Singing in the Green World

Two Operas in Surrey

Dear Reader,

A very rustic hello from the woods of Maine. Below please find some reflections on my recent time in the UK. This is an installment of my Bird on the Wing series for paid subscribers. Stay tuned for a new Frugal Chariot about Gigantic Cinema: A Weather Anthology, edited by Alice Oswald and Paul Keegan—for all subscribers and coming soon!

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Singing in the Green World

My conversion experience with opera came 25 years ago in San Francisco, in October of 1997. I was there alone for work, and scanned the local paper for something to do on a Saturday night. I saw that the Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel was singing the title role in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, and while my knowledge of the opera world was at that time limited, I did know that he was (and is!) a brilliant artist. I bought a single ticket, and marched up the marble steps of the San Francisco Opera House for the first time.

When I was a child, my mother generously took me to the opera several times. I have a vivid memory of noticing one evening, in a production at Wolf Trap near Washington DC, that Luciano Pavarotti was wearing Adidas sneakers (dyed green and matching his tights) to aid him in maneuvering his globally-adored bulk across the stage. I recall great swells of sound and action, the meaning of which was pretty much indecipherable to a kid.

Luciano Pavarotti as the Duke in Rigoletto, 1971. Photo: Royal Opera House/Donald Southern

But that night in San Francisco, the freewheeling energy of a committed ensemble, my sudden and complete investment in the characters’ fates (Would the creepy Count rape Susanna and ruin her life, and Figaro’s? And what about the poor Countess?), and the utter gorgeousness of the music overwhelmed me with joy and gratitude. I’ve always wondered if the fact that I was expecting my first baby—and therefore on the cusp of a major life change—allowed me at long last to tap into the dramatic exuberance and spiritual riches of opera. Whatever the case, I now loved opera.

The next day, I dropped everything to get to Berkeley to hear Terfel in recital. Three members of the Figaro cast who’d turned out to support their colleague kindly autographed my ticket from the night before—including Angelika Kirchschlager, who sang Cherubino so beautifully and acted with such great comedic verve. I carried that ticket in my purse for a number of years, before I somehow lost it.

Matthew Aucoin

Composer Matthew Aucoin recently published a book of insightful, big-hearted essays on opera, The Impossible Art. He explains the title in this way:

Impossibility is baked into the art form’s foundations. The operatic ideal, an imagined union of all the human senses and all art forms—music, drama, dance, poetry, painting—is itself an impossibility. But this impossibility is productive and even liberating: all of opera’s bizarre and beautiful fruits, its carnivalesque excesses, its improbable moments of intimate revelation, stem from artists’ ongoing search for this permanently elusive alchemy.

I love this idea. The craziness of opera is a feature, not a bug, of its operating system. And perhaps of humanity’s also.