Someone suggested that I drop the subject of masks. I certainly aim to please my 10 readers, so how about opera? The one Jeopardy category I occasionally do well at. We’ll start with Un Ballo in Maschera…
Only kidding folks. There was a time before we started tandem riding that Stoker and I spent quite a few nights at the opera. And afternoons too.
My first exposure to opera came from the 1980’s film Amadeus. Prior to that all I knew about the subject was from a Marx Brothers’ film and the famous sports quote attributed to NBA coach Dick Motta; “The opera isn’t over until the fat lady sings”. Sexist, weightist, and body shaming by today’s wokeness standards of course.
Amadeus piqued my interest, and the next step was to see a television production of Don Giovanni on PBS. That hooked me. We went to see a our first live performance, a production of Cosi Fan Tutte by Townsend Opera Players (TOPS), a local company in Modesto. Cosi has what I still think is the most beautiful music of any opera.
It is hard to believe how much Stoker and I got into this. We were season ticket holders and fairly big donors for TOPS. Ditto for Stockton Opera. I was even on the TOPS Board of Directors for a while. We also bought season tickets to Sacramento Opera. We bought tickets to 4 operas each year at War Memorial to see the The San Francisco Opera, a world famous company. We even took consecutive summer vacations in Santa Fe to attend a couple of performances by Santa Fe Opera in their spectacular outdoor theater.
When we were going to attend an opera I was unfamiliar with, I would read the story and pay attention to the characters before the show. At a production of Idomeneo in Santa Fe, I came to realize not everyone did the same thing. There is a moment of high drama in the last act where Ilia intervenes to offer herself for sacrifice to the Gods instead of Idomeneo. Her dramatic entrance, throwing herself on the sacrificial altar, was met with laughter from the audience. I cringed.
We drifted away from opera. First we stopped going to SF, because it was too much hassle. I got more into cycling which made Sunday Matinees less attractive because I wanted to do club rides most weekends. And evening performances never ended before 11 pm, which seemed much later than it did when we were in our early 40’s.
But what really put me off was a performance of Cosi in Sacramento. Cosi has wonderful music, as I said. It is also a ‘cautionary tale told with humor’ about men and women, and how one lover is interchangeable with another. But the director of this production decided to turn it into something resembling an episode of the TV show ‘Friends’. This is a PG rated blog, so all I will say is that a lot of the singing took place while kneeling and looking at someone’s waistline.
Socially staid types like me have to be tolerant if we are to enjoy the beautiful music and moving stories of opera, since most of the attendees are of a more liberal mindset. I left my politics, which are not left, at home. But I decided that this excessively lurid treatment of Cosi was too much. So our last live opera was the same as our first. As Mimi sings in Act III of La Boheme, “Addio, senza rancor“.
Rich Freggiaro Cycling Blog 