I Love Opera! «First note»

I do love Opera!

This seems a strange thing in these days and time. How many Opera lovers can you find in the several billions people who inhabit this, our hapless planet?

Our seal, I mean human beings in general, our seal seems to be the confused, mixed, blatant noises and the confused, mixed, blatant actions in growing speed: if you breath, you lose, if you blink, you are left behind, we must go, Go, GO! never mind grasping what is going on around us, no time for that! We must reach the future before it reaches us and becomes long past and use it just as a propeller for the next step into future.

When time overtakes us and we find we are not fit anymore for the athletic feats that filled all the time of our life we find our hands empty, maybe some of us reached the shores of the American Dream, but, and this is arguable, the only thing they have is wealth, poor and stupid wealth with no significance when the line of end is near.

Now, if you could stop and think a bit, lose a small part of the immense wealth you are pursuing since you learned to read the words “one dollar”, then there is hope to fulfill a rich experience in life…

Opera is not a popular music genre. It cannot be. Society as a gregarious group presents a difficult way of living, the bigger the group the greater the competition. This situation demands so much of an individual that any other requirement is to ask too much.

The need of music and lyrics that help people find a way to raise their thresholds on suffering and let them be lost in any kind of ecstasy, in rapturous delight; that separate them from the hard reality, IS a strong need, but that music must be undemanding, able to dull feelings into a kind of stupor that conceal the piercing pain of actuality.

Opera is just the opposite, it tells melodramatic stories, with tortured characters full of pathos and pain, the “real” reality, (except in what is known as “opera buffa“, that is, comic opera which are just a little part of the whole) but the music is the redeemer. When you accept the hurting feelings from those acting, the drama as normal since so is life too, and let music seeps into the tissue of your soul, then OPERA is the only way to set you free, to stir, to shake you into a magic world of bliss and joy without creating a fantasy world for a while nor dampening your human feelings.

Maybe this introduction makes you recoil from Opera or maybe it opens a small crevice of curiosity.

(to be continued)


You are listening to beautiful Dame Joan Sutherland performing a deliciously distressed Elena singing "Mercé diletti amiche" from Verdi's "I Vespri Siciliani", just let the butterflies of her voice caress your soul...



© 2009 Od Liam.