Opera Can Change Your Life!
I’m not an opera buff, or an opera expert. I wasn’t an opera-mad teenager, who queued up for hours at Covent Garden to see whoever was the top soprano of the day. I’m just an enthusiastic beginner. The first opera I saw was in 2017; I’ve seen 3 live since then and maybe another dozen on DVDs or the internet.
But I’m passionate about my mission to make the artform accessible to a much wider audience, particularly young people, who wouldn’t normally even consider watching an opera.
It’s difficult to overstate the excitement that I feel on watching an opera which I’ve never seen before — fresh and new for me, like the day on which it was first performed so many years ago.
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It’s always orchestral music which is used in films to create an exciting, poignant, sad or happy mood and that effect can be achieved very rapidly, with just the opening lines of a theme. In opera, the addition of singing further enhances the emotional connection with the listener/viewer and means that you really concentrate on the singing. I wonder if it’s this enhanced concentration which helps to create the transcendent experience of opera?
There have been profound changes in my appreciation of all forms of music — I have found myself really listening hard and intently, with a fresh ear, to music which I have heard many times over — recent pop music; the last movement of Beethoven’s 9th symphony; the perfect pop songs of Abba; musicals from the 1930s and, particularly, the 1950s and 60s.
But now this is also happening for me with the spoken word: we watched Romeo and Juliet (the play) the other day; I found myself being profoundly moved by the sheer beauty of the balcony love scene — really hearing the lines, as if I’d never heard them before.
Even with visual art, opera seems also to have changed my perception of what I’m seeing, as well as hearing. I’d never been at all keen on Renaissance art, the ‘old masters’, but I found myself, the other day, really wanting to go to the National Gallery and spend time looking at them.
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We just need to help people surmount that tired ‘opera is weird, posh and elitist’ barrier and we’ll be able to communicate our enthusiasm to them and introduce them into our world.
It can be done and it’s up to all of us to try our hardest, so that more people’s lives can be changed for the better.
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In the film Pretty Woman, millionaire financier Edward Lewis (played by Richard Gere) flies with Vivian (played by Julia Roberts) in his private jet, to San Francisco to see an opera.
At the end of the performance, Edward delivers a tablet from on high:
“People’s reaction to opera the first time they see it is very dramatic. They either love it or hate it. If they love it, they will always love it. If they don’t, they may learn to appreciate it, but it will never become part of their soul.”
Through this statement oozes the elitist view which so many critics of the artform assume we subscribe to: it is only a very special person whose soul can be touched by opera. It is not for mere mortals, only we chosen few.
It sounds good, doesn’t it and seems profound? But my experience is that liking came first, then loving and then much more. Opera touches my heart and infuses my soul with something quite otherworldly.
Opera has changed my life.
