It wasn’t all about the music, the pizazz, and the flaunting oboists. It was also about a voracious appetite for story.
How many movies and TV series have I enjoyed since Saturday morning cartoons and waking up early to catch The Smurfs and Dungeons & Dragons; and before that how many nursery rhymes with elves and shoemakers? Countless. How many friends in tale after tale casting themselves as the sympathetic protagonists in an ever antagonizing world? Since the beginning of the pandemic I’ve read 45 books with my bookclub. Added up, that’s a lot of story, not including my inner monologue, which is positively Dickensian.
Give me a hundred more lifetimes and I would still be stuck in drawer “A” of humanities card catalogue of story. But when did it all begin and how did it evolve into opera? Adam and Eve had too much drama going on to write their own story let alone write Don Giovani, so how did it all begin?
It must have began 30,000 generations ago with only grunts and barbaric yowls to communicate. That must have been tough. I can imagine the early storytellers figuring it all out: “Ug, tiger.” Try again. “Tiger grrrrrrrruh, no berry.” Keep trying..
Eventually those grunts turned into utterances and those utterances into articulation and then… humble words – became worlds. The tigers of both the mind and the world could be experienced and communicated.
Tiger tiger, burning bright.
“Here I am in the worst neighborhood, you know the one I’m talking about down by Banyan and Reef foraging for my girls favorite raspberry when five fucking tigers jump out bared teeth drip-dripping with my own reflection looking back at me in beads of saliva. I think about running but I’ll tell you I’d rather face a thousand tigers than her empty handed of raspberries. So, I grab a stick and thru slashing claws and teeth barely escape with my gonads intact to bring her this.” Rocko holds up a raspberry for all to see. “And you know what she says when I get back to the man-cave? I asked for b-l-u-e berries.”
Teenage Wiccans think words can be harnessed into magical spells and effect the phenomenal world and maybe them and Neil Gaiman are right; words have power. Power that has grown over time to mend hearts and rally armies.
Our brains have literally evolved into language machines. Thirty thousand generations of brains processing experience and naming each one have evolved a neural network equivalent to a built-in blank dictionary, just waiting to be filled. Language and storytelling have become a ubiquitous part of society and we crave new stories like tigers crave meat.
Enjoying stories however doesn’t always translate into telling stories. I’m definitely the type who thinks of great comebacks five hours too late while stuck in traffic by myself, and I labor over these small posts more than you might imagine. Maybe it’s from my own inability that I hold storytellers in such high esteem. Stories that let me see myself and escape myself at the same time.
After a trip to Belize/Guatemala my friend Ed asked me how the trip was and I described the entire trip not much better than a caveman; “ugh, cool” I said. More please. “We drove into Guatemala? Saw a cave that we had to swim into.” Now Ed is known to be a great story teller and swift and deadly at comebacks (but only if really provoked, he pulls his punches and is more likely to rebut with a self-deprecating laugh). He’s patiently indignant with me. “You fly to Central America and that’s all you bring back?”
He agrees after a little encouragement to translate my story like only he can:
Me: we swam into the cave and then…
Ed: There I was on the edge of a bottomless pit of water, the sound of macaws and monkeys all around and who knows what dangers lurked beneath the surface of the water, or what tigers in the brush. The humidity was like a ghost haunting every leaf and stone. I stowed my gear into a water proof bag and with my things swam across the treacherous pond of poisonous snakes and suckers.
Me: We had to squeeze between two rocks to get inside.
Ed: I turned to my side squeezing between tight boulders a literal mountain of weight pressed against my chest and back, each step squeezing my lungs a little more like a boa constrictor hoping the prize on the other side would be worth risking my life. My only relief – beads of sweat lubricating the gritty rock surface helping to squeeze thru with my life…
He could have went on like that forever. Maybe not as epic as his Walmart-line story or the time at the car dealership, but he turned my experience into a story worthy of being told. In a strange way my friendship with Ed makes me think of Bernie Taupin and ultimately opera.
Bernie Taupin if you don’t know is the collaborative partner of a certain dynamic singer who famously wore a Donald Duck outfit for a free concert in Central Park. Bernie was the lyricist for the singular Elton John and their singer/songwriter relationship has a similar parallel with the creators of opera.
To be clear, opera is special to me for the music. I swoon over the orchestra and bat my eyelashes at the sopranos and tenors, but the unsung heroes for it all, like Bernie, are the wordsmiths. Words that leave enough space in the framework for the musicians to add their own color and elaboration. For every Elton there is a Bernie, for every Mozart there was a DaPonte.
Opera lyricists are called librettists and the libretto they write is a triumphal act of balance, restraint, and essentialism. There has to be enough meat on the bones for the audience to follow the plot, but then also enough left off so the singers and orchestra can complete the story by adding the greater expressive power of music. For example, Verdi’s librettist Boito eliminated 6 words of every 7 from Shakespeare’s “Othello,” for their opera Otello, and it’s brilliant.
It’s this multi-layered approach in opera that makes me consider it the highest form of art; because it is ALL of them at once. One magnificent soup of expression. There are also some unique advantages in opera: To have multiple people communicating at once without it sounding like chaos, to amplify a character’s emotion with sound, to contradict the surface dialogue with the interior intent and ulterior motives. There’s a unique dynamism to it all that leaves one breathless. Throw in some costume, acting, ballet, a sword fight or two, and all while singing! Pizzazz!
Many of these final operas will be based on books and I’m looking forward to the opportunity to talk about our little book club that has been a sustaining life support every Tuesday since the pandemic began. It’s also a chance to revisit my favorite books that I think all humans should read and talk about, plus my excitement for afrofuturist literature and magical realism. It’s going to be an exciting home-stretch!
As I near the end of this passion project to see 101 operas and I begin to wonder what it was all about. Looking back it is a celebration of story and where my story and the story of opera overlapped for a brief beautiful moment at the beginning of the 21st century.
*The Tyger, by William Blake, 1794
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat.
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp.
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?