Puccini Without Excuses A Refreshing Reassessment of the World's Most Popular Composer

Part One the case of puccini Why Puccini? Why Now? An Introduction Without Puccini, there is no opera; without opera, the world is an even drearier place than the evening news would have us think. This book is aimed, firstly, at people who would have trouble agreeing with either part of that sentence. To begin with, there is the issue of opera in general. I do not hold with those who believe that opera is a dying art form. The same things have been said about opera almost since its invention. Opera was said to be doomed when the castrati disappeared in the eighteenth century, when the Napoleonic Wars shut down the conservatories in the early nineteenth century, when tonality was redefined in the twentieth century, and so on. Movies, television, radio, and the Internet were each supposed to nail the coffin lid shut, and all of those media have become part of the opera story. If opera were mortal, it would have died by now. Yet opera has been neatly contained in an obscure corner, thought to be only for, ahem, "certain" people, and this riles me. I believe opera is the most important art form. It is not the most important because, as is always said, it subsumes every other art form (which happens to be true), but because at its best it has the ability to probe deeper into the human experience than any other art form. There are never any easy answers in opera, and it promotes critical thinking. This is why fans are always said to be so passionate. While I can celebrate the high profile of opera in America today, I wish it were even higher-much higher. There are, however, impediments to raising this profile. Opera will always be considered a foreign art form, and we see all our national neuroses about things foreign in our approach to opera. It will always be marginalized to some degree. Opera continues to attract the elitist label. That there are rich people who support and attend the opera is beyond question, but I must wonder why it is that opera remains the single great signifier of the effete elite. You have all seen the images on television: overdressed, ancient, white audiences wielding lorgnettes while overfed woman onstage hits earsplitting high note. It doesn't matter that this image has little basis in reality-it exists and is with us forever. Had there never been this "opera house of the imagination," it would have been necessary to invent it. And the image continues to keep opera, and all its considerable power, away from many, many people. Conversely, the arts marketing people have been working overtime for a generation or so to combat this idea, and in doing so have perhaps overstepped their bounds. Opera is not elite, they have maintained. It's fun, and (worst of all), it's good for you, like cultural cod liver oil. This is America. We have to believe, or pretend, that something has an uplifting moral effect in order to support it (cf. baseball). I doubt that opera has ever made anyone a better person. I don't think baseball has either, but I love it all the same. Quality should be an end in itself. Furthermore, opera is elitist, but not in the way it is assumed by detractors to be. It is phenomenally expensive to produce and always has been, and therefore must be funded by someone (the king, corporate foundations, whomever). It is elitist in its performers: only about one in a million people (by one estimate) is born with the instrument necessary to make the sounds required, and only very few of them can follow through on their gift. And it is elitist in its requirements of its audience. We are expected to pay attention if we are to cull what can be culled from the experience. We seem to be able to assimilate these ideas in sports. We ought to be able to do something analogous for opera. Leaving aside, for now, the issue of opera's continuing, illogical, and urgentBerger, William is the author of 'Puccini Without Excuses A Refreshing Reassessment of the World's Most Popular Composer', published 2005 under ISBN 9781400077786 and ISBN 1400077788.