I'm Going to the Opera

I decided it was time to take care of the second item on my "To Do" list (the first being the very reason this blog emerged from the quantum fog of imponderables: my decision to study music). I made arrangements to make a Spirit Quest to New York with my son to the Metropolitan Opera. To be more specific, we're going to the November 19th 2011 showing of Phillip Glass's opera Satyagraha, a lovely work honoring Mahatma Gandhi. I'll embed a music file you can listen to as I relate my tale.




My involvement with this work goes back almost thirty years. I first heard parts of it on NPR, and I knew I had to have it. The opera premiered in 1980, the year my son was born, and it seems to me I heard it around that time, but I could be mistaken. It was, after all, a while ago. Perhaps the broadcast I heard was the 1984 performance by the New York City Opera Orchestra and Chorus, which was released as a boxed record set. At that time there was a record store which carried Classical music and they had ordered albums for me in the past. I recall the manager's name was Andy, and once he had obtained for me the complete Khachaturian Gayne Ballet from Russia. You could not at that time purchase the complete Gayne anywhere but Russia because of Soviet proscriptions concerning the exportation of native music. I recall the boxed set of Gayne, which I still have, cost the outrageous sum of $30 (1980 dollars at that).

So Andy, known to me and my friend Donahue as The Insomniac for reasons too lengthy to go into here--but mainly because he had eyes like a lemur which never blinked and who spoke at a data rate rivaling DSL--obtained for me the boxed Satyagraha. I made a condensed jam tape of highlights on cassette tape for my car and it accompanied me in my journeys.

At that time I worked at the State Mental Hospital (I ain't making this up) while I was in school, and I worked with a chap named Mark who was fascinated by my unusual musical taste. I had introduced him to Frank Zappa, who Mark probably liked as much for the racy lyrics as the blistering guitar solos. So I brought my new acquisition to work with me to play on the turntable in our breakroom. Esther, who was a very funny redneck lady who weighed in at around 400 pounds, was horrified by the sounds issuing forth. "Jesus Lord Mary and Joseph," she declared, "That sounds like Communism." She delivered this verdict in a honeyed Southern drawl nuanced with smoker's rasp and conditioned with obesity-induced apnea. She goggled at me like I had lost my mind for listening to such cacophony, a look to which I had grown inured since age twelve and my initial infatuation with Wagner, as related on Page One of this self-indulgent spew.

Knoxville in the early 1980's was not ready for the music of a visionary like Phillip Glass. I suppose there was a cultural cadre of fops huddled together away from the drunken mobs of UT Football fans stumbling around like moonshine-fueled hyenas, listening to John Adams and Phillip Glass and possibly even John Cage and Henryk Gorecki, stroking their beards, nodding sagely, and muttering, "Hrmm....Indeed...." at perfectly appropriate intervals. If such an Underground Cabal existed, I had not as yet discovered the key to admission.

Anyway, I found the music beautiful, and my wife of that era found it maddening. Literally. She said it drove her insane. Satyagraha is a composition without brass of any kind, performed entirely by strings and woodwinds, with Glass's trademark repetitive compositional style; and this seems to irritate some people. My son grew up listening to Zappa, Wagner, Glass, Gregorian chants, my weirdo friends and I discussing philosophy and theology, me levitating off the ground and pulling my eye from my skull; not your normal East Tennessee upbringing. Eventually I overheard him listening to the very music he heard as a toddler. I had corrupted him. Sometimes I think in this society where "music" is Lady Ga-Ga, and grunts and profanity accompanied by electronic noise, it may not be doing your kids a favor instilling a love of good music. I know most of my life I have been partnered with lovers and spouses who didn't share my love of theater and music, and this isn't something I would bequeath my descendents. I envy people who can go to concerts and sit hand-in-hand with someone who shares their interest in the Great Masters. When I go to the Opera, I sit alone, or rather it's just me and the composer. But it's enough. Probably the only times in my life I'm truly happy is when performing before an audience who truly gets it, and when I'm listening or watching opera.

So New York is on my itinerary. I have bought the tickets, two seats behind the conductor, and booked the flight. So devious is my plan is that I bought tickets for the performance which will be broadcast in HD in theaters, so I can watch MYSELF watching the opera when it goes into encore presentation two weeks later. And the most beautiful part of this master plan is that when Satyagraha comes out on DVD my great moment will be captured forever. My son and I, in New York, looking out at the world, closing a cycle that began thirty years ago--or in my case, forty years ago with a two-dollar purchase of Das Rheingold purchased from a discount book store--saying, "Suck it Knoxville." And the Fops in their secret underground cabal will stroke their chins, nod and say, "Hmm.....INDEED."