Listen, have y’all heard about this opera thing? I mean honestly, where have they been keeping this stuff? It’s fantastic.
Like most kids who grew up in the ‘90s, I had a Bugs Bunny-Elmer Fudd idea of what opera is, and never really pursued the concept further on the assumption that I wouldn’t need to know it. Opera is a thing you have to try for - it doesn’t happen to you by accident, not if you’re a middle-class white kid in suburban Texas. I did have a stronger-than-average relationship with classical music generally, having grown up Catholic and with parents who listened regularly to the local NPR affiliate in the car. So I could name-drop Gershwin (from Fantasia 2000) and Schubert (from the soundtrack of Minority Report, because I was trying to impress a girl), but that was about it.
In my adult life, there have been occasional flashes of emotional connection to a piece - Holst’s Jupiter, Bringer of Joy, for example, has been a favorite since college. But the unique mix of factors that has been this pandemic year prompted my effort to make sense of it all. Living by yourself under quarantine gives you a lot of time alone with your thoughts, and I’ve found that following a complex piece of music can help me stay in the moment while I’m unloading the dishwasher, or cleaning out the shower drain, or whatever else we’re all doing these days. I think it’s also part of the “pandemic baking” phenomenon - when you’ve got a lot of time on your hands, might as well learn something new. (To that end, I highly recommend Dacia Clay’s Classical Classroom podcast, born in my very own hometown of Houston. It introduced me to Camille Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3, which has an organ in it and will make you want to punch stuff in a really good way.)
Still, opera remained the deep end to my kiddie pool - until. Until! Until some random neuron fired at 5:30am the other day, when I was flopping around in bed trying to convince myself to get up. For no particular reason that I can recall, I started Googling “Figaro,” wanting to confirm the half-remembered idea that his repetitions of his own name were part of a complaint about being in such high demand. I read a full plot summary of The Marriage of Figaro before realizing that what I actually wanted was The Barber of Seville, and there, I discovered that the famous “Figaro” aria is called “Largo al factotum” (a word that always reminds me of Miranda Cosgrove in School of Rock, and that I cannot seem to convince myself doesn’t mean “know-it-all”). And when I Googled that, I found… well… this:
I mean, y’all. Look at this. Look at the sheer weapons-grade charisma Mattei is wielding as Figaro. Look at the drunk gal fixing her boobs. Look at the horde of women pulling his enormous barber-cart. Look at the tooth extraction mid-song. Look at the live donkey. This is so extra. I’m obsessed with it.
Turns out, you can rent this production (it’s the 2007 staging of Il Barbiere di Siviglia and you should absolutely do it) from The Met Opera’s website for $5. I just finished watching it and I have no regrets. Seeing Peter Mattei swagger around the stage like a self-satisfied cat was everything that I had hoped for, but I found so many other moments of genuine delight - from a giant anvil crushing a pumpkin cart, to Juan Diego Flórez’ “Ah il più lieto, il più felice”; from catching two women in Figaro’s entourage making out, to Joyce DiDonato’s ferocious “Una voce poco fa”.
I loved watching this. I loved learning a bit about the form, and about the context of Figaro himself, who it turns out is something of a cultural symbol. I don’t think that opera will become part of my regular rotation, but now that it’s demystified a little it has definitely hooked me, and I’ll be watching more. I’m also already deep in the Peter Mattei rabbit hole, and am planning to set aside time tomorrow to listen to his Winterreise (there’s that Schubert again). I feel sorry for all my loved ones who Absolutely Do Not Care about any of this, but are going to have to listen to me talk about it for the next six months. I promise I’ll try to keep it contained.
So, I guess in short - opera: pretty rad. Who knew?