Opera: Some Boring Thoughts

For those of you who felt that a blog post comparing hardcore/punk/indie shows to the opera was 1) inevitable, 2) sure to be boring, and 3) already sufficiently "previewed" in real-life conversation, feel free to tune out. You are probably dating me or hear enough of my opinions as it is. 

For the rest of you, this comparison is sure to be invigorating and off-the-wall. 

When one goes to the opera, one expects a great deal:
*a return on the outlay of money for tickets, in the form of world-class singing and staging
*good acoustics
*a bunch of old New Yorkers who will cough and rustle paper for the entire performance
*many guaranteed "highlights" interspersed among boring plot-advancement
*everything going off "without a hitch"
*established and world-renowned classics of the genre, confirmed by generations of fans 
*showmanship, performance, excellence
*socializing optional
*class anxiety

When one goes to a "show" in Brooklyn, one ought to be prepared for:

*milling about and preening by people not really there to see the band(s)
*many people only there to see one band: their friends' band
*sound difficulties, bad sound
*unprofessional performance, drunkenness
*sets that go on for too long
*unpleasant social interactions with people you didn't know still lived here
*bands whose raison d'etre seems to be free drinks/getting laid/being talked-about
*no one even pretends that the goal is to give a memorable evening of entertainment

Now, I have seen some great shows in my life: but many of those were bands from Japan (with a completely different idea of performance than ours), and many of the others irregular "DIY" shows in basements, laundry rooms, etc.--no one was there for the ambience. On the other end of the spectrum, nearly every stadium-rock concert I've seen has been great: Judas Priest, John Fogerty, etc. 

The problem, then, seems to be somewhere in the middle. A show so desperate to exist that it needs to take place in a laundry room, stands a fair chance of being good. A major concert with hundreds of staffers and million-dollar sounds, will probably be OK. It is almost a certainty that "some band" playing the Cakeshop, however, will suck hard. 

Here I hope the opera comparison is useful. No one goes to hear a Mozart opera and walks away without having heard some astonishing and catchy tunes. And yet it is common in the extreme that your friends' band will play a show where, granted, the instrumentation may be fine, you may "like" the music for what that is worth, but the "take away" is nothing. A week later, you have forgotten who played completely. Only the ubiquitousness and incessant hyping of bar and club shows could produce their current dominance. No opera could be staged without a good chance of success, without elaborate composition that would ensure periodic engagement. No such "screening process" is necessary for a band to play their shitty set-list, however. 

I could go on, but you take my point. "Shows" are a waste of money. The music scene in (your town) is a cluster fuck. If only bands worth seeing played shows, there would be 1/30th the number of shows there are now. The question no artist seems to ask is, "Will anyone care that we wrote these songs, five months from now?" 

And to the reply that this is all an obvious point, I rejoin: is it? Then why is it that I am perpetually told that I "should come out" to X show; that it "will be fun," that Y band "is pretty good"? If I don't hear these phrases a single time this summer, then I will admit this point was obvious and unnecessary. Meanwhile, you will find me at home with my records or in line for rush orchestra seats.

Herzog at Film Forum

The past week, I have been going to Film Forum's series of Werner Herzog documentaries. On Tuesday, I saw his 1994 film The Transformation of the World into Music, about the annual Wagner festival in Bayreuth.

The most immediately interesting aspect of this film is that, where most documentaries (and Herzog's normal procedure) approach the subject as an outsider, even an ethnographer, throughout this film Herzog is simultaneously engaged in filming and in staging his own version of Wagner's Lohengrin.

This outside/inside binary is not interesting to me as an abstract dilemma faced by the instantiation of the camera--no, nothing like that. The absence of any outside is exactly pertinent to our discussion of taste. (Although, to be clever, I could point out the film's almost total lack of "exterior" shots; Bayreuth's rehearsal rooms are its whole world.) Because Wagner is such a polarizing artistic figure, often polarizing within a single person (see: Nietzsche), there is certainly a "cult" aspect to his work and following--a definite gap between the devotee and the puzzled outsider who does not see what all the fuss is about.

A recurrent motif in the film is that every single person involved in production, even down to the theater's fire sergeant, knows every word and melody of Wagner by heart. This allows for very short rehearsal times, but there are also intimations that this shared love is shielding Wagner from something: the ignorance of critics, anxieties about his music being co-opted by the Nazis (ie: whether this co-opting was somehow allowed or inherent in the music or in Wagner), and even the press of the cult upon the Bayreuth site as a destination for a pilgrimage.

[At one point, in staging Lohengrin, Herzog wants to play up the druidical cult-site that is the setting of the play, and surround the opera house with gigantic monoliths and have lasers shoot out of the building for hundreds of miles to other cult sites. I wonder how "knowing" this intention was, because the present direction of Bayreuth, under Wolfgang Wagner, is so opposed to such a "cult" and insists that everything must be INSIDE the opera house: that is where the staging takes place. But the cult scene has always-already infiltrated Wagner--the massive druidical stones are part of Lohengrin, and Bayreuth can never be "just" an opera house anyways.]

I am an outsider as regards Wagner. I don't get it. And this made the film all the more interesting, because I am such a card-carrying Proust aficionado---Proust, who is no stranger to Wagner! And the film is a kind of bizarro version of my embryonic fantasy of a world of Proust lovers, where every reference would land squarely, and scarcely another author would ever be mentioned. And in Herzog's film, you get this, and--here's the genius of it-- there is nothing creepy about it at all. Because it is about insiders shot from the inside, it is a film we might say, lacking distance, even as its subject is that very proximity. The total experience, therefore, is of having wandered into an alien world invisibly, and without crisis.

And so I would conclude that this is a film about the possibility of irony.