DANIEL JOHN KELLEY

In further opera news, this past Saturday was spent giving a whirl to the whole “opera at the movies” thing. Despite having live tickets for May 8th, I decided I would check out La Fille du Regiment on the big screen, mainly because if I Mr. Juan Diego Florez canceled live I would kick myself for not sucking it up, and seeing it in the movies. 

The opera was preceded by talk by the head of Opera America, who did everything in his power to bias the people at the brunch/talk into total opera snobbery. Firstly, with dripping disdain, he talked about how frivolous the opera is, and how it was just a bit of “fun”. While this is true, he certainly didn’t seem to be selling the opera to anyone in the room. 

Secondly he did my least favorite thing- he played versions of the famous arias from the opera as sung by other famous singers, and then asked everyone to make sure and compare the two. This is nonsense. While I love to listen to historical performances, I make it a point never to listen to the opera I’m going to see two weeks before the opera, so that I’m cleared of preconceived notions and go into the opera fresh. I suppose this comes from my own snobbery that whatever I am going to see will be less good than the recordings I have, but it seems catastrophic to bring those expectations to bear on people who are experiencing these pieces for the first time. 

On another note, despite these HD broadcasts being meant to reach out to younger audiences who might not go to the opera, I was clearly the youngest person in the movie theatre by a least 10 years. What does this mean? That people who would have come to the opera were instead not coming to opera- which is not a good thing.

The whole me being the youngest person in the audience thing tends to happen a lot with me and the things I like, though…