janvier 30, 2005
Opera and Life's Beautiful Things
The Duchess and I did an opera-and-sushi date tonight -- Roméo et Juliette followed by a stop at the Okeon. Let's face it, nothing spells romance like dead Veronans and freshwater eel.
I think Gounod's score is a little heavy-handed, but the cast was excellent. Lyudmilla Semenenko was a great Stephano.
During the second act it struck me how much opera depends on society's consensus that it's "high culture." Stripped of this, there would be something ridiculous about the whole thing. Take away its prestige, the loveliness of the voices, and the grandeur of the theatre and you're left with slightly overweight grown-ups in costume enacting a tenuous plot with overacting direct from the William Shatner School.
Opera, like so many of the beautiful things in life, is impractical, unhip, and dismissed as elitist. The same could be said for formal dress, customs, local traditions and especially manners. They've always relied on a cultural consensus that said, "These things are impractical and time-consuming, but they have value in themselves."
These are the things that make civil society civil. As we urbanize and atomize, they're anything but out of date -- they're vital. They're the antidote to the coarsening and ugliness of daily life.
Posted by Discoshaman at janvier 30, 2005 01:53 AM | TrackBack