I've been out of town for a few days, so it's nice to see I stirred up some
controversy.  Christopher Webber comments:

>Having read his post on returning from "Nixon in China" at English
>National Opera, as intellectually stimulating a piece as John Adams has
>made, I found myself wondering what - even in the context of the Boston
>question - Peter Goldstein was getting at?
>
>That an opera doesn't "matter" so much as, say, a Symphony? That the
>people who love opera are maybe just a tad lower-fronted than higher
>musical spirits? That the undoubted emotional impact of stage music ipso
>facto rules out intellectual rigour? That opera's involvement with the
>other arts somehow mysteriously debases it?

I'll assume it's my fault for expressing myself badly, but this gets my
ideas backwards.  My point was that people who like to think of themselves
as "intellectual," many of whom live in the Boston area, see opera as
beneath them, because most operas (at least, most pre-20th century operas)
are not as susceptible to intellectual analysis and appreciation as most
of the other works we call classical music.  That's why I mentioned that
in the past I had unfairly denigrated opera.  We intellectuals tend to make
the equation "intellectual=good," and so Bostonian intellectuals would tend
not to care much for opera.

As a college professor, I plead guilty to being an intellectual, but as
I have grown older, I have found that the intellect matters less and less
to me, and that intellectual pursuits are not the highest.  I am gradually
coming to share Christopher Webber's belief that opera (or, perhaps better
said, musical drama) is the most important form of music, but not because
of its intellectual content.  I think opera has the potential to touch us
in ways that other forms cannot, because it deals directly and explicitly
with specific human emotions.  It can make us empathize and sympathize, and
that's what the world needs most.  And it does so by telling a story, which
is one of the most natural forms of human art.  What intellectual content
it has is welcome, but it is not its chief attribute.

>At root, any attempt to ring-fence and grade the emotional and the
>intellectual in art is baying at the moon.  When we have the metaphysical
>poets on the one hand, with their goal of intellect transmuted into
>feeling; and the Augustans on the other, with their "feeling methodised",
>it would seem that fusion, rather than division of the two, is what most
>composers, artists and writers have been after all these years.

I would agree with this statement, which is why I love and teach the
metaphysical poets.  The greatest of all 17th century lyric poems is John
Donne's "Hymn to God, my God in My Sickness," precisely because it most
perfectly marries the emotional and intellectual.  But if the emotional
and intellectual are separate faculties, then, in my view, most pre-20th
century opera tends to lean toward the former.  There's a very good reason
for this.  Christopher Webber quoted Ben Jonson on the intellectual
qualities of the masque, but Jonson was only theorizing.  The reality,
as he found in his dealings with Inigo Jones, was that audiences for the
masque wanted "spectacle," not in the potentially intellectual sense, but
so as to make themselves feel good about their aristocratic and royal
pretensions.  The fact is, the conditions under which opera was composed
and produced, until the 20th century, worked against intellectual depth,
which is why most pre-20th century operas don't have much of it.

Opera is great, opera is wonderful, and as I said, I'm coming to
believe opera is the best of them all.  And maybe older operas have more
intellectual content than I think.  But I don't want to argue that point,
because for me it's not the important one.  Give me stories, give me
emotions, give me people doing people things.  And give me Mozart and
Verdi to go with it.

Peter Goldstein