Children and opera

Is opera still alive? It's like she's alive. There are many opera houses, old operas are staged, even new ones are composed. However, let’s take a “cynically impartial” look at the current life of opera. Imagine an adult attending an opera production for the first time (including in a cinema). For example, something super famous, Carmen, La Traviata or The Queen of Spades. Try to look at what is happening on stage or on screen impartially, just as Tolstoy described it, through the eyes of a normal adult. Take a break from the music and focus on the libretto. Carry out a simple experiment, take a book like “100 Opera Librettos”, or even more clearly the full text of the opera libretto, with all the dialogues, with all the stilts, nonsense, “gods ex machina” and so on. According to Stephen Fry's definition of Mockingbird, the plots of operas "should be: (a) practically incomprehensible to those who have not read the program, and (b) stupid beyond belief."[1]

And don't throw eggs and tomatoes at me. I’m just a fan of opera, but in order for me to become one, it took a long cultivation, the source of which was laid in my childhood, in three records of “Carmen” in Russian given to my mother for her birthday. I was then 13 years old, I lived in Nizhny Tagil, this was the first opera in my life that I heard in its entirety (and six years before that there was a completely naive operetta by Kacho Pongratz “Vityaz Janos”, which I listened to with pleasure and many times). The child does not hear exaggerations and banalities, does not hear bad taste (which often penetrates even the greatest works as a favor to the insider viewer). For him, a musical stage performance is something like a soap series, with passions, love and even death. Yes, I think that opera in its time performed the function that “cinema” performs today. But the consumer is different today.

After the opening of the first public opera house in Venice in 1737, San Cassiano, over 40 years nine Venetian theaters premiered more than 150 operas written by two dozen composers and four dozen librettists.[2] The population of Venice was then, however, obviously smaller than today, when only one famous opera house, La Fenice, operates in Venice. In those days, public opera could only exist if it was profitable, and not like today, when opera houses are unprofitable and are supported by the state.

Much has changed since then. The musical language has changed. The attitude towards this genre has changed - from democratic it has become elitist. In fact, the role of opera as a democratic musical stage performance was taken over by the musical. Modern production of classical opera is trying to get away from the fatal connection between opera and the museum through modernization, moving the action to a time closer to the viewer, introducing modern allusions to the scenography, and simply showing anything on stage in order to draw the attention of theater critics to the director, today the true owner of the opera performance. Usually this is something erotically shocking, like a homosexual relationship between Don Giovanni and Leporello, Mephistopheles masturbating, Herman copulating with the Countess in order to find out the secret of the three cards. These are not my fantasies. These are the performances I have seen. Yes, I think the reader himself will remember no less stories in the same spirit. In a production of “Wozzeck” in one of the Western opera houses, the director needed to arrange a gynecological examination of a naked young deceased woman on stage. The Mimamsa actresses refused to participate. Moreover, all the legal priestesses of love, whom the theater management approached, also refused, although 100 euros in cash were paid for one “removal of the body.” Then the leading actress, as a true priestess of art, put her minor daughter at her disposal. I saw all this at the premiere. I admit, I couldn’t resist and instead of looking at the stage, I turned around and looked into the audience at that moment. Spying on spying turned out to be much more exciting. To top it all off, in the finale, for unknown reasons (for me, at least), two or three dozen completely naked men and women of different ages and sizes came out to the ramp. This mimance was recruited from city déclassés, also at 100 euros per appearance.

Considering the situation described (and after the children were introduced to this or that opera in a lesson at our school), I soon stopped encouraging parents to attend opera performances with their children. Now I go to the theater myself first to make sure that the performance is at least suitable for a family visit. It must be said that there is no censorship in Western opera houses for spectators “under 16 years of age” to attend performances. And that's right. Parents, not ushers, should be involved in raising children. Therefore, non-attendance to a particular performance is possible only on the recommendation of those who have seen it. There is another consideration that may influence such a recommendation. If a child comes to watch “Eugene Onegin”, having previously heard a lot from the teacher about the Russian noble life of the 19th century, and on the stage there is a constructivist interior with some dark brown verticals and horizontals that are interesting for a gourmet, men and women in jeans, in a choir of peasants with balalaikas, apparently black descendants of Pushkin are dancing, then, I’m afraid, the measure of this convention It may be too tough for the child.

What is classical opera? This is a story about simple and clear feelings, about love and devotion, about nobility and betrayal. This is a naive, but competently constructed fascinating spectacle by experienced playwrights. A modern child has seen a lot of things. He is much better prepared to perceive “adult passions” than his peer a hundred years ago. Telling the plots of classical operas to children aged 8-9, I was always amazed at their mature understanding, for example, of the same love triangles, as in “Aida”, understanding of the behavior of cold-blooded seducers, as in “Don Giovanni” and “Rigoletto”, understanding of murder out of jealousy, as in “Carmen”, understanding of the destructive passion for enrichment, as in “The Queen of Spades”, understanding even of the problem of misalliance, as in "La Traviata". Of course, all this is called in different words, the direct sexual implications of the events are removed from the retelling, but the essence remains.

Properly trained children love opera. Over three decades of teaching, I am completely convinced of this. Moreover, opera, in my opinion, namely classical opera, is a completely children’s genre. After all, the modern adult visitor to the opera house does not go there for the plot. At best, for the music, performers, interesting and convincing stage design, at worst, for the piquancy in the production. Once upon a time this was not the case. Of course, the kings of opera have always been the vocalists. It is a fact, however, that the author of the opera back in the 17th and partly in the 18th century was a librettist, not a composer. Those. audiences perceived the opera primarily as a dramatic work. Today only a very naive viewer can perceive opera this way. It's easier to say, a child.

There is nothing surprising in this apparent paradox. Yes, visiting the opera house is a kind of significant event. This place is elite. It's customary to dress up there. For evening performances, for example, in Hanover, ladies come in appropriate toilets. The annual Opera Ball is a prestigious event that sells out well in advance and is not cheap. And yet, I repeat, opera is a children's genre. This is an ideal high genre for a modern child who has television experience, experience of movie fairy tales, all kinds of “Pirates” and the like. A modern child is accustomed to the fact that in TV series there is a lot of passion going on, and in movies there is quite complex music. I would say that the music of classical opera is in some ways easier for children to understand than the music for The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. Opera is an excellent enticement into high culture.

Four years before Mozart's death, the premiere of Salieri's opera Tarar took place. The excitement in the public was such that four hundred soldiers stood around the Paris Opera House to prevent a stampede. Mozart, in Pushkin’s little tragedy, addressing Salieri, speaks of Tarara like an advertising agent:

Yes! Beaumarchais was your friend;
You composed Tarara for him,
A glorious thing. There is one motive...
I keep repeating it when I'm happy...

Those. the glory of “Tarara” reached Russia. 200 years after the premiere, an attempt was made to return “Tarara” to the stage, but nothing good came of it. The public of the late 20th century showed no interest in Salieri's work. What happened during these 200 years to the once extremely successful “blockbuster”, which remained one of the most attended performances in Paris almost until the mid-19th century? The very paradigm of opera performance has changed. The public's interest shifted from the plot to the execution, to the singers and directors. A modern researcher attributes this failure specifically to the production.[3] It is significant that Tarar remained a box office performance in the 18th and 19th centuries. regardless of the quality of the productions. Thus, what was important for the success of an opera performance one and a half to two centuries ago has become unimportant today. And vice versa. In addition, this opera is, in principle, not popular among singers, and therefore “not well known.” Those. This is another side of the “posing problem”. Salieri's music, while truly expressive, dramatic and beautiful, does not, however, have a stellar vocal tradition, as, with the exception of Mozart's music, almost all operas of the 18th century do not have it.

So, the success of “Tarara” at one time was largely due to the libretto, the brilliant author of which, Beaumarchais, also wrote, as is known, the dramatic basis for “The Barber of Seville” and “The Marriage of Figaro”. It can be assumed that the plot of “Tarara,” which has completely lost its relevance, nevertheless has everything to remain, with appropriate adaptation, a children’s pathetic mystery. The screening in our school, after appropriate preparation of the children, of an abridged version of the film-opera “Tarar” (directed by Jean-Louis Martinoti) confirmed this assumption.

The very fact that adult art becomes childish over time is also not surprising. This is the normal fate of any adult democratic genre. Thus, Louis Boussenard, Fenimore Cooper, Wilkie Collins, Mine Reid, Jules Verne, and partly Mark Twain, Jack London, and Charles Dickens became children's writers in their time. Their so-called works for children were not written for such a purpose. It was quite adult literature. But as time passed, a new generation of readers turned out to be more sophisticated than the previous one. And adults began to prefer other literature, because they had already become acquainted with this one in childhood.

An opera house is an extremely expensive enterprise. With modern wages for singers and orchestra members, stage workers, set designers, conductors and directors, with the modern cost of the premises themselves and the land under them, etc. etc., an opera house, in principle, can only be unprofitable. Society invests taxpayers' money, of course, not in entertaining a thin layer of the elite public, but in preserving a colossal, priceless tradition, a heritage that threatens to disappear, like endangered species of animals and plants or like endangered languages.

But if this is so (and it is), then it would be natural to use part of these funds to attract children to the opera house. For special “children’s” productions in “adult” opera houses, namely, with the reproduction of signs of the era and life, “in historical costumes” (even if these costumes were conventional at the time of the very first performance). For adapted performances with cuts that make it easier for a child to perceive the opera. On productions of operas in the child’s native language (the culture of translated librettos, on which several generations of listeners grew up, was preserved only in “historical sound recordings”). So, at our school we show opera films, pre-prepared in such a way that the show does not take more than one and a half to two hours. The children can't stand it any longer.

Special children's musical theaters (like the Natalia Sats Theater in Moscow or the Zazerkalye Theater in St. Petersburg) do not save the situation. Firstly, there are negligible numbers of them. Secondly, for example, out of 30 performances in the repertoire of the same Sats Theater, only four performances are devoted to classical operas. In Through the Looking Glass, classical opera productions (except for The Magic Flute) are generally announced as performances “for adults” (I am based on the repertoire plans published on the Internet in February 2008). This is a normal situation for children's musical theater. He has other tasks. Such a theater should not primarily attract children to classical opera.

It seems that this ambitious task should be solved at the level of UNESCO recommendations, just as architectural monuments are taken under protection. Otherwise, opera houses will continue to turn into reserves of stage experiments, not so much to provide the public with an extravagant spectacle, but to provide the daily bread of those who create artistic reputations, theatrical-critical, I don’t want to say “mafia,” well, let it be for the brethren.

Literature:

[1] Fry, Stephen. An incomplete and definitive history of classical music. Moscow, Phantom Press, 2007, p. 268.

[2] Rosand, Ellen . Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre. University of California Press. Berkeley - Los Angeles - Oxford, 2007, p. 3.

[3] Braunbehrens, Volkmar. Salieri. Ein Musiker im Schatten Mozarts. München, Piper-Verlag, 1989.