the fact that we are silly, aching, trivial mortals staggering under the gravity of our divine essence.

The only smart thing I think I’ve ever heard attributed to Sigmund Freud is when he called us humans the gods who poop (he admittedly used the rather more graphic word for our waste). This is the staggering reality—we are marvelous, conscious, and yearning for the divine, and yet we poop and pee, say awful things, betray each other, and are susceptible to injury, cancer, and deformity. We are all of those things that belong to heaven or to earth. So is opera.

Take the beloved aria, “Nessun dorma,” from Puccini’s Turandot. The opera is a weird, even cheesy epic about a princess who plays exceptionally hard to get. She sets special, mostly impossible tasks for suitors to accomplish. A persistent prince manages to complete the tasks, but she still resists marrying him. He agrees that if she can discover his name before sunrise he will liberate her from the obligation of marriage.

The prince, confident that even though she has called for the entire kingdom to stay awake all night to discover his name, mocks her by singing “nessun dorma,” no one shall sleep. It’s a nonsensical moment in a silly story. But the song is so majestic that Luciano Pavarotti turned it into a modern blockbuster. He sang it at football games to the rousing cheers of thousands of half-drunk sports enthusiasts. The song is spectacular. When I hear it—almost every time—I want to clap, laugh, and cry all at once. But it’s basically a few lines from a Disney princess movie, sung perfectly. Such is the juxtaposition of beautiful and banal in opera. Such is the work of our lives.

I once attended an intimate discussion group with some prominent Christian professors. They asked what I did to try to place myself into a spiritual attitude that could make me available to inspiration from God. I told them that I listened to opera. They said, sure it’s nice to encounter beautiful art sometimes, smiling at me as if I were a sweet and uncomprehending student. But they didn’t understand my spiritual life, and they didn’t understand opera. This marvelous mélange of beauty and grotesquerie is for me an avenue to the spirit and presence of God. Making myself open to the reality of the banal and the beautiful unfolds to me the secret of life, afterlife, and their interconnected meanings. Such is the work of opera on my life, the work of God in my soul.