Helping newbies scale the walls of opera
Companies compete to attract young fans to a demanding but highly rewarding art form
Standing in a line, they each try to make sense of it all: The valet and the maid love each other, but their boss wants the maid. The boss’s wife has eyes for her husband’s godson, who was caught with the gardener’s daughter. Meanwhile, the valet is in debt to the doctor and, in order to repay, must marry the doctor’s housekeeper.
Even Cupid, the puppet master behind this mess, isn’t quite sure what’s going on.
This tangled web of duplicity and double-crosses is a reality show producer’s dream. The Marriage of Figaro, a 230-year-old opera written by Mozart, manages to outdo The Bachelor, Survivor and Keeping Up With the Kardashians when it comes to backstabbing and sexual trysts. Which no doubt explains why, in 2016, Figaro remains one of the top 10 most-performed operas around the world.
Before watching Figaro, however, I am warned by Katherine Semcesen, the Canadian Opera Company’s (COC) associate director of education and outreach, not to follow its plot line by line, twist by twist. “It is confusing.”
For a music critic, the idea that a piece of art is difficult shouldn’t be an issue. But the world of classical music remains a towering enigma and, to anyone not already bought in, opera is an impenetrable fortress.
Boiled down to salacious plot elements, it’s easy to see how opera has survived for over 400 years. Yet, where reality TV aims to capture the widest possible audience, opera is a niche within a niche, one of several disciplines that fall under the classical music umbrella.
“It is not a mainstream interest,” opera expert Iain Scott admits. But through education and exposure, organizations like the COC hope to broaden opera’s appeal.
What enthusiasts tend to hold up as the medium’s strength — the combination of drama and music, performed without amplification, no less — can be incredibly alienating to anyone unaccustomed to spending four hours listening to rich people sing about their problems in Italian (or German or French).
This wasn’t always the case. In their 18th-century heyday, opera houses could be found across Italy and Germany, the equivalent of a small Canadian town’s Legion Hall.
“You went not to see the show,” Scott says. “You went to marry off your daughter, to play cards with your friends and find out who was screwing who.”
Today, opera fans tend to be a “greyhair and no-hair population, and has been for the past 100 years.” Only 9 per cent of those who attended a COC performance last year were under 30. Opera Insights It’s standing-room-only in one of the side rooms at the Four Seasons Centre as COC music director Johannes Debus walks Figaro’s cast through the opera’s final act. Though the likelihood that more than a handful of people in an audience will understand the original Italian is small, he regularly stops the performance to correct pronunciation.
This rehearsal with an audience is part of the COC’s Opera Insights series, designed to give newbies and diehards alike entry points into the medium. “There are a lot of individuals who love the art form and attend mainstage productions, but they don’t have a very good understanding of what goes into a production or the history of it,” Semcesen says.
“Live theatre is all-encompassing and opera takes that to a whole new level,” Jenna Pilgrim, a 21-year old opera fan, says. “It’s a change of communication methods.”
The past few decades have seen almost every major opera company make concessions toward accessibility. Along with education programs such as Opera Insights, surtitles that translate the libretto (lyrics), pioneered by the COC in the early1980s, are now standard. Discount programs for younger viewers are common, as is the idea of “rebooting” standards by dropping them into more modern contexts.
À la Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, the words and music remain the same, only the way the opera is staged changes. The COC’s Figaro, for example, ditched the piece’s original 18th-century setting for a 1930s Ingmar Bergman-inspired look.
Still, opera in most cities, Toronto included, continues to be dominated by a handful of tried-and-true productions. Two from the COC’s current season — Mozart’s The Magic Flute from 1791 and Puccini’s Tosca, which premiered in 1900 — rank among the top 10 most-performed operas across the globe.
“Other art forms can’t extract the emotions in these stories,” Semcesen says. “That’s why audiences are still gravitating to these pillars of the operatic repertoire.”
But the music that accompanies them is purely European and lacks a rhythmic African influence. The absence of a steady beat, at least the kind familiar to a generation brought up on rock, hip hop and dance music doled out in three-minute chunks, can make the music feel ponderous.
Pilgrim credits five years of ballet for priming her for opera.
“That’s when I first got into classical music,” she says. “The two go hand in hand.”
They’re also long. You can listen to Drake’s entire official discography in the same amount of time it takes to watch some operas. Some might question the need to spend five hours in a darkened theatre full of strangers when the totality of recorded music, film and television can be viewed in your home via a few key strokes. Operaphiles argue that’s the entire point. A relatively short 31⁄ hours into
2 Figaro, the aristocracy has been put in its place and Figaro the valet is able to marry his love.
Among the audience, the jubilation is palpable, though surely some of that joy must be directed at the now available bathrooms.
Time is the key, Scott says. In that sense, opera is not unlike any great work of art that requires more than a moment of your time to appreciate.
“It’s a deferred gratification thing,” he says. “Great literature — written, orchestral, operatic — does need exposure and a bit of help.”