Which of course it was

I forced myself to hear the last 20 minutes of Die Walkure last night, on the radio, from the Vienna Staatsoper. It was awful, even worse than the totally joyless Capriccio by Strauss last week. It consisted mostly of yelling at the top of one’s voice; it had no melody at all; what it did have was mostly crass and naïve, a kind of Customs Official Rousseau of music, but rather less talented; and very loud so as to drown out any small voice observing that it has nothing in it but volume. And it appeared to appeal to emotions which are totally alien to me.

Above all, it was serious.

But opera cannot be serious. One cannot take seriously fat people singing about transports of love, or flabby warriors stopping in the middle of battle to give a 7 minute aria. One can only take it unseriously, as a delicious joke. Mozart’s opera buffa, and his Gesangspiele are of course the ticket, but actually the entire preceding chapter of opera history, the opera seria, could not possibly have been either meant or taken seriously in its heyday. It wasn’t. The aristocrats turned up fashionably late, just in time for the ballet interlude, to see the girls’ legs. They dined here. In the Fenice, the diners upstairs threw chicken bones at the popolani standing in the pit below.

Because, of course, only when kidding can we actually manage to say something really profound. Opera seria was about noble characters acting nobly; for real noblemen, to be serious about that would be like being serious about dining.

Which of course it was.