A Redeeming Occasion

Extract

Going to a performance of any opera anywhere—well, almost any opera and almost anywhere, not Lucia di Lammermoor, not Glyndebourne—is for me an entrance upon an occasion. An entrance I may make at each performance. An occasion not to be experienced by those who sit amidst contraptions which without a by-your-leave or a letter of introduction thrust the entire chorus and orchestra of La Scala into one’s withdrawing room, and which are yet quite unable to bring Parsifal’s heavenly voices descending from the ceiling.

This sense of occasion belongs not nearly so much as is popularly believed—by those, for example, who covered the great concrete staircase of the Metropolitan at Lincoln Center with rich red cloth—with chandeliers and plush of a vanishing past, but rather is to be discerned in a common expectation of audience and players and singers. ‘It does me good to come here’, said my mother during the interval of a recent Covent Garden performance, T don’t often see so many people looking cheerful. It is not what television suggests to me that the world is like these days’.

Not that opera is to be thought escapist. Contrariwise. The 19th Century convention, for example, of a plot moving along by quick melodramatic incident, like falling in love or shooting a man down, with, before and after the incident, extended arias of comment and interpretation, seems to me not a whit artificial but exactly like the processes of my ordinary living.