In the primary world, we all have experienced occasions when, as we say, we feel like singing. We may sometimes even attempt to sing, but if we do, we are dissatisfied with the results for two reasons. First, most of us cannot produce pleasing sounds; second, even if we are professional singers, we cannot compose a song expressly for the occasion but can only sing some song that already is in existence, which we happen to know …
W. H. AUDEN, The World of Opera
That same week, I saw my first opera when my father took me to Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande at Covent Garden. I travelled down to London and spent the afternoon with Beth, who watched in astonishment as I changed into a long floral dress. I had chosen this outfit with what was expected of me in mind. It had nothing to do with me. In any case, I was thrilled by the idea of going to the opera. When we had lived in London, my parents had gone often. Opera was what you dressed up for and what my father sat up alone late at night listening to. I knew it would give me feelings.
Pelléas et Mélisande, though, is elusive and suggestive, a work in which Debussy made the decision to be deliberately unforthcoming. As he explained to a friend, he had discovered ‘a technique which seems to me quite extraordinary, that is to say Silence’. I didn’t want silence. I wanted to be bashed over the head with feeling.
Until the lights dimmed, the evening didn’t disappoint: gilt and velvet, diamonds and lorgnettes, the murky boxes in which novels used to be played out. After that all I can remember is a wash of music as a bunch of kings and queens, brothers and sisters, argued and plotted and made up.
What did I expect? A secondary world that lit up the primary: colour, drama, volume, everything high. Yet here were the singers standing around while the music piled up on top of itself and Mélisande, up in her tower, let down her interminable hair, on and on, yard after yard, as Pelléas waited below.
I thought of opera as sensation, I still think of it as such, and one reason I could not sense Pelléas was because I could not see it. Mine was the world of the close-up, of corners and cracks, tight frames and vivid abstraction. Such hyper-real visuals couldn’t be achieved by people in long frocks and helmets waving their arms on a faraway stage.
It didn’t sound right either. Sometimes a wave of brass engulfed the singing, or in a duet one voice overrode another and I felt irritated.* I had assumed that live opera would look like a film and sound like a record. I was unaware of how conditioned I already was to experience such things in a particular way. I thought I was used to live performance but the bands I saw were electrified and mixed. They could create their own acoustics and be turned up or down at the flick of a switch; they were brought close through cameras and amplifiers. I had thought opera was artificial when all it was was a bunch of people making the noise they really made.
At the interval, my father suggested, with great tact, that we head off early to dinner. Had we stayed till the end, I might never have gone to see an opera again.
* I once went to a performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem with a singer, Ted Huffman, and afterwards complained of the difficulty of getting a coherent sense of the piece when the sopranos blasted the tenor off the stage. Ted reminded me that this was live acoustic music and not the digitally adjusted arrangement I was used to.