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On Saturday, Dec 11, 2004 promptly at 1:29
p.m., I tuned in to WUGA. This was a day I'd been
waiting for since last May, the first day of the
Metropolitan Opera's matinee broadcast season.
Mysteriously, however, Verdi's scheduled I Vespri
Siciliani had become Wagner's Flying Dutchman.
'Live from the Met* was not being broadcast It
had been replaced by NPR*s "World of Opera."
Several of my fellow opera fans in Athens, I
discovered, assume that the disappearance of The
Met was caused by Chevron/ Texaco's churlish
withdrawal of support after sponsoring the broad
casts for more than 60 years. But no. The Met
found last-minute support for this year's matinee
broadcasts from the Annenburg and Vincent A.
Stabile Foundations, and embarked on a "Save the
Met Broadcasts" fund-raising drive.
The broadcasts have continued, but they have
largely disappeared from Georgia's airwaves
because the management of Georgia Public Radio,
including WUGA's Robb Holmes, decided to stop
relaying these performances. You can hear the Met
matinees in London and Buenos Aires and Tokyo,
but not in Athens, GA, unless you have Internet
access or a good FM antenna.
Canned Opera
Within 15 minutes that December afternoon, I
had posted an irritated (and no doubt irritating)
complaint to WUGA's website, expressing my
intense dismay. A few days later, Mr. Holmes
replied, stating that the Met broadcasts were
inconvenient because they lasted differing lengths
of time. A long opera like Der Rosenkavalier, which
begins at 12:30 p.m. rather than the usual time of
1:30 p.m., would necessitate the cancellation of a
regularly scheduled program, and these cancella
tions had elicited complaints. While acknowl
edging that some listeners like me have a "senti
mental" and "nostalgic" attachment to the live
broadcasts, he argued that "World of Opera,"
which comes in a tidy and predictable three-and-
a-half-hour package, was a perfectly adequate,
even preferable, substitute.
"It appears to me," he wrote, "that “World of
Opera' now serves both opera listeners and other
listeners far better than the Met. Network." He
advised me to listen to WABE in Atlanta.
But "World of Opera" is not an adequate sub
stitute. For the past months, I've been trying to
figure out just why I feel so bereft by the disap
pearance of "Live from the Met" on WUGA from
my Saturday afternoons. I've come to some con
clusions.
First, "World of Opera" is a program designed
for opera connoisseurs, listeners who know the
standard repertoire thoroughly and seek out
seldom-heard rarities. The Flying Dutchman broad
cast that afternoon was performed as a single act,
as Wagner had originally intended, though he
later changed his mind. Other offerings this
season include Hans Heiling, a German Romantic
opera by Heinrich Marschner, whose more familiar
Der Vampyr barely survives on the fringes of the
repertory in Europe. The list also includes Gustavo
III. Verdi's early score zapped by the political cen
sors. Verdi went on to rewrite it as A Masked Boll,
making his tale of assassination safe by moving it
from the Swedish court to colonial Boston, and
the revision is an acknowledged masterpiece—
Gustavo is a historical curiosity.
Also featured on "World of Opera" are Rossini's
long-forgotten Moses and Pharoh and Matilde di
Shabran, Admittedly, the program does include
some Carmens and Traviatas and Bohimes. But
"World of Opera" primarily offers an archive com
pelling to the knowledgeable and dedicated opera
fan. The most significant aspect of 'Live from the
Met" is that it makes opera accessible and
appealing to listeners who know nothing about it
"World of Opera' should supplement GPR“s opera
offerings, not substitute for 'Live from the Met'
Second—and this is crucial— is the issue of
live versus recorded performances. A live perfor
SAVE THE MET BROADCASTS
mance is always preferable to a recorded one. Part
of the pleasure of the live broadcast is its thrilling
element of inherent risk. If we're listening to La
Traviota for the 50th time, we want to bear how
yet another Violetta negotiates the hazards of
"Sernpre libera." How will this particular collabo
ration between singers, conductor and orchestra
inflect the performance? How will the latest
Violetta sound in the context of Joan Sutherland,
Beverly Sills, Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi, Anna
Moffo? Certainly this aspect of the experience
does depend upon the existence of recorded
opera, which also enables those of us who weren't
privileged ever to hear Callas live to understand
something of her art. But as a musicologist friend
pointed out, listening to an opera recording is like
watching a tape of last year's Super Bowl: you
may enjoy the action, but you always know how
it's going to come out There's no tension, no sus
pense, no life.
Furthermore, since live broadcasts contain live
intermissions, the Mets strategies for filling in
that time have themselves
become a beloved tradition:
the musical analyses, the
singers' round tables, the
interviews with conductors
and designers, and (most of
all) the Opera Quiz. The edu
cational value of these fea
tures is quite impressive.
When I first started
preparing to teach a course
at UGA on Opera and
Literature, reading scholarly
work about opera systemati
cally for the first time, I real
ized just how much I had
learned from hearing decades
of these programs. I'm sure
this must be true for multi
tudes of listeners.
lexicographer, defined opera as "an exotick and
irrational entertainment' He was quite right; the
notion of a world in which everyone sings rather
than speaking is flagrantly artificial For English-
speaking audiences, this artifice is compounded
by the fact that the standard operatic repertory is
almost entirely in foreign languages. Yet opera
lovers generally acknowledge that rationality is
simply beside the point Remember the scene in
Pretty Woman where Richard Gere takes Julia
Roberts to a performance of La Traviatal She has
nevet heard of opera, much less seen one. Gere
tells her that upon hearing their first opera,
people either love it or they hate it "If they
hate it they may learn to appreciate it but it
will never become a part of their soul' The
screenwriter was accurate; either you get opera
or you don't.
Unfortunately, I think that Robb Holmes'
rational argument about "World of Opera" as
preferable programming suggests that he may be
one of those who just doesn't get it. I greatly
respect his encyclopedic knowledge of classical
music and jazz, but he just doesn't empathize
with those opera fans for whom the Saturday
afternoon broadcasts create an important form of
community, who experience them indeed as a kind
of secular ritual. When I was a teenager, I felt
that although I was almost undoubtedly the only
opera fan in Comanche, there were thousands and
thousands out there who were as fascinated and
as moved by opera as I was. Opera offered a
window (indeed, Keatsean "charmed magic case
ments') onto a world that was utterly different
from my narrow world of small-town Texas.
And given the history of opera, perhaps it's
not surprising that the live broadcasts function
as kind of secular ritual Opera was invented in
the 1590s by a group of Florentine intellectuals
who called themselves "The Came rata." Scholarly
research had led them to conclude that ancient
Greek tragedy had been sung, exemplifying a
primal unity between music and language that
had subsequently been lost The purpose of this
new genre was to repair this loss. In the subse
quent four centuries of opera history, this perfect
union has seldom, perhaps never, been attained.
But whether the words or the music of a partic
ular opera prevail opera always offers us a mode
of reparation, a kind of alternative reality, a
world in which music and words fused together
transport the listener to some place different,
whether that world embodies the wish-fulfillment
fantasy or the nightmare.
It's quite troe that many people who don't
know or care about opera assume that it is an
elitist art that appeals only to a handful of the
rich and the snobbish. And yet the Met broadcasts
could arguably be cited as by far the most democ
ratic of American cultural institutions. In 1706,
the eminently rational British critic John Dennis
published an attack on the Italian operas that
were beginning to be performed in London. Opera
was irrational he writes, and music was trou-
blingly "effeminate." But it also bothered him that
white one needs a liberal education (i.e. three
years studying Latin and Greek at Oxbridge) to
appreciate a good play, all one needs to appre
ciate music is a good ear, which, he admits, may
be bom as readily in the servant as in the master.
For generations, the Met
broadcasts have made it pos
sible for those who live far
away from an opera house (or
who could never afford the
admittedly expensive tickets)
to love this art form. Anyone
reading the testimonies of
those whose lives have been
changed by the Met broad
casts must acknowledge this
important dimension of their
social effect.
Anne Williams
Anne Williams teaches in the UGA Department
of English.
Lifelong Passion
I take the disappearance
of "Live from the Met" very
personally because I owe my
love of opera to the Met
broadcasts. I fell in love with
opera in 1964, when as an
impressionable and romantic
16 year old living in
Comanche. TX (population '
4000), I happened to turn
on the Met broadcast, which
happened to be Wagner's
Flying Dutchman. It was an
electrifying performance with
Leonie Rysanek as Senta and George London as
the Dutchman. I subsequently learned that I had
been particularly lucky, that this was a legendary
performance. That day, however, I was simply
swept away by Wagner's stormy overture, by the
thrilling intervals of the Dutchman's theme, by
Senta's ballad and by Rysanek's bloodcurdling
scream when she lifts her eyes from her portrait
of the Dutchman to see him standing before her
in the flesh. I started tuning in every Saturday
afternoon.
Recently, I have read the more than 200 testi
monials currently posted on the Metropolitan
Opera Guild's website (www.operainfo.org). Almost
all of them tell stories like my own, how the often
accidental discovery of opera by hearing the Met
broadcasts led to a life-long passion. Two
metaphors dominate these listeners' attempts to
express their feelings about opera: you fall in love
with it (which is what it seemed lite to me), or
it's an addiction: one hearing and you're hooked
for life. You'll always need another Met matinee to
satisfy this irrational craving.
The point about irrationality is important.
Opera, and the love of opera, are not matter* of
logic and reason. Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great
Bring It Back
There are thousands of
stories much like mine—how
the broadcasts opened up
another world to someone
living in Texas or Nebraska
instead of New York. Chicago
or San Francisco, someone
whose family was not partic
ularly musicaL Furthermore,
many American singers report
that listening to the broad
casts first sparked an interest
in the art that would become
their profession. In Texas in
the 1960s, I heard the Met
through an AM station in
Fort Worth, over 100 miles
away. Nowadays, only one FM
station in Dallas (40 miles
further away) relays the
broadcasts. If I had been
growing up in Comanche in the '90s, I might
never have heard a note of Wagner or of Verdi. I
find it profoundly sad that nowadays a teenager
there (or here in Athens) is much less likely to
stumble across opera by accident because of
Georgia Public Radio's decision. I consider it scan
dalous that these managers should choose to limit
rathei than to enlarge the aesthetic horizons of
their audience merely because the Mets matinee
broadcasts are inconveniently vasying in length.
That's the kind of standard that commercial sta
tions pay attention to. GPR should surely try to do
better in serving the cultural life of the nation.
I am collecting signatures on a petition
addressed to WUGA requesting that the broadcasts
be restored next season. If you wish to sign it
please send a message or a snail mail note to me
at the UGA Department of English, Athens, GA
30602. You can contribute to the Save the Met
Broadcasts Fund by visiting www.operainfo.org or
www.metopera.org.
MAY 11.2005-FLAGPOLE.C0M 11