vissi d'arte
in defence of the opera, plus slow art and cultural value today
A few months ago I watched Marina Abramović talk about her multimedia opera project, Seven Deaths of Maria Callas. Blending film, music, and performance, Seven Deaths is a love-song to Greek soprano Maria Callas, whose heartbreak and tragically early death is dramatised through her most famous arias, from Bellini’s Norma’s Casta Diva to Vissi d’Arte from Puccini’s Tosca. I had mixed feelings about Seven Deaths, which I won’t get into here, but Abramović’s account of the beginnings of her love affair with opera resonated. She was fourteen and in her grandmother’s kitchen when she first heard Callas’s voice on the radio. ‘I remember standing up in the middle of the kitchen and starting to cry. It was immediately emotional. And I have no idea why.’1
Like Abramović I came to opera early, thanks to my dad, who took me to a matinée showing of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte when I was ten or eleven. I mean, nothing screams daddy-daughter day out for a preteen like Rosicrucian hermeticism, bird-related innuendo, and a hefty dose of eighteenth-century gender roles. Not that I picked up on any of that. As far as I was concerned, The Magic Flute was Harry Potter on steroids, with added singing. But something about it stuck. Whether it was the vengeful Queen of the Night, her smooth soprano punctuated by staccato notes like the white-hot stars in her cloak, or the candle-lit, catacomb-like forest set which seemed to stretch far further back than the stage should allow, I found myself ensnared.2 I think my love of the arts stems from that moment of total immersion as Mozart’s drama swallowed me whole.
Opera gets a pretty poor rep. With its origins in the Baroque, it has always been synonymous with the leisure of an exclusive elite. Opera developed in the court and patronage systems of the early seventeenth century, as the polarisation of wealth in the hands of an elite few, coupled with a triumphalist resurgent Catholic Church and ambitious secular states looking to consolidate their authority encouraged the development of an assertive, dynamic, and dramatic style in the arts. In this world, opera came to stand for the ostentatious grandeur of kings, popes, courtiers, and wealthy families, the musical counterpart to the new architecture springing up across Europe, complete with ostentatious decoration and trompe l’oeil painting. Opera continued to evolve and flourished well into the twentieth century, though not always in perfect harmony with the establishment — complaints about the London premiere of Strauss’s Salome, based on the controversial Oscar Wilde play, reached Parliament, whilst Stalin’s shocked reaction to Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk grounded the opera for thirty years.3
Whilst other art forms from theatre to painting might immediately evoke modern spaces — a black box stage or white-washed gallery — opera is explicitly marked by its history. On the whole, opera houses remain ostentatious and grand, often explicitly tied to the state, even if only nominally (think the Royal Opera House or Vienna State Opera). They are daunting spaces to enter, from the velvet curtains and plush boxes to the terminology used in programmes and the fraught question of dress code. It is hard to untether the art from its setting. That setting is as much a theatre for the crowd to perform in as it is for the singers and orchestra themselves. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the opera house was a space for the social elite to ‘see and be seen’; when French architect Charles Garnier won the 1860 competition to design a new Parisian opera house, he consciously added features which would emphasise this spectacle of wealth and display of power, such as grand staircases and balconies from which to observe the monied milieu.4 Nowadays, overdressed influencers pose in silk slips with glasses of champagne, using interval curtains as the backdrop for carefully-planned photoshoots.
The opera is still a place to ‘see and be seen’, but the immersive, experiential immediacy of a night at the opera also sets it apart from much of our modern engagement with art. So often, art is filtered through a screen, or our attention is divided between it and a competing screen. It’s not uncommon to watch visitors to museums or art galleries wandering around with headphones in, or taking photos and sending texts. Think of the hoards which throng around the Mona Lisa or Starry Night, studying the art through their phone cameras. Meanwhile, I can barely get through a whole movie without scrolling through Twitter or Instagram at the same time. Our first encounters with art, music, and theatre are often intermediated by technology, we discover new works through short clips or posts on social media, and rarely take the time to slow down and engage mindfully with them. We may not even feel the need to attend an exhibition or a show, once we’ve read the review. An online presence can broaden access to the arts, but it can also limit our full engagement with and enjoyment of them. At the opera, seated with your phone switched off, surrounded by music and drawn into the visual aesthetics and heightened emotional drama onstage, it is impossible not to drift away from the modern world for a time.
Numerous studies have shown that millennial consumers prefer to spend their money on experiences over products or investments, whilst a year of lockdown led to a new emphasis on the importance of public spaces and communal events for mental health and wellbeing.5 This desire to slow down, connect with others, and really sit with an experience can also be seen as a reaction against the frenetic pace of modern life and the loss of third spaces in our atomised urban and increasingly online world. Opera urges the intensive, multi-sensory engagement championed by Slow Art. Slow Art, coined in 2017 by Professor Arden Reed, refers not to a particular artistic movement but a ‘style of looking, one that involves heightened attention to the experience of time unfolding’ against the hectic pace of modern life.6 Often deployed in contemporary gallery spaces to encourage ‘attention-deficit museum-goers’ to engage mindfully with artworks, the concept of Slow Art encompasses multiple practices from painting to performance. This way of looking emphasises the ‘necessity of devoted attentiveness’ to encourage a ‘dynamic, intimate experience’ between observer and artwork.7 For Reed, both the need for and the practice of Slow Art are products of modernity, filling the ‘social spaces evacuated by religious gazing’ as communal worship declined. In this context, we can see the opera house as a kind of secular church, which uses music, words, and visual effect to appeal to universal human themes and values, creating a transcendental, connective experience akin to worship or meditation. Art as opposed to entertainment, as opposed to content, as opposed to the mindless white noise of the modern world. Experiencing not just consuming.
Opera is the ultimate slow art. What other art form can make a death last an act, or in Abramović’s case, an entire opera?8 The experience of opera is both a contemplative and active engagement with form, content, and emotional expression, an encounter which is both ‘dynamic’ and ‘intimate’. Plot, music, song, set, acting, poetry, and dance draw together to create a complete emotional world. Opera asks us to believe in these worlds on an emotional level even when their content is remote from us. We are forced to sit with the themes and emotions opera raises and reiterates, plunged into emotional dramas which are expressed in the most heightened way. Souls are bared in song. Even when the protagonists seem foreign and the plots far fetched, their expression in music connects on the human level across time and space. A frequent critique of opera is its inability to speak to modern audiences. But love, loss, pain, mortality — these are experiences we all know.
Repeating patterns in dialogue and musical leitmotifs charge opera with meaning, drawing the audience into the mental world and relationships of the characters, much as repetition in literature or art drives home particular themes. Such repetition sounds boring on paper but out loud and onstage it is emotionally and thematically compelling, as score and libretto work together to encompass the listener. Indeed, repetition in music has a unique effect on the human listener, stimulating our brain’s pleasure centres and ‘amplify[ing] our involvement in these musical experiences‘.9 In particular, the aria, a ‘set-piece song for a solo singer in which the character expresses an emotion or ideal that doesn’t necessarily drive the story forward’, involves complex and patterned repetition. Intended as a stylised expression of inner thoughts and feelings, a bit like a theatrical monologue, the aria is often the most memorable moment of an opera.10 Though the aria form emerged for a variety of reasons, from eighteenth-century ceremonial to breaks for ice-cream sellers to peddle their wares, today it feels anachronistic, akin to a serialised novel or epic poem. A lengthy, emotionally-driven break from plot and action, the aria is far from the bite-sized content and sporadic connections of the modern world.
In an age when we’re so used to the digitisation and distortion of the human voice, the live, un-mic’d voice of the opera singer is a revelation of emotional immediacy and human will. You know those sped-up remixes that go viral on TikTok, with breathless vocals, an unsettling pace, and all the musicality of tinnitus? Opera is the polar opposite. It is an intimately human art in raw form. Where the internet presents a thousand competing discourses, clamouring over each other at hyper-speed and in bite-sized, digestible snippets saturated with images, opera returns first and foremost to the human voice, and the breath which drives it, which also drives life itself. It is impossible not to be awed by the experience of live opera; the skill of the singers to fill an auditorium with sound and still express the most subtle of emotions in song. I’m often surprised to feel my body responding to the music — mascara-stained tears running down my face at the final scene of La Boheme or a inner shudder when Strauss’s Elektra vows to sacrifice her mother or (spoilers!) Tosca kills the rapist Scarpia. It is unsurprising that these moments of musical catharsis draw us closer to the onstage world, given that music activates the cognitive system which controls our emotions and helps us form strong autobiographical memories.11
Opera’s power is the power of the human voice, the rawest expression of authenticity and the first outlet for intense experience. The voice in song has creative power, to generate lives, even worlds, and to destroy them. ‘In the beginning was the Word’, says the Christian gospel, whilst the followers of the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras saw music as a kind of spiritual medicine to cleanse the soul. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion it is music, a music outside time and space, which brings the universe into existence. ‘I gave my song to the stars, to heaven’, sings Tosca in Vissi d’Arte, ‘How should I not hear the music?’ cries Elektra, moments before her death in mania, ‘It comes from me.’ In opera song is the soul made manifest.
Opera is often seen as established and ahistorical, an out of date reflection of a bygone age. But that doesn’t have to be the case. Just as the visual arts can be reappraised and drawn into dialogue with our modern world, so too can opera. Opera can be challenging and difficult (did I mention Mozart’s Rosicrucianism?!) but that doesn’t mean we should disregard it as an object of disinterest for today’s audiences. To assume that younger, more diverse audiences will not draw value or enjoyment from opera is to talk down to them, to engage in the same snobbery which excluded those audiences in the first place. Think of Labour Deputy Angela Rayner, sneered at by both Right and Left and labelled a ‘champagne socialist’ for attending the summer opera festival Glyndebourne in 2022. Coincidentally, Rayner had been to see The Marriage of Figaro, which she subsequently described as ‘the story of a working-class woman who gets the better of a privileged but dim-witted villain’.12 Rather than a marker of international pride for the UK, opera, along with the rest of our vibrant cultural sector, has become a weapon in the ‘culture wars’. As opera director John Berry remarked, this state-sponsored hostility to culture and unwillingness to champion arts accessibility is uniquely British: ‘Politicians in Europe want to be seen at cultural events…When European colleagues observe the conversations in the UK about elitism in the arts, they are shocked.’13
The English National Opera, formerly headed by Berry and which staged Seven Deaths last Autumn, has been at the centre of a year long battle for existence which culminated last week when the organisation handed out redundancies to singers and musicians halfway through a performance of The Handmaid’s Tale. Many members of the chorus and orchestra saw their formal redundancy notices during the interval, and returned to finish the performance.14 This came shortly after the end of a strike by performers, triggered by a dispute over proposed redundancies, and the year after the organisation lost its Arts Council grant and was ordered to move outside of London.15
For the Right opera is a sign of pointless leisure and an unproductive drain on funds increasingly infiltrated by liberal values, for the Left it is a sign of elitist snobbery and grandeur. To continue reiterating this comfortable myth that opera is outdated and irrelevant disregards and conceals the vital work opera houses and companies are doing with accessibility initiatives, outreach, and young people’s programming. The Royal Opera House runs a £30 tickets programme, which enables under-30s to book any seat in the house, including those which usually sell for £300. Last time my partner and I bought these tickets, we found ourselves sat behind another couple in their mid-twenties, who were regular attendees who’d discovered a love for opera through the programme. It isn’t just the ROH — I’m heading to Vienna in March, and am hoping to buy €20 tickets to the State Opera on their under-27s programme. Arts Council England may claim that moving the ENO outside of London is a progressive initiative to boost accessibility, but what about the work the organisation has done to increase access and enthusiasm in London, including Seven Deaths, explicitly geared towards a new, younger audience? What about investing in local, home-grown companies and institutions, such as Opera North? What about new grants, more funding, extra infrastructure, rather than less? As Melvyn Bragg put it in an op-ed for the Guardian, 'the Arts Council’s plan to force out the English National Opera reveals that the funding cake is simply too small, not that the capital is greedy’.16 More culture — like more cake — can never truly be a bad thing. All it means is everybody gets an extra slice, rather than scrabbling for the crumbs.
Rejecting opera (and ballet and classical music, both also under attack from cuts) contributes to the cheapening of cultural life in favour of an atomised, digitised world where art is treated as little more than content and all content is labelled as art. For those who love opera, as well as the thousands of musicians, singers, actors, artists, and backstage support who work in the opera and ballet world, the ENO redundancies are the latest blow in a battle for existence where arts organisations must survive in the face of a hostile government culture, limited funding, and now new censorship of ‘political statements’ by Arts Council England.17 ACE’s call for the ENO to relocate may have been in the name of arts accessibility, but it’s hard to believe that it, and the government, really care — these are, after all, the people who gave us ‘Fatima’s next job could be in cyber (she just doesn’t know it yet)’.
Opera fulfils Susan Sontag’s call for an ‘erotics of art’. It is first and foremost experienced on the sensual level, as a wash of sound loaded with emotional content, an audio-visual feast, which triggers a deep response in the listener. A Slow Art. And beyond the immediate sensations, it can be relevant, and political, and intellectual. But why should the arts have to fight for existence, defend their value in the language of grants and committees? If it is to engage new audiences, the arts must be allowed time, space, and money, given the opportunity for imaginative and radical initiatives to flourish. Without this, chance encounters with opera such as mine, or Marina Abramović’s, or Angela Rayner’s, can never happen.
‘Vissi d’arte’ sings Tosca, an opera singer playing an opera singer, towards the end of Puccini’s opera, as she calls on God not to abandon her in the face of torture and assault. ‘I lived for art’.
I lived for my art, I lived for love,
I never did harm to a living soul!
With a secret hand
I relieved as many misfortunes as I knew of.
Always with true faith
my prayer
rose to the holy shrines.
Always with true faith
I gave flowers to the altar.
In the hour of grief
why, why, o Lord,
why do you reward me thus?
If you’ve never heard it, listen to a recording of the aria, preferably Callas’s. As opera’s own fate hangs in the balance, it is impossible not to feel the music embed itself in your chest, like a knife between your ribs, or a ball of tears, somewhere near where your heart might be.
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https://www.wallpaper.com/art/marina-abramovic-seven-deaths-london
I spent over a decade thinking about that production, though when I saw it restaged at the Royal Opera House in 2022, I found it stripped of its magic and in need of updating. Unless you really care about Christian mysticism and male brotherhood, or are a ten year old escapist, I wouldn’t chose The Magic Flute as your first opera.
https://www.eno.org/discover-opera/operas-that-shook-society/
https://bonjourparis.com/history/opera-garnier-sign-its-time/
https://www.eventbrite.com/blog/academy/millennials-fueling-experience-economy/?trk=article-ssr-frontend-pulse_little-text-block; https://www.vicemediagroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/VMG_MAKE-CONTACT_EXPERIENTIAL-WHITE-PAPER_2021.pdf
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/is-slow-art-the-next-big-art-movement-1061195
https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-46-summer-2019/slow-art-take-time-jonathan-p-watts
There’s even debate as to who has the longest death! This is a fun thread for nerds. https://www.talkclassical.com/threads/longest-death.13788/
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/apr/29/why-we-love-repetition-in-music-tom-service
https://theopera101.com/operaabc/arias/
Jäncke, L. (2008). Music, memory and emotion. Journal Of Biology, 7(6), 21. doi: 10.1186/jbiol82.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/jul/02/opera-director-john-berry-condemns-raab-sneers-at-angela-rayner-visit-to-glyndebourne
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/jul/02/opera-director-john-berry-condemns-raab-sneers-at-angela-rayner-visit-to-glyndebourne
https://slippedisc.com/2024/02/exclusive-eno-starts-firing-musicians/
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/feb/15/english-national-opera-musicians-call-off-strike-action
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/13/levelling-up-is-worthy-aim-but-stealing-arts-cash-from-london-is-cultural-vandalism
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/feb/15/arts-council-england-to-update-activist-statements-guidance-after-backlash
Fantastic piece, Helena.
Love it. As a middle-aged person who has seen opera, ballet, and orchestral music recede from public attention where I live, not to mention get cut off from the public purse, I say fight the good fight!