Could anything sound more poncy than the above title? Am I just peddling the cliche of art history as a posh person's leisure pursuit, sneeringly broadcasted last week by Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones upon the news of art history's decommissioning as an A-Level?
Opera, like art history, is quagmired in misconceptions. Anyone can enjoy it. Why not? Full-length performances are available for free on YouTube. BBC Radio 3 strongly advocates the art form. Supported by Arts Council funding, tickets for almost any performance in the UK can be bought at absolute rock-bottom prices. This summer I stood through four operas at the Proms, at £6 a go, including a magnificent five-hour performance of Rossini's Semiramide, conducted by Sir Mark Elder. The very same is performing Wagner's Das Rheingold in Manchester with the Halle Orchestra, with a £3 student deal for the best seats in the house. Any takers?
Opera is an essentially synthetic art form, combining music with the visual and dramatic arts. Its impact as a Gesamtkunstwerk or "total work of art" as Wagner conceived it (his own operas being the supreme realisation of the art form's potential, if you believe) has drawn legions of ardent opera-lovers among the intelligentsia - Stendhal, Nietzsche, Adorno and Kenneth Clark to name a few. Harnessed to music's irresistible Dionysiac force has been libretti of at best Shakespearean eloquence (though not very often) and a prominent visual component, namely the production.
Operatic productions form an art-historical goldmine whose surface musicologists can only scratch, not least in the twentieth century. Hockney's Die Zauberflote (or Schinkel's, or Chagall's), Dali's Salome, Jarman's Don Giovanni. Filmmakers have also dabbled, with roaring success: John Schlesinger (of Marathon Man fame), Franco Zeffirelli, Luchino Visconti, Patrice Chereau.
Sadly these prodigious forebears are of scant interest to today's generation of Eurotrash nitwits. The bicentennial production of Wagner's Ring at Bayreuth was greeted with a twenty-minute standing boo-vation for its stridently anti-Wagner rhetoric, where Rhine Maidens are prostitutes who hang around gas stations and love duets are accompanied by alligators copulating. Some might say such controversy is what keeps opera alive. Personally I'm staying at home.
My essential point is, give opera a chance. In fact, go the the library now and take out Rigoletto, or Il Barbiere di Siviglia, or Boris Godunov. Because operatic music is among the most exciting and delectable ever written. And what could be better after a full day's Marx, Foucault or Derrida?
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