Why the Fat Lady Sings

I like all kinds of music: bebop, gamelan, Tropicalia, minimalism, honky-tonk, to name but a few, but as with a lot of people, opera has always eluded me. There’s just a language to opera, a set of signs and signals, that I’ve never been trained to decipher. Rock music has its own signs and signals too, which we tend to take for granted – would a classical fan know what it “means” when the singer puts his foot up on the monitor? So it was with some reluctance, even mild dread, that I accompanied my dad the other day to a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Based on the 19th-century novel in verse by Pushkin, the libretto is a bit elliptical: the teenaged Tatiana, of a rural bourgeois family, falls for 19-year-old visitor Onegin and impulsively sends him a passionate love letter. But he blows her off, explaining that he’s not into commitment. (Typical guy, right?) A few months later, Onegin flirts with his pal Lenski’s girl and so Lenski challenges him to a duel. Onegin shoots him dead. Years later, Onegin is at a stuffy dinner-dance with a bunch of rich people. Tatiana is there; he falls madly in love her on the spot. Unfortunately, she’s now married to an aristocratic general. She blows off Onegin. He’s devastated. Curtain.

I began to key into the personal, emotional aspects of the story. Who hasn’t turned down a romantic advance, only to regret it later? Who hasn’t gotten into a terrible, destructive fight with a friend and regretted that too? So I was all set up for Lenski’s aria as he waits for Onegin to show up for the duel. I don’t know jack about opera, but I somehow realized the guy who sang that aria, Ramón Vargas, was tearing it up — and sure enough he got a huge ovation. Wow, I was getting it! Earlier, Tatiana’s aria while she writes her brash love-letter to Onegin veers between girlish giddiness and wrenching uncertainty, but either way her passion ratchets up with each line, and soprano Renee Fleming conveyed it vividly – she was actually pretty sexy too! Like Vargas, Fleming got a big round of applause. Somehow, I had made some great strides toward appreciating opera. And somewhere, deep below the surface of the earth, Hell must have been freezing over.

I think maybe the keys to “getting” opera are: a) above all, you have to see it live, if only because you paid all this money to see it, so you have to pay attention, but also because seeing people actually make those opera singer sounds with their voice is kind of mind-blowing; b) you have to familiarize yourself with the libretto beforehand and then pay attention to the translation so you can follow the story; and c) relate the story to things that have happened in your own life. Opera is definitely over the top. Sure, that appeals to the rocker in me, but seeing people express themselves in over-the-top ways has an inherent appeal: everything seems more intense when it’s happening in your own life. So ask not for whom the fat lady sings. She sings for you.