Opera: A Test of Character?

Strange pair of brainfellows, huh?  Iris Murdoch, British novelist, and Luciano Pavarotti, Italian tenor.  Welcome to my head, today.

At this very late stage in my so-called career, I am reading Murdoch for the first time, at the behest of a dear friend.  The Sea, the Sea won the Booker Prize in 1978.  (I spent many Friday nights that year baking in a sauna with another dear friend who raved on and on about Murdoch, but somehow I never got around to actually reading her.  I think I was saving her for emergencies, like I'm saving Mansfield Park and I forget which other Austen novel I haven't read.)

The Sea, the Sea is ostensibly the autobiographical ruminations of a celebrity, a fabulously successful theater playwright and director who has recently retired to a ramshackle house on the remote northern coast of England.  In his journal, he reflects on his professional career, his relationships with women, his family, and on his present location, its charms, its drawbacks, and the creepy things that are starting to happen.  Murdoch's writing is dense, intricate, and hypnotic.  As is always the case with any first-person narrative, the reader's initial task is to evaluate the character of the storyteller, whether s/he is reliable, and--most important--whether we like him.  I'm only about 100 pages in, but last night, I began to suspect that this guy is an asshole--possibly of epic proportions--owing chiefly to his record with women:  he never married, never wanted to, isn't gay, but blithely exploited an astonishing number and variety of women throughout his life, starting when he was 20 and got involved with a 39-year-old actress, which relationship carried on in various configurations for years until her death.  She and a few of her successors interested him, so he studied them rather like someone might study bugs or birds, and he notes their feelings and behavior but doesn't seem to care about them much; toward the feelings of the others, he is complacently cavalier.

So I'm just getting ready to wring his neck when he mentions that he hates opera.  "OK, that does it," I think.  "People who hate opera are--"  And then I remember that I don't like it, either.  I've only been to about three actual performances.  The plots were stupid, the costumes ludicrous, the makeup likewise, and if I wanted to read (supertitles--clumsy translations), I'd stay home.  I stood through two acts of Figaro (eugh, SO silly!) outdoors in Santa Fe before my aching feet sent me whimpering off in defeat.  Best thing about that experience was the visuals:  the stage itself seemed to disappear as dark fell, so the performers appeared to be floating; behind them to the south, a thunderstorm lit up the sky over the Sangre de Cristos, and to the north, the lights of Los Alamos blazed.

Another time, in San Francisco, Pavarotti gave a free concert at the band shell in Golden Gate Park about ten blocks from my house, so I thought I'd drop by.  But the crowds were so huge, I couldn't get anywhere near him--could barely get into the Park at all--so turned around and went home and pouted.  Told myself I wasn't asking much--it wasn't like I wanted to go to an opera--an expensive proposition, way beyond my means--I just wanted to see/hear Pavarotti because he's arguably the greatest ever, and I'm always interested in anybody who's the greatest at whatever they do.  Pitching a baseball, lecturing on Picasso, blowing bubbles--I don't care.  If they're really good, I want to see them do it. I'm scuffing around my backyard, muttering about this when all of a sudden I hear something.  It's a crisp fall day; the air is perfectly clear; I hear a voice.  Or I think I do.  It's faint, but it sounds like--but it can't be, he's ten blocks away, and there are trees galore between here and there, big ones.  I listen, though, and it is.  It's him.  The crescendo of the Nessun Dorma aria, floating out of the Park and down the block right into my back yard!  Goosebumps?  OH yes.  Almost tears, even; those notes pulled something out of my chest even from ten blocks away.  (And later I heard he hadn't been miked, but I never believed that.)

Now it's this morning, and there's no way around it, I HAVE TO do some housework, which I can't do without music.  LOUD music.  I think about the aria,  I put in the Favorite Arias CD, I crank it up, Luciano's blasting away, I'm shoving the mop back and forth (like the Sorceror's Apprentice?), loving it all and wondering, "Does this mean I like opera?"  Because it's not just Nessun Dorma on this CD, it's some other stuff, a couple of Verdi duets where he's going "rrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!" and she's going "twitterTWITTERTWITTER!" and I realize oooooh, this is sexy stuff!  Is this why people like opera?  Do I like opera?  I don't know. I never really thought so before.  But here just lately. . . . 

Anyway, I DO know that that guy in Murdoch's novel is a jerk for being a theater director who says he hates opera.  And I hope something terrible happens to him, which will make The Sea, the Sea a very good book!

Comments

[Pica]

I can't remember what happens to the main character in The Sea, The Sea, but I do remember enjoying the book. You're right, she's a terrific writer. I think this book might have been her homage to Woolfe.

When we were living in Cambridge (UK) it was something of a dinner joke to speak in Iris Muroch uncertainties. "She wore a sort of .. a kind of... quizzical expression, etc." So English. She was the quintessentially English writer of her generation. When Fowles took up the subject of Englishness in Daniel Martin he took it a step further, the Englishness, but he can never do anything without being slightly nasty, which may all be part of the equation. (He may also, be, which I suspect, a slightly nasty person.)

[dale]

:-)

I don't even know enough about opera to have a *guess* about whether I like it.