OPERA...there isn't often anything in Wagner opera that one would call by
such a violent name as acting; as a rule all you would see would be a
couple of ...people, one of them standing, the other catching flies. Of
course I do not really mean that he would be catching flies; I only mean
that the usual operatic gestures which consist in reaching first one hand
out into the air then the other might suggest the sport I speak of it
the operator attended strictly to business... Wagner's music is better than it sounds. |
|
| I have attended operas, whenever I could not
help it, for fourteen years now; I am sure I know of no agony comparable
to the listening to an unfamiliar opera. I am enchanted with the airs of
"Travatore" and other old operas which the hand-organ and music-box
have made entirely familiar to my ear. I am carried away with delightful
enthusiasm when they are sung at the opera. But, oh, how far between they
are! And what long, arid, heartbreaking and headaching "between-times"
of that sort of intense but incoherent noise which always so reminds me
of the time the orphan asylum burned down. - Mark Twain, a Biography There was nothing in the present case which was an advantage over being
skinned. |
|
One in 50 of those who attend our operas likes it already, perhaps, but I think
a good many of other 49 go in order to learn to like it, and the rest in order
to be able to talk knowingly about it. The latter usually hum the airs while
they are being sung, so that their neighbors may perceive that they have been
to operas before. The funeral of these do not occur often enough.
- A Tramp Abroad
I have witnessed and greatly enjoyed the first act of everything which Wagner
created, but the effect on me has always been so powerful that one act was quite
sufficient; whenever I have witnessed two acts I have gone away physically exhausted;
and whenever I have ventured an entire opera the result has been the next thing
to suicide.
- Mark Twain in Eruption
The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief.
The racking and pitiliess pain of it remains stored up in my memory alongside
the memory of the time that I had my teeth fixed...
- A Tramp Abroad
There is where the deep ingenuity of the operatic idea is betrayed. It deals
so largely in pain that its scattered delights are prodigiously augmented by
the contrasts.
- A Tramp Abroad
I have never heard enough classical music to be able to enjoy it; & the
simple truth is, I detest it. Not mildly, but will all my heart. To me an opera
is the very climax & cap-stone of the absurd, the fantastic the unjustifiable.
I hate the very name of opera - partly because of the nights of suffering I
have endured in its presence, & partly because I want to love it and can't.
I suppose one naturally hates the things he wants to love & can't. In America
the opera is an affectation. The seeming love for [it] is a lie. Nine out of
every ten of the males are bored by it & 5 out of 10 women. Yet how they
applaud, the ignorant liars! -
What a poor lot we human beings are, anyway. If base music gives me wings, why
should I want any other? But I do. I want to like the higher music because the
higher & better like it. But you see, I want to like it without taking the
necessary trouble & giving the thing the necessary amount of time &
attention. The natural suggestion is, to get into that upper tier, that dress
circle, by a lie: we will pretend we like it. This lie, this pretense, gives
to opera what support it has in America.
- Notebook # 15, July - August 1878
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