| ...there isn't often anything in the 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 silent people, one of them standing still,
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 if the operator attended strictly to business and uttered
no sound. - "The Shrine of St. Wagner" |
 AI image created by R. Kent Rasmussen |
|
The late Bill Nye once said, "I have been told Wagner's music is
better than it sounds." 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. 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... 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. |
|
| 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. |
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| 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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