William Berger - NPR The Curious Listeners Guide to Opera

A ny American who first approaches the world of opera today would be in the position of a newcomer approaching baseball. The two institutions, after all, have quite a bit in common. Both opera and baseball claim legions of insanely loyal fans who believe the subjects of their passion to be uniquely eloquent, powerful, and even spiritual in some sense. They are also both equally mystifying to those who are not fans, people who cannot grasp what all the fuss is about and who suspect the fans to be delusional in their passion. Both opera and baseball receive the same criticisms from detractors. Both are called slow, plodding, old-fashioned, and hopelessly out of touch with todays fast-paced world and its less genteel modes of expression. Many true athletes decry baseballs lack of pure athleticism and many true musicians denounce operas impure musicality. Both opera and baseball are imbued with rituals and postures that apparently have nothing to do with the supposed tasks at hand, yet that are, inexplicably, accepted and even celebrated by their respective devotees. Both thrive on mythic elements from the past, and both have always been said to be in a state of decline today compared to the Golden Ages (real or imagined), of yesterday.

The simile can be stretched further. Even those who have no interest in baseball or opera accept the fact that an American city must have a baseball stadium and an opera house if it is to be considered a major urban center. In this way, these venues fulfill a function not unlike cathedrals in medieval French towns, except that most residents of the modern American city never actually enter these cathedrals. Still, they are happy to know that such places exist, and cheerfully accept the status they confer on their hometowns. They might even get curious to know what goes on in these places. Here the newcomers to baseball and opera find themselves in very analogous situations. Asking fans about their passions is hazardous. First, one must endure a long discourse on the beauty of the pastime in question. Then, assuming the newcomer has the fearlessness to pursue the discussion on to the detail level, he or she is flooded by a completely incomprehensible jargon that has no apparent relationship to any other sport or art form. More confused than before, the newcomer can be excused for dismissing the whole subject as irrelevant to his or her own life.

All this is true for both baseball and opera, but it must be admitted that opera has its own unique barriers in addition to those already mentioned. While opera is a palpable and growing presence in America, no one outside of the asylums would (yet) call it The American Pastime. Although a distinctly European art form in origin, opera belongs to the world at this point in history. The notion that opera is not exclusively American permits some to perceive it as distinctly un-American. There are language issues beyond the jargon enjoyed by fans. Most (although not all) operas are written in languages other than English. We in America are given famously little incentive to tolerate foreign languages in our lives, yet the perpetrators of opera would ask us to sit for long hours through performances in languages we neither understand nor particularly respect. The dominant languages of operaItalian, German, French, and Russian (in that order)are portrayed in our culture as comical, effete, or downright hostile to our values. If one can penetrate the language, there is the issue of what is being said on the operatic stage. Everyone seems to know that opera plots are emblematically silly, and no amount of explaining them or apologizing for them will remove this notion.