Power art

Television is the universal art form.  Nearly everybody has a TV, nearly everybody watches it.  Its basic mode is populist; it necessarily tries to please most of the people most of the time.  Its characteristic product is the soap opera, in which ordinary people are portrayed as doing slightly more than ordinary things; viewers find it easy to identify with the characters, and relate easily to the succession of fraught but fulfilling situations which are paraded before them.  Their disbelief willingly suspended, they happily ignore the unrealistic density of incident; people watch soaps because they present a vision of their lives as they might be - faster, bigger, better - a vision they desperately crave.

Cinema has established itself as a more specialised genre.  It too offers a window on the world, but that world has less to do with the quotidian reality of most people.  However, it still encourages projection and the merging of individual identity with that of the on-screen stars.  Its audience tends to be wealthier than that of television; watching films presupposes the availability of time, money and energy in a way that television does not.  For the middle-class and its aspirants cinema is the art form par excellence.

Where, then, do the nobs and toffs repair for escapist relaxation? To the genre that has always been theirs, ever since its inception: opera.

Opera is about public excess, about ostentation, about the outrageous, about money.  Where production costs for television are typically less than a pound for every viewer, and cinema a pound or two, opera inhabits the stratospheric regions of fifty to one hundred pounds per person.  The mere act of sitting in an opera house is one of conspicuous consumption.  Which is why going there to see and be seen has always been such a crucial part of opera's social ritual.

Just as cinema represents a move away from the kitchen-sink or jacuzzi world of television, so opera has progressed even further from nominal realism in its characters and subject matters.  It treats of emperors, queens, doomed bullfighters, consumptive courtesans, sorcerers, amazons, poets and muses; in short, it displays to opera-goers their own self-image.  Just as television encourages us to believe that our lives too pass at the helter-skelter pace of the soaps, so opera's subtext is that you, too, are a hero or heroine, and that tonight we present your problems and reveal them as art.

Opera's outward form underlines this.  The protagonists wear gorgeous costumes, inhabit huge palaces, fly through the air.  But above all they sing.  Opera says to its adepts: "See, your every word - for this is you portrayed on the stage - is music to the world's ears.  You do not talk like lesser mortals; you speak with the voice of the gods."

And so the closed, hermetic world of opera reinforces the illusions of those who sustain it in all its ludicrous, costly glory.  It is the apotheosis of yet another aspect of their being. For the power dressers and the power lunchers, it represents their very own power art.

(28.10.89)

See also Moody Sonnets - In Mozart’s Garden

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