Lucie de Lammermoore. Victor Coindre, Public area, through Wikimedia Commons.
My first reminiscence of opera is Bugs Bunny or possibly The Pink Panther Present: these Saturday-morning cartoons the place the fats girl sings and shatters a glass. A lot later I started so far a person who had been to lots of of opera performances (a reality I discovered not solely surprising however actually unbelievable) and so I went from watching no operas to nearly one a month. The one I’ve loved essentially the most by far was the Met’s spring 2022 manufacturing of Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, staged in a city within the depressed Rust Belt. I had already examine Lucia: it’s the opera that evokes Emma Bovary to cheat on her husband (once more, and extra dramatically). And but I didn’t know something about its plot, as a result of Flaubert doesn’t describe it; the opera serves merely to attach Emma to her youthful self, the beautiful nation lady who had had greater goals than a failure of a husband and a cad of an (ex-)lover. On the opera, Flaubert writes, “d’insaissibles pensées” come over her: “elusive ideas,” uncapturable ideas, incomprehensible ideas. What’s coming over her is fantasy.
Nabokov stated about Emma Bovary that she was the quintessential “unhealthy reader,” the one who reads “emotionally, in a shallow juvenile method, placing herself on this or that feminine character’s place”: above all, within the place of Lucia di Lammermoor, the tragic sister of a warlord, saved from the person she loves, who slaughters her husband on their wedding ceremony night time in a crazed delirium and herself dies. However to learn Madame Bovary as purely reprobative appears to me chilly to the purpose of madness; as Flaubert stated, after all, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” We’re all fantasists, incomplete and incoherent actors in quest of a personality, and who can blame and even fail to admire Emma: so moved by artwork that she too will destroy her life for a fantasy of affection, and die.
And but I personally was under no circumstances moved by the opera to alter my life. I might admire the lead soprano Nadine Sierra’s expressiveness, virtuosity, magnificence; I might delight within the claustrophobic units, within the (maybe a tad extreme) use of projection. However the expertise was under no circumstances like that of, say, watching a nineties movie and eager to be a slacker so badly I regretted ever getting a job. Opera, you may say, is an outdated fantasy machine: too mannered, too heroic, too … boring?
Then again, I more and more discover it laborious to grasp what individuals’s epistemic relationships are to all kinds of issues: the massively well-liked Love Is Blind is an nearly mockingly Brechtian, stiff recitation of clichés (“I’d name myself, possibly … an empath?” “Me too!”). The individuals round me who appear essentially the most clearly engaged in absurd, even delusional, fantasies of inconceivable and irresistible love—those who take their cues from Earlier than Dawn, from the movies of Kieślowski—are those who really feel themselves most assuredly and assertively to be residing in reality.
Now, once I see individuals on the opera, I see individuals delighted much less by the fantasy of opera than by the fantasy of themselves as operagoers. The divide is instantly evident between the regulars, the season-ticket holders, the devotees, of their wheelchairs and sneakers, and people in robes and tuxedos taking photos on the plush purple stairs. But I suppose all of us should get our scripts from someplace. I’m not positive what anybody is feeling on the opera, as the marginally repulsively trendy chandelier goes up and the lights go down, however I’m pretty sure what they want to be feeling—would really like themselves to be able to feeling.
