The art form of opera is currently suffering a major economic crisis in the United States. With an administration that is at war with the arts, and an economy that is pinching the amount of capital one needs to live or uses to donate to support fine arts causes like orchestras and opera companies. We need to reconsider as a society what freedom of expression looks like. I’m not dissenting with anything in particular. I’m advocating for an art form I used to despise.

Back in the 20th, when I was an undergraduate student studying music I despised my music theory and history teacher for making us analyze and listen to L’Orfeo by Claudio Monteverdi and Orfeo ed Eurydice by Christoph Willibald Gluck, and a few others I can’t remember. We also analyzed operas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Don Giovanni, and Cosi fan Tutti. We examined Richard Wagner’s music dramas: Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal. By the time we started studying classical and Romantic period operas I had completely changed my mind on the genre.

Opera is a difficult genre to get into within the United States of America. If you come from the blue-collar, low-to-moderate income economic class, and are culturally isolated by geography it is difficult to access or even appreciate the music. Then we have the challenge of language. When I talk about opera with students, elementary, middle, high, or college, I talk about the barriers. The most common barrier is language (French, Italian, German.) English operas exist, but not many sit at the peak of the genre. Unless you have subtitles, or the libretto sitting in front of you it is almost impossible to understand what is going on the stage.

This was my barrier as I entered college. I also despised music written before Johann Sebastian Bach, or at minimum Bach’s death. I found the study of it to be dull and slow. Bach was the beginning of music for me. It had dissonance, movement, flair, and glorious technique. My naivety didn’t realize that this early music is where we build the blocks of everything after. Without these rules, concepts, and constructions music doesn’t develop the structures we are familiar with today. I think the Monteverdi L’Orfeo was my first exposure to a full opera. I had sat through a Metropolitan Opera broadcast on PBS for 20 or so minutes, but never invested in the story and music of a Bel Canto or Romantic Opera by Giacomo Puccini or Giuseppi Verdi that I came across.

I was not the only one who struggled with this structure of music theory and history presentation. I stuck with it, but many of my classmates dropped. We started with sixty or so students in Theory/History I, and by my sophomore year in Theory/History IV we were down to about 25. I made it through the challenging process. It required me to develop a growth mindset. One that took work. I looked at our textbook and took note of the music we were going to study in the future. I remember saying, “Shit, really!” My ideal course of study for music was destroyed… I then accepted my fate. I would have to adopt a new attitude if I were going to be a music teacher, conductor, and performer.

Three weeks into my second semester of my freshman year I went into the music library and determined that I was going to listen to a contemporary opera by my favorite composer of that moment, Paul Hindemith. I set aside three hours of one of my evenings to place a record on a turntable, read the libretto’s translation from German, and also follow the score. Mathis der Mahler was that opera. The libretto is the story of artist Matthias Grunewald’s struggle to find a freedom of expression for his art during the repressive climate of his day. Hindemith was also struggling to find freedom of expression for his music due to the rise of the Third Reich. I found the symbolic situation striking, and I had yet to put needle to vinyl.

Once I did place the needle to vinyl, my three hours went to the library’s closing time at 11:00 p.m. I had spent five hours listening, reading, listening again to certain arias, and marveling at Hindemith’s score. His orchestration and use of tonality reinforced the character’s plights within the opera. I finally understood what my professors were trying to teach me. Opera is the pinnacle of musical expression. The notes are far more than pleasant sounds, they are purveyors of emotion, connection, and struggle. The text is simply the language, the music is actually the conveyance that tells the story in an emotional context. At 10:45 p.m. that lonely evening the final D-flat major chord played across my headphones I sat in awe as if the Earth had landed on top of me. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in the 1977 EMI recording became the first professional classical vocalist to move me emotionally. I felt Matthias’ struggle through Fischer-Dieskau’s performance. The Bavarian Radio Symphony crushed me musically.

I had yet to hear a darker chord than the final one from this opera. A couple of years later I listened to Das Leid von Der Erde (The Song of the Earth) by Gustav Mahler, and realized this must have inspired Hindemith’s orchestration for Mathis der Mahler. The walk back to my dorm room in the winter stillness was not without a sense of awe. I decided I was going to spend a lot more of my non-homework time in the library listening to operas, symphonies, ballets, and other great works with the score in front of me.

Did this one experience change my whole resistance to opera? No, it took a few more months to alter my naivety entirely. I listened to the complete score of Mozart’s Don Giovanni before we studied it my sophomore year. I also listened to my first Wagner opera, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg. I chose this one as Wagner wrote magnificent parts for the tuba… I loved the orchestrations of this opera, but the story was not as interesting as the later works. I also listened to Alban Berg’s Wozzeck without really understanding the esoteric sounds of expressionism and twelve-tone theory. This one challenged me, but I found a place in my heart for the work following intensive study of it in undergraduate and graduate school.

During the remainder of my college career I developed some favorites from the genre of opera. Don Giovanni, Die Zauberflote by Mozart became my favorite of his. I also fell in love with the tragedy Dialogues des Carmelites by Francis Poulenc. Nabucco by Giuseppi Verdi also enters my list. I was introduced to this opera through the band transcription of the overture. The score is rich and powerful. The brass writing engaged me from just the overture.

I have seen a couple of operas, and lots of concert performances of arias from various operas. I went and saw a production of Richard Wagner’s Siegfried from his Ring Cycle at the Lyric Opera of Chicago many years ago. I wanted to experience at least one of these operas live, before I died. I succeeded. Sublime would be a nice adjective for the experience. The orchestra was superb!

I continue to collect compact disc sets of various operas. I just purchased Charles Gounod’s Faust, Romeo and Juliette, Giacomo Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, and Mozart’s Cosi fan Tutti at a library sale in Galesburg, IL of all places. BTW, I am a huge fan of American Composer John Adam’s operas: Nixon in China, Death of Klinghoffer, and Doctor Atomic are all in my library. He graces contemporary subjects musically that deserve an artistic look. Controversy has followed him, sadly (Klinghoffer.) I never imagined at 18 years of age I would enjoy opera as much as I do now.

I still don’t feel like I belong in the crowd at a live opera performance. I hate wearing ties and suits even though I look good in them. I don’t like the feeling of upper class/lower class while intermingling with an opera audience. The air of sophistication is suffocating. Music performances should be inclusive rather than exclusive. Europe is far better at this than the United States based on my readings of European musical culture. Too much capitalism and classist behavior hurts the genre in the United States. Ticket prices are quite expensive, and once you buy a ticket they hit you up for donations immediately. Season ticket prices are thousands of dollars. I could attend several baseball games around the Midwest for the same amount. Just putting the expense into context with my other favorite hobby, baseball.

I would recommend everyone give opera a try. Listen to the music with the libretto translated into English. If you need more visual like that of musical theatre, go purchase a ticket for a college production of an opera. Or, splurge and make it a big weekend with your significant other in a metropolitan city. Invest a little into the process. Think of it as a concert ticket. No mosh pits, just the most carefully written musical stories ever assigned to paper. Thanks for reading…

…so it goes…