Peter Goldstein <[log in to unmask]> wrote, in response to my joke that:

>>Maybe it [that "brainy" Boston has no opera house]
>>tells you something about opera:)
>
>A good joke--but it touches on something very real. Opera is probably
>the least intellectual of classical music forms

Actually, joking aside, I disagree with this.  I never understood why
"pure" music is seen as intellectual or cerebral etc.  To me it feels
exactly the other way around, if anything, opera is more intellectual.

In opera you need to follow the plot, and for that you need to understand
the motivations and personalities of the protagonists, and for that you
need to understand (at least a little bit) the social millieu these
characters are supposed to inhabit, etc.  In fact, many of the highly
intellectual people I know who love opera love it for the very reason that
it provides such a fascinating historical and sociological commentary on
the times and societies it either depicts, or, by reference, it addresses
itself to.

On the other hand, for me listening to music should, ideally, remove me
as far away from intellectual activity as possible; in the sense that
the effect of music (the effect that I care about, anyway) is purely to
the emotions and nothing else (an idealized description, but words are
inadequate here as we all know).  To me, "intellectual" is thinking about
mathematics, or reading a physics paper, or reading an article by Charles
Rosen, or...  these are extremely cerebral "tasks" for my mind, very, very
different from listening to, say, the WTC or late Beethoven (just to take
examples of music that many, for reasons mysterious to me, regard as highly
intellectual).  Listening to music like that is more like being in the
"orgasm machine" from Woody Allen's "The Sleeper:" a state (when everything
is right) of intense emotional receptivity and of total immersion in a
purely "visceral" mental mode; during that state the "intellectual"
structure of the music (whether it's the fugue or the sonata form etc)
is the farthest thing from my mind.

I think Beethoven put it best in words when he said "from the heart, to the
heart"; that's what matters, and it's all that matters, it's what "pure"
music is all about, as I see it.

>I remember when I was in college (yes, in the Boston area), I used to
>denigrate opera, precisely because it lacked the kind of intellectual rigor
>I could find in the instrumental and vocal works of the great masters.

But what is this "intellectual rigor" in the works of the great masters?
It sounds so unappetizing; I would never want to listen to intellectually
rigorous music knowingly.

You need to keep in mind that "intellectual rigor" is often an
after-the-fact construction by music scholars.  Bach did not have
counterpoint books from which to learn rigorous composition procedures;
instead, those books came later from scholars who tried (and miserably
failed, in my opinion) to encode what made Bach's music great in a
manageable number of algorithms (or "rules").

Ulvi
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