Samizdata

Rumours are afoot that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are going to be in Hollywood’s attempt to bring Atlas Shrugged to the big screen. They might make an interesting pair to play John Galt and Dagny Taggart.

The constant temptation for writers here at Samizdata is to focus only on politics, and as a direct consequence to get depressed. Politics is always depressing. Depressing is what politicians do. They say they are going to encourage this or that, but these thises and thats generally involve extorting yet more tax to pay for such encouragement, which depresses taxpayers yet more, and the encouragement as often as not turns out to be the opposite, while nevertheless scaring away any non-governmental encouragers who might really have helped, which is especially depressing for everyone who got their hopes up.

So, I will now write about opera on DVD, which is not nearly such a depressing subject as politics, and especially not right now. True, opera is often paid for by governments – which goes a long way to explaining why most new operas now are such junk. And true, the stories told in operas are often themselves very depressing, involving, as they often do, politicians, as well as other sorts of bad people doing bad things. But, despite all that, the presentation on DVD of the operas that date from the time when opera was show business and when people ran opera houses for fun and profit, rather than out of a sense of cultural duty, is now getting seriously into its stride.

DVD has always seemed to me the obvious way to enjoy opera. The thing itself, in an actual opera house with actual live singers and players, is for me just too expensive and too chancey. For instance, a few years ago I attended an English National Opera production of Madame Butterfly. It was advertised as being sung in English, but it turned out to be that particular sort of unintelligible English that only opera singers sing. Waar-blaar-traar-hyaar etc. I couldn’t make out one single damn word of it. Since I was paying for someone else to be there too, that was a big slice out of a hundred quid in exchange for a few tunes that I already knew and already had on CD in several versions, all of them better.

And as for when they are singing in another language, well, where’s the fun in that if you don’t understand it? To enjoy that, you have to do a ton of homework, and for me that drains all the fun out of it. No, the answer had to be DVD, with subtitles (which I believe you can often summon up even if they are singing in operenglish). And the good news, for me, is that opera DVDs are finally coming within my price range.

I don’t buy opera DVDs new, any more often than I buy full price regular classical CDs new. I buy them new, that is to say, only very occasionally. Fifteen quid for one disc? No thank you. And operas on DVD still tend to cost nearer thirty quid than fifteen, if you buy them new. But, and this is the really good news, opera DVDs have finally started to show up in decent numbers in the second hand classical CD shops and market stalls that I regularly visit. So, for instance, I recently got the entire Levine/New York Met set of Wagner’s Ring Cycle for thirty quid, and, during the same trip, Beethoven’s Fidelio and Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier for a tenner each. Some operas are going now for even less. That, for me, is value. These prices mean that now, I can finally allow myself to enjoy opera, because if I become addicted to it, as I never have allowed myself to so far, the habit will not ruin me and mean that I have to die under Charing Cross Bridge in a cardboard box, instead of indoors and comfortable.

Have I disliked opera because I really did dislike it? – mostly because of the wobbly, incomprehensible way they so often sing it. Or did I dislike it in mere self-defence against being economically ruined by it? Hard to say. But, a few nights ago, listening to the closing scene of Der Rosenkavalier, I could feel myself getting seriously hooked.

Der Rosenkavalier contains many ridiculous things. The leading man is sung by a soprano, which takes some getting used to, however well she sings. And teenager Sophie, whom the leading man (well, more like a boy) eventually becomes engaged to in that melodious last scene, is, in this production, rather obviously nearer to forty than twenty, albeit a very nice looking forty-year-old. Above all, these people are all old-time Viennese, which means that not only does the villain have a thoroughly warped view of the world, but so, frankly, albeit to a lesser degree of course, do the good guys. I.e. the good girls.

But no matter. Richard Strauss’s taste in operatic singing is pretty much the same as mine. He adored the light soprano voice – as opposed to the heavy, wobbly, knock-a-giant-down-at-fifty-paces Wagner-type soprano voice – to the point where ever since, people have tended to call such sopranos “Straussian”. (Gundula Janowitz and Lucia Popp are two of my favourites, both of whom were sublimely wonderful performers of Strauss’s sublimely wonderful Four Last Songs, which I have adored for decades.) Der Rosenkavalier, like most operas, has its longueurs, when they do that annoying form of operatic talking which is half talking and half orchestrally accompanied singing, which is similar to what actors used to do, without music. But every so often, and the final scene of Rosenkavalier is definitely one such time, they get some actual tunes to sing, and as Sophie and the Boy/Girl Soprano sang away ecstatically, I could feel myself surrendering.

Good. For me, classical music is something to enjoy first, rather than to “understand”. But, there is no doubt that if you do want to deepen your understanding of this music, you have to at least be acquainted with opera. Mozart’s piano concertos, for instance, are intensely “operatic”, and a thorough study of the way they echo tunes in his operas will give you an order of magnitude greater feeling for what they are all about.

I already have a number of operatic DVDs, quite aside from the ones I have recently acquired, for the operatic DVD bargain is not an entirely new phenomenon. But, for all the considerations alluded to above, I have tended to keep them on the shelf, unsurrendered to. Now, I look at my little DVD opera collection with new eyes, knowing that I will soon be listening to it with new ears and watching it with those same new eyes, enthralled.