It went on this way, with exits every five or ten minutes to unload the blood that had collected in the back of his throat: he still sang with his face up, each time more and more streaked with red. In the intermission between Acts One and Two, the bleeding was finally stopped. But all through Act Two, a doctor and nurses waited with us, on the chance that it might start up again, under the part’s considerable physical strain.
Hearing an opera from backstage, especially in a house the size of the Met, is almost a wholly vacuous experience — even when there is no medical emergency. No meaningful stage picture is visible from the wings. The performance is not directed toward you. And there are a lot of ugly sounds — gasped breaths, rough attacks, and what-have-you — that ordinarily do not make it past the footlights over the orchestra pit but which become egregiously noticeable from so near. Even though various assistants and technical directors are constantly shushing stagehands and technicians, there is so much extraneous noise from the setting of props and the moving of scenery that from so close it is impossible really to hear — or to concentrate on what you hear. The balance between orchestra and principals is so far off as to be ludicrous. The proscenium is not before you to frame what you see: costumed chorus members in their intense make-up mingle with workmen in their greens and blues and technicians in sweaters and jeans, with metal scaffolding all around (invisible from the seats), lights hung every which where, and music always playing through the lights and motion and general hubbub, so that the effect is more like watching a circus rehearsal scattered about the floor of some vast hangar than an artistic performance.
The lights from the flies and from the balconies completely blind anyone out on the stage to the audience. From the center, gazing out into the auditorium, you seem to look only at a dead-black curtain, hung just beyond the apron. Blazing about in it, here and there, are blinding white magnesium flares — so that, in the third act, after I’d filed out to stand on our little bridge, I wasn’t sure, for the first minute or so, if the curtain were open or closed — if, indeed, the music I heard were from the Act Three prelude (outside the curtain) or from the act proper. Were the characters moving around below me getting in place for the act’s beginning, I wondered, or, indeed, had the curtain opened already with the act already in progress…?
It was, of course.
But from inside such a production is simply not the way to experience an opera — especially one new to you; even if, as I had, you’ve read the libretto in preparation.
Now the drummers came out to stand beside us. In rehearsal everyone had been in street clothes. Nor had they carried any actual drums. The great bass instruments they hauled out on their bellies now were streaked with paint to dull their stretched skins. Their rims were blotched with brown and gilt. One of the drummers stood no more than eighteen inches from me.
Diaz rendered the prize song.
Eva presented him with the medallion.
There was a terrifying roar —
Because of the paint, I’d assumed the drums were props (to the extent I’d thought of it at all) — and that any actual drumming would occur down in the percussion section of the orchestra pit. But, no. These drums were real; they were played by on-stage costumed musicians!
The sound of six bass drums in a fortissimo roll, starting all at once, no more than two feet from your ear, is louder than any cannon-shot or thunderclap!
I nearly vaulted over the edge of the bridge in heart-thudding astonishment, sure that something huge had fallen onto the stage. I lost my balance, staggered from one of the bridge’s steps to the step below, and had to be steadied by the burgher behind me.
The chorus began its joyful “Ehrt eure deutschen Meister…” and soon the real curtain closed, its inner lining for the first few feet of its journey before us looking no different from the black into which I’d been staring and at which, since the drum roll, I’d been blinking and panting — till suddenly it swung into the light and turned gold.
It was my last Met production.
But how can one really speak of one’s first exposure to Wagner’s music? How can one speak of a first exposure to “Here Comes the Bride,” that, in the years since it first opened the second act of Lohengrin at the Weimer premiere on the 28th of August in 1850 (during Wagner’s Zurich exile after his part in the Dresden Uprising of 1849), has wound throughout our lives, now seriously, now as parody, from childhood on? How can one speak of a first exposure to the Liebestod that has yearned throughout the three acts of Tristan und Isolde since its first performance — commanded by young King Ludwig of his idol — in 1866? When I was a child, played on a diapasoned studio console it was the radio, then television, theme song for two different soap operas! As an adult, I’ve encountered its strains, uncredited, on the soundtracks of at least three “adult” movies. How can one speak of a first exposure to “The Ride of the Valkyries,” that opens the third act of the Ring cycle’s second opera, Die Walküre? Such music is so ubiquitous that to quote it anywhere outside a production of the opera in which it initially occurred is to lampoon it in much the same way that the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or Rossini’s William Tell Overture produce a similar air of self-mockery.
What is being mocked in all these cases is, of course, the very concept of High Art as expressed by opera — just as the Venus de Milo or the Mona Lisa are, at this point, self-parodic works, as they are brought round to represent art itself.
Wagner’s influence as a shaper of the notion of art that all these icons both present at the level of sublime experience and re-present in satiric self-pollution (and buxom sopranos in horned helmets — Wagner’s virginal warrior goddesses — are another image from the same gallery) is totally pervasive. Indeed, one reason it is sometimes so hard to evaluate Wagner’s influence is because we are always within it. We can never get outside it, never see it as an organized stage picture. There is no vantage from which we can slip into the audience and look at it objectively. We try to contain it by saying that Wagner’s legacy (along with Baudelaire’s and Flaubert’s) is that which we call modernism in art. But, for better or worse, it would be more accurate to say that Wagner’s legacy is that which any modern or post-modern — at the gut level — recognizes as art itself, whether our response is to go nodding off in boredom at the whole scattered operation, whether we wander about, gazing appreciatively up at this or that grandly engineered effect, or whether, now and again, some aesthetic thunderclap galvanizes us for moments, hours, or years, shaking us to our footsoles.
In 1982, I began to listen seriously to Tristan und Isolde and the four operas of the Ring. But there were (and still are) at least a dozen composers, classical and modern, who, in terms of pleasure and significance, have meant more to me for years — and will always mean more. Today, we must remember that in the marketplace of culture, all judgments of taste are personal; none are fixedly canonical, and it is only illiterates either in the synchronic array of artistic rhetorical provender or the diachronic sweep of developing cultural discursive practices, who, hoping to achieve some dubious authority if not mere momentary stability before nearchaos, let themselves think that great art and not-great art, major art and minor art, or strength and weakness in poets has any meaning outside a given community, communities which themselves are always partial, which by themselves never constitute a people: that is one of Artaud’s lessons.