Attitudes Towards Opera

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 631, 3 August 1951, Page 10

Attitudes Towards Opera

degree the power to make people jump to one or the other side of the fence," says George R. Marek.* "People, if they are responsive to music at all, either love opera or hate it. Few can take it or leave it alone." This is as true in New Zealand as in New York, where Mr. Marek is programme annotator for the Metropolitan Opera House. Among our native-born musical intelligentsia there is a quite positive dislike of opera. Lieder are music; arias are not, unless they be by Mozart to whom all things are forgiven. Why do these divisions exist? Mr. Marek believes that it is "Because the ee C ) has to an egregious

attitude towards opera which leads to enjoyment needs at the outset a certain amount of-not. tolerance, for that is too condescending a word-but of loving imagination." And more things can go wrong than in other arts, "The wholly . satisfying perform- . ance of an opera is a rarer thing than a wholly satisfying violin recital." I have known

_people who seemed born with a faith _in opera, with a complete acceptance of its conventions-its "absurdities" as the call them. And I have known /many who were wholly converted the /moment the curtain rose on their first visit to the opera house. But I have not known radio make converts by its | attempts to supply the dimensions of sight and action which it lacks by nature. Indeed, sometimes it has only ‘hardened the unbelievers, and irritated the rest. In presenting operas whole, though, without an interrupting commentary, radio gives us a chance to dream ourselves into the illusion. If the opera audience, in the theatre or at the radio set, is a small one in British countries, it is nevertheless the most. faithful and passionate of all musical coteries. People do not go indefinitely to symphony concerts or piano recitals, or even to chamber music unless they are practitioners. But opera holds nonperformers to the end, probably because of the extra demands it makes on their loving imagination. The demands its radio version makes are a challenge we enjoy meeting in our own ways. Mr. Marek’s book will live close to my radio set, because it has more smell of the opera houses than any other I have read, and a few pages in it anywhere put me in a hungry listen‘ing mood. Referring us to others for complete coverage, he gives 45 short chapters of anecdote and reflection from odd angles. He is scholarly and moving; and he ig also very funny, as people can ‘be when they are not on the defensive about what they love.

It may be 50 years before we can raise commentators in New Zealand who can speak in these tones of voice. We need first an opera house people may go into from childhood. By making this world seem real, Mr. Marek makes it seem not hopelessly beyond our reach,

Nanook