For a number of years my husband and I went often to the Metropolitan Opera, in its grand house at Lincoln Center.
We went by cab, and as we drew near I liked to watch the people streaming toward it. On opera evenings you can see a tide: everyone heading the same way, hurrying along the sidewalk, jogging up the steps, striding across the plaza. We were all heading for the luminous glass walls and the glowing Chagall mural, radiant in the evening light. Around us the city hurried and pounded, but on this windswept urban plain the pace was grand and ceremonial. The opera house drew us, like a great glowing star.
Inside, caped ushers and velvet ropes guarded the crimson-carpeted interior. Everyone was dressed up: we wore fur, silk, pearls. We were paying sartorial tribute to the opera’s grand endeavor.
Sometimes this tribute was whimsical. Wagner’s Ring Cycle, one of the grandest of all operas, inspires a certain ludic levity. One year a friend invited us to her box in the Grand Tier, and on the first evening she distributed Valkyrie helmets, with small curved horns. We wore them to every performance; my husband still has his.
You may think that wearing horned Valkyrie helmets to the opera is absurd, and perhaps it is. But a deep strain of absurdity runs through this world: opera may be the most artificial of all art forms. Plots, sets, dialogue, costumes—everything is contrived. The only kind of realism we expect is emotional. Music is a portal to the heart; opera may be the most emotional of art forms. Wagner, that scholar of Nordic myth and human psyche, delivers passionate surges that shift the landscape like seismic jolts. Without feeling, his operas would be flow-charts of dysfunctional families and failed power politics. What drives his operas, and what drives us to see them, is the havoc they wreak inside us, the disturbance they set up within our most intimate selves. I learned not to wear mascara, because the last act always brought me to tears.
On those evenings we moved on a tide of anticipation. We settled into our seats and listened to the orchestra warm up, playing its thrilling racing trills, prelude to the prelude. Then the house lights dimmed, the crystal chandeliers rose suddenly like silent stars, and the real world fell away. The conductor appeared, the curtain rose, and we heard the deep, slow note that signals the beginning of everything.
Opera at the Met combines musical brilliance, emotional potency, and social pyrotechnics, creating a cultural crescendo that’s hard to match. I was curious to see the opera in High Definition, the Saturday matinee video broadcast beamed live from the Met to small-town theatres across the country. It seemed like a contradiction in terms: isn’t the opera, by nature, an imperial experience? Doesn’t it require a sophisticated metropolitan context? Can it survive translation into the provinces?
The Mahaiwe, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and the Grand, in Ellsworth, Maine, are both revivified old movie theatres in handsome nineteenth-century towns. Both houses are modest, compared to the Met’s nearly four thousand seats: the Mahaiwe holds about seven hundred; the Grand, around three hundred. The towns have no big plazas; no pedestrian tides sweep these sidewalks. The HD performances are matinees, so no one wears evening clothes. And in wintertime, in the hinterlands, no one was wearing silk or mink. We wore sweaters and parkas and boots, honoring the god of weather, not opera. But the sense of anticipation was the same: we settled in, waiting to be enveloped by the opera’s world.
But this is not permitted. Instead of the fluttering of the orchestra until the start of the performance, HD begins with banal, intrusive chatter—announcements of sponsors and coming events. Instead of sinking into the delicious dream-state of opera, you distance yourself as if you were watching commercials. You are watching commercials. And if the beginning is bad, the intermission is worse.
Consider the curtain, and its purpose. It rises to reveal a magical new place—the rooftops of Paris, the sands of Egypt, the court of Turandot. We know these are sets, but they create a physical context for the narrative and heighten the sense of emotional reality. At the Met, the boundary between curtain and audience is sacrosanct: when the curtain falls on “Les Troyens,” the ancient world vanishes. But HD flouts this long tradition. There, when the curtain falls, just as you’re feeling trembly for poor Dido, who is nearly mad with grief at Aeneas’ departure, no sooner have you pulled out your Kleenex than Dido appears again, striding offstage, grinning at the camera and swigging from a plastic water bottle. Behind her, stagehands hammer and shift scenery. Another singer appears to interview Dido. Chatting and joking about their careers, they rip to shreds the whole fine, complicated mesh of prophesy and war, anguish and love and death that makes up the ancient world of Dido and Aeneas, and you’re made to feel like a fool for that trembly bit, the Kleenex.
And there are technical problems: during the climactic scene in “Maria Stuarda” the Mahaiwe screen went black, and we’ll never know if Mary, Queen of Scots, actually called Elizabeth I a bastard, or how those voices wove together the gorgeous texture of the moment.
But as to the performance itself, HD is brilliant. If exquisite music and powerful emotion are the great engines of opera, HD delivers. It’s as though a scrim has been lifted: everything is sharper and more vivid. Even the music seems truer—but the great change is visual. The camera provides the one thing that the Met can’t: intimacy. The vast stage and enormous house keep us at a distance, and a view through opera glasses is cramped and tiny. The camera’s quiet close-ups offer an entirely new rendering, where love and grief and rage become personal: the swelling throat, the trembling mouth, the welling eye. We watch Brünnhilde’s grieving face as she yields to her father’s sorrowful decree, Rigoletto’s, as he understands his bitter fate. The characters sing the great arching narratives of their lives, and their faces remind us of how our flesh reacts to primal moments of pain and bliss. It’s both compelling and humbling, and as these images become part of the musical narrative they heighten our experience, drawing us deeper into opera’s charged realm.
And now HD makes this available virtually everywhere. Opera may still be an imperial phenomenon, but it’s no longer limited to the imperial city. On certain Saturday afternoons, a tidal surge moves quietly throughout the country. People in parkas and jeans make their way through the streets of small towns, from parking lots behind the bank or along the railroad tracks, toward an old movie theatre. They’ve paid twenty-five dollars to sit for several hours in a darkened house, where they’ll enter an ecstatic realm.
At the end, when the singers take their bows, at the Grand and the Mahaiwe, we begin to clap. They can’t hear us in New York, but we don’t care. It’s like the Valkyrie hats: we’re applauding the splendor of the performance, the ardor of the musicians, the beauty of the whole. We’re paying tribute to this cultural crescendo. We’re honoring the distant presence of the opera house, at the heart of all this, like a glowing star.
