Night at the opera with Mr. Levine

SALISBURY — In the Marx Brothers movie “A Night at the Opera,” Groucho Marx (as Otis B. Driftwood) chastises a hansom cab driver who is driving him around, killing time while the opera is on.“Hey, you. I told you to slow that nag down. On account of you I almost heard the opera.”Robert Levine, author of “Weep Shudder and Die: A Guide to Loving Opera,” said, in a talk he gave at the Scoville Memorial Library on Sunday, March 25, that by the 1930s (when the film was made), opera had become a rarified institution, expensive to attend and largely supplanted by the cinema as a popular form.But opera began as a hugely popular entertainment, Levine said. In Venice, around 1740, “there were something like 35 opera houses — in a city of some 50,000 people.”He attributes opera’s endurance to its appeal to the emotions. “It’s grand, extravagant, larger than life.”Levine described his talk as “missionary work,” and the gist was to demystify the form. He challenged the notion that opera is so difficult that an ordinary audience can’t handle it. “Opera is another form of entertainment.”In 1594 “Dafne,” by Jacobo Peri, was the first production that could be called “opera.” It was, simply, “a play in which everybody sings.”In 1607 Monteverdi came up with “L’Orfeo,” based on the Greek myth of Orpheus, who descended into Hades to rescue his wife, Eurydice, and bring her back to the world. (It didn’t work out very well.)The subject matter is, perhaps, a little arcane to modern sensibilities, Levine conceded cheerfully. “It’s not the kind of thing the kids are talking about.”“Smart Italian musicians and poets wanted to get back to the Greek chorus, with musical instruments,” said Levine. “Of course they were wrong,” as the chorus in classical Greek drama was not a chorus in the modern sense, but rather a group that commented on the action of the play.The error can be forgiven, Levine said, because the Italians “invented something very special.”And very popular. By the end of the 17th century an adaptation of the Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts — as a comic opera — had been performed over a thousand times.“I saw it recently,” said Levine. “It was bizarre. It was a riot. It turned seriousness on its head.”By 1715, Vivaldi was writing operas for specific singers, and at Venice’s numerous opera houses, if one show bombed, there was always another one waiting to be produced.Opera caught on in England — notably in the works of Handel. Levine described the situation: “Operas in Italian, for the English, by a German.”So if opera was so popular, what changed?By the end of the 19th century opera was popular and affordable, but a century later, attending the opera was as much a social event for the wealthy as a musical experience.In New York, by 1900, “everybody went to the Met. The upper levels were for the German and Italian immigrants.” There was even a separate entrance, so the toffs didn’t have to mingle with the hoi polloi.But Enrico Caruso was the biggest star, and he was a hero to the Italian immigrants.He was also a star in the modern tabloid sense. In 1918 Caruso was arrested for molesting a woman (specifically, pinching her fundament) in the Central Park Zoo. To add spice to the story, the incident occurred in the Monkey House.“That’s not an image you want to live with,” said Levine.The trial received enormous publicity. Caruso “was the Kardashians, the ‘Jersey Shore,’” of his day.Caruso also made the phonograph popular, and vice versa. “Other singers were suspicious” of the new technology, Levine said. Singers, who had never heard themselves, experienced a phenomenon not unlike the reaction of people when they first hear their voice on a telephone answering machine — i.e., “Who’s that?”But Caruso’s voice was “phonogenic,” Levine said. The singer sold an astonishing 7 million copies of his recordings. “Those are Michael Jacksonian numbers,” Levine said.Caruso also made silent movies, Levine said, pausing a moment to let the oxymoron sink in.It was the cinema that ultimately replaced opera as the dominant form of inexpensive entertainment. “There were a lot more movie theaters than opera houses,” said Levine.“Now it is coming full circle, with opera moving into movie theaters, with subtitles and closeups.”Levine conceded that opera, on the face of it, could seem out of reach. “Fat women dying of consumption and singing all the time?”But “why is that any odder than musical comedy? People are having a perfectly good conversation and suddenly they’re singing.”“Even when the plots are stupid, the emotions are highlighted.” An opera might be about a deposed Czar of Russia, or a Japanese geisha, but the emotions of a longing for power or loss of a loved one are universal.Why watch the same opera over and over? Levine said that different voices and different productions approach the same material very differently. By way of example, he showed two scenes from “La Traviata” — one a traditional production from Covent Garden, and a more modern interpretation from the Met.The party scene in the former is sumptuous, with lots of furniture on stage and the cast in ornate period costumes.The same scene in the contemporary version takes place in a stark setting, and the partygoers, exclusively male, are all in dark suits, white shirts and dark ties. The only color is in the lone piece of stage furniture, a red couch, and in the heroine’s red dress.“All the emotions are on the table here,” Levine said. “There is no undercurrent of anything.”“I’ve seen a production set in an AIDS ward. It was appalling, but you could see where they were coming from.”Levine also talked about “The Cult of the Voice” — listening to singers who can produce unique sounds. He used as an example a television clip of Joan Sutherland — “from the ‘Bell Telephone Hour’” — singing the aria that closes Act I of “La Traviata.”Sutherland’s trilling “suggests she is almost giving in” to the entreaties of her desperate lover. (To the novice, it also suggested birds.)As the clip ended, Levine said “You can’t say she didn’t end on a high note.”Opera “can be interpreted or reinterpreted, as the composer intended or through the cult of the voice,” said Levine.“Weep, Shudder and Die” (from a remark by Bellini) looks at 50 different operas and lists moments to listen for. “With less flippancy than I am using this afternoon,” Levine said.He suggested that the newcomer to opera “put it on at home and little things will pop out.”And perhaps the listener will experience another Marxian moment: “And now, on with the opera. Let joy be unconfined. Let there be dancing in the streets, drinking in the saloons and necking in the parlor.”Or, in other words, the universal emotions that make opera accessible to all.