"I don't want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it's like, 'Hey, keep this thing alive, even though, like no one cares about this anymore.'," Chalamet said... "All respect to all the ballet and opera people out there."
This young actor just let us all know that although he works as an actor, in a craft that's been around, in western tradition, since before the Greeks, he doesn't have much sense of history. He doesn't have respect for opera or ballet, either, despite his quickly tacked on semi-retraction.
What he said saddened me, as I grew up enjoying both art forms and with a healthy respect and regard for these somewhat hoary artistic expressions. I confess that I have cried buckets of tears over both, exactly like any devotee of afternoon soaps or B movies. I have DVDs of opera and ballets and have sat before them, blissed out, for hours. I take offense exactly because I am a fan, but also because I know about the years of training, discipline, and self-sacrifice that goes into the making of these stellar singers and dancers, who bravely shoulder the work required by these jewels of western tradition.
Ballet and opera grew out of entertainments which once thrilled rich and poor alike. This is particularly true in the case of opera. When people in the street whistled and sang Mozart's tunes, the Maestro noted in his letters that he knew he had a hit. Without copyright laws, sadly, he never got the royalties, of which modern pop singers are assured.
Of course, what Chalamet said is a fairly typical young person's take on two artistic traditions which have been around a good deal longer than he has. Still, I must acknowledge that I have been unable to convince any number of descendants and/or friends to become fans. My opera friends are all old, like me; it's sad but true.
I just went to a movie theater and watched the Metropolitan Opera's Tristan and Isolde, with fabulous singers. I've heard the "greatest hits" from the opera since I was child, but I have never before experienced the five hours it takes. When I was a kid, Wagner was exciting, loud, colorful, a gigantic heart-thumping, aural fireworks display. The Ring saga--yes, the same Northern myth that inspired Tolkien--The Ring saga was all that, better than Marvel comics, complete with a world-cleansing apocalypse at the end.
When I became an adult, musically I turned back, before Beethoven, toward the Baroque, toward Bach, Mozart, Telemann and Vivaldi, and from there into polyphonic church and folk music. Wagner became a rather over-the-top self-promoter with fascistic (more-than) tendencies. His personal life, his opinions, his music, seemed pompous, exhaustingly patriarchal. Then, nearly extinct being that I now am, I sat through those five hours of Tristan & Isolde, along with white-haired others of my kind.
I can't say I went full circle. I was, however, bowled over by the totality of the work, despite the fact that the opera is a downer, ending in a round-robin of death. Tristan and Isolde begin as haters, because he's killed her husband to be and then fooled her into saving his life. Isolde asks her servant to give them both a draught of poison, so that she drink with Tristan and fool him into killing himself. Bonus! She will end her personal grief by dying. Instead, the faithful servant, assigned a heart-breaking task, gives them both a love potion, and they fall into a blazing passion. This briefly changes the flow of events, but ends by destroying them and everyone around them, exactly as in Isolde's savage, original intention.
This tale is one of human dysfunction in the extreme, but don't pretend it couldn't happen. Just look at the self-destructive madness in the world around you! The lyrics, drenched in Nietzchean philosophy and Wagner's sex addiction, are sauced over with sweeping music--self-referential, yet endlessly evolving and swelling. It's voluptuous, ecstatic, and it left me in a fog of reflection and emotion for days. Yes, opera may be dying, but with my fuses well and truly blown by attending this one, I am still going to call it ART.
~~Juliet Waldron
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