Welcome to my life as an artist/poet/author, where there is never a dull moment.
Having completed a collection of short stories and two novels, I was on the verge of writing a sequel to my second novel. In fact, I thought this could become a series of at least three, maybe a half dozen books. I wrote several exploratory chapters, which I shared with my critique partners, and it seemed I was well on my way. Then something happened, totally out of the brilliant azure sky.
The Introduction
In December of 2019, my daughter (also a writer, and librarian) visited me for a couple of weeks. She and I both had a vague curiosity about opera (although neither of us had ever attended one), so while she was here we ended up watching one online, and then a half dozen.
I had never previously been a fan of opera—it all seemed so…ARTIFICIAL. The stories (or at least what I knew of them) seemed pretty contrived. And then there was all that singing. And pretty stylized, unnatural singing at that. But after experiencing these six or so productions, I was unexpectedly hooked.
After she left, I started watching other operas online, as I came across ones available as free video streams. I also ordered a DVD of Massenet’s “Thais” and watched it.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. One of the unfortunate casualties of the virus fallout was the closing of the entire 2020 season of New York City’s Metropolitan Opera. This premier opera venue was left in the lurch. But their great misfortune soon became my (and millions of other opera watchers around the globe) good fortune. The “Met” began offering their incredibly rich library of past productions with a free video stream of a different opera each night. I consumed these major works of art nightly, and almost became obsessed with it.
No, not “almost,” I DID become obsessed. In the first half of 2020, I watched about fifty operas—from classic 17th century works, all the way to current works of the 21st century. By now, I’ve watched something like one hundred.
What’s the Big Deal?
Why? What was it about the actual (well, as “actual” as online can be) experience that changed my attitude toward this artform?
While I was originally put off by opera as something drastically artificial, I finally realized that, in fact, that is just what art is. Artificial. Let me say that again. ART-ificial. I’d never before noticed that “A-R-T” in the word. Hmmmm.
Once I got over my prejudice against anything “artificial,” I began to realize the wonder that opera can be.
It is a deep integration of so many disparate arts—instrumental music, poetry, song, drama/theatrics, stage/scene design, costume, makeup, and often even dance. It is a rich brew, that, when done with excellence and high ambition, is tough to match with any other artform. The emotional impact on an appreciative audience can be almost incalculable.
I became most acutely aware of what can happen, at the conclusion of my watching Richard Wagner’s Tristan Und Isolde. When one reads through a comprehensive synopsis of the opera, or even looks into the libretto itself, the opera seems a conventional, maybe even trite, love story. Love stories are a dime-a-dozen, having been written or sung thousands, no, many millions of times.
In this case, an Irish princess is more or less kidnapped and hauled off to another land to be the wife of some foreign, unknown king. She hates her captor, the king’s right-hand man, but a love potion draws them both into a whirlpool of romantic attraction to each other, resulting in the king’s rage. Yada, yada, yada…
Major Frisson
But as the opera’s last bars of music came to its culmination (a song titled “Liebestod,” or “Love-death”), and the curtain finally dropped, chills shot up my spine, and the little hairs on the back of my neck stood at attention for somewhere between 30 and 60 seconds.
I’ve been deeply impressed by other artistic works (music, film, literature, paintings, etc.), and even experienced a brief one or two second thrill (or “frisson,” French for “shiver/shudder”) here and there, but never had I experienced something that so deeply affected me for such an extended time.
The opera shocked me by its raw, emotional power.
To What End?
So what does this all have to with my own writing?
As my appreciation of opera developed, I began thinking that the story I had already embarked upon for my third novel—Shuqilat, the tragic story of an engimatic Nabataean queen—might best be told as an opera. The story had all the elements of fine operatic art: deep emotions and conflict swirling around love, betrayal, and death. Although I was well into writing the novel, I kept thinking, “What if this was an opera? Could it be an opera?” And then finally, “Why not make it an opera?”
<<NOTE: the theatrical poster below is entirely a figment of my own imagination…but who knows?>>
