On Music

...Made up for artificial light, most of the women resembled garish waxworks, and the men in their evening dress had an unnatural, self-conscious air, like guests at a foreign wedding...

...And they shrewdly comment, "Ears, it would seem, are amazingly subjective organs and are more connected to the eyes than we may think...

...it will help you get through...

...And, cautiously, their ultimate assessment is that "more physiological research is needed into the mechanism of voice production to determine exactly what is crucial to the power and stamina of the human singing voice...

...It offers, beyond singing, acting and orchestral playing (often under very glamorous conductors), great opportunities for set, costume and lighting designers—and, latterly and regrettably, stage directors with hypertrophic egos who reconceive operas along spectacularly perverse lines...

...That delightful English eccentric, Lord Berners—composer, novelist, flamboyant homosexual—has the hero of his Count Omega (1941), an operagoer, observe from the theater steps: "Sunlight shone into the portico and lit up the faces of the people...

...Consider the scene in Siegfried where Siegfried, removing her breastplate, discovers that the sleeping Briinnhilde is a woman...

...The mammoth Eaglen, who does not even have a very good voice, looked repellent...

...Then come "First French kisses with women...

...A recent review of Bellini's Norma in the New York Times was accompanied by a picture of Jane Eaglen (Norma), Dolora Zajick (Adalgisa) and Richard Margison (Pollione...

...Of course, they aren't the only audience for opera...

...Many are medical items concerning the physiology of performance or the somatic changes operagoers undergo during performance...

...But the true opera fanatics tend to prefer the more "unreal" works, although the quasi-naturalistic, verismo ones find favor too, because of their lurid plots and often melodramatic music...

...It should be pointed out that here "living" has multiple meanings: It refers to opera done live, to the living experience of performers and spectators, and to the imaginary lives peddled by operas and vicariously lived by audiences...

...and] by the continuing valuing of music over drama by some musicologists writing about opera...

...The fat singer's gasp "is the audible price tag on the expensive garment of the aria...

...It is scarcely surprising that books about opera are often far-fetched, if not downright bizarre...

...surprise at the mouth's flexibility and tolerance for foreign objects...

...I use it to express the emotions, just as I use my hands or my eyes or my shoulders...

...All of which brings me to the latest provocative book about opera to come my way, Bodily Charm: Living Opera by Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon (Nebraska, 366 pp., $39.95...

...The same year I discovered gay 69,1 formed an opera club," etc...

...And these were the people...

...Presumably most of them were cultured people, many of them ornaments of society...

...After the weight loss," the Hutcheons write, "the same performance, such as her Covent Garden Nonna, would elicit extreme claims: that she sang worse than ever before or better than ever before...

...Opposing this is the no less distinguished, but petite and slender, Roberta Peters: "I maintain that these heavy singers cannot sing so long, because their muscle tone, their energy, is not good...

...The body must spill over, embarrass itself, declare immensity...

...One reason for this is that it is the most artificial of arts (with the possible exception of ballet), and not only because the normally spoken is sung...

...The Perceiving Body" is about how an opera audience is physiologically affected...

...We read that the audience's shivers of pleasure are also shivers of dread: "Is there really a fundamental difference between the thrill that comes at the climax of the love duet in Act II of Tristan und Isolde and the shudders of dread—experienced explicitly as such when Lulu screams her death cry under Jack the Ripper's knife—that unfailingly overcome us no matter how familiar we are with the work...

...Why do they not shut up...

...The Body Dangerous" is about the power the heroine of Richard Strauss' Salome exerts on the opera's other characters and the audience—how the eroticized gaze of both Herod and the spectators empowers her...

...Charm" has several meanings here as well...

...No pebble was left unturned...

...The characters will do ordinary things only as a background contrast to blood and thunder, murder and suicide, betrayal and vengeance, cross purposes and cross-dressing —or, in comic opera, buffoonery on a grand scale...

...They have amassed and digested a bibliography of 789 items—books, essays, articles, biographies, works of fiction, philosophical treatises, medical and sociological studies, and whatnot— with sedulous zeal...

...And outré behavior seems to befit outsize performers...

...Opera for Clément is "where love and hatred can interact without vital risk...

...I will want to strangle him...

...The curiosity is unsatiable, and the pursuit of such knowledge is a spiritual exercise, demeaning but also secretly ennobling...

...that has stubbornly persisted because "it was useful to voice teachers as a descriptive term...

...Frequently opera does not even start until the fat lady sings...

...Linda Hutcheon is a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Toronto, where her husband, Michael, is a professor of medicine...

...fixed superbly in her song, attentive to vocal perfection alone, she sings as if she sought to banish the memory of one who sacrificed her voice to the perfection of a body that finally conformed to death...

...With similar absurdity another gay writer, Sam Abel, in Opera in the Flesh: Sexuality in Operatic Performance, hails the diva as the camp embodiment of opera itself, "signifying plenitude and embarrassing excess...

...The Hutcheons ask, "What is the source of the obviously potent mystique of body size correlating with size of voice...

...I have always harbored a Utopian dream that someday all opera managers would adopt a law against giving a contract to any singer above a certain agreedupon tonnage...

...The bigger the satellite they want to get up, the bigger the rocket...

...Callas' slimming down from a heavy body to the one inspired by seeing Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday has led to totally contradictory evaluations from critics and fans...

...First fellatio...

...it's all fat...

...Operas occasionally hit an erotic high point without necessarily being erotic works: Siegfried, for example, with the awakening of Briinnhilde whose breasts are (in theory) revealed when her breastplate is removed...

...I myself am consoled by having witnessed over the years at least two dozen divas not only greatly gifted and very pretty, but also perfectly slim...

...an imposing matron, be able to stay ugly...

...It concentrates on strong, even fiercely overstated, feelings and violent actions that best take to musicalization...

...Already in 1891, Vienna's Marie Wilt "was driven to suicide by the malicious barbs and caricatures of the press...

...In those genres, however, the effort is usually to make the switching into song seem spontaneous and natural, to make it fit seamlessly into the fabric of the action...

...The mechanism has nothing to do with "the myth of singing from the diaphragm...

...I recalled catching Eaglen and the adipose Ben Hepner doing—or, rather, not doing—the love scene in Tristan und Isolde...

...Some of these are specifically about opera, some tangentially, and some only very remotely...

...For Susan Leonardi and Rebecca Pope "the diva has become an image of woman not as victim but as independent and empowered...

...Typical is Clement's description of what happens when she leaves the opera house: "There will be a man who, from the height of his scholarly perch, will think this or that, will do his work as a critic...

...Take the rabidly feminist Opera: The Undoing of Women by the French Catherine Clément, with a Foreword by the American Susan McClary entitled "The Undoing of Opera: Toward a Feminist Criticism of Music...

...Jane Eaglen (not much less), and the herd of others...

...It becalms the patriarchal laws that put women to death...

...even a 1992 piece by me in Opera News appears...

...On page 21, Koestenbaum writes about Anna Moffo (to whom he dedicated a poetry volume, Ode to Anna Moffo): "I need to know whether Moffo's La Rondine was recorded in 1966 or 1967...

...If your muscles and your body tone are good, your vocal tone is going to be good...

...From Bodily Charm I learned, alas, that in a 1993 Opera Quarterly Bruce Burroughs had established a prior claim to my pun...

...There is the physical charm an operatic character has for the other characters, the charm the character has for the audience, and the magic the performer exerts on the enraptured viewers...

...After all, the same is true in musical comedies and movie musicals, which, to be sure, also have their eccentric enthusiasts...

...and what she said to [Maria] Callas while recording La Bohème in 1956...

...so did Margison...

...slow ballet of tongues...

...whether the best voices come from the biggest bodies...

...Thinking of Anna Moffo and Maria Callas, the towering Joan Sutherland avers, "The ones that slim down to look glamorous really tend to lose their voices and there's no two ways about it...

...being nowhere near able to embrace, they evoked not passion but mirth...

...To the surrealist and ethnographer Michel Leiris, in his sometimes silly, sometimes sharp little book Opérratiques (combining opera with erratic), this is "the height of the theatrically marvelous in Wagner...

...The Hutcheons write: "The tradition that supports the mystique of size has been strangely reinvigorated by the fetishizing of the disembodied voice in the wake of technological changes...

...Crowds, especially when struggling to get somewhere, never give a very flattering impression of humanity, and every face seemed to bear the stamp of folly or unpleasantness...

...We gather that sound results from the "regularly repeated interruption of air flow through the glottis, caused by the valving action of the vocal folds...

...This picture, I thought, was not of Norma but of Enorma...

...Then there is the popularity of so much opera on CD, where looks do not matter and major reputations can be made...

...The homosexual who is threatened by women as sex objects, embraces them as objects of merriment, sacred cows presenting no sexual threat to his "otherness...

...One man's spiritual exercise is, I guess, another's Moffo diving...

...I return to the fat divas and divos who are unable to move sufficiently, let alone gracefully, and are too lazy to diet and exercise...

...The book subdivides into sections: "The Body Beautiful" is about the importance of alluring bodies in operatic plots...

...it "does not seem to feature in any of [the examined accounts] of how a powerful sound is produced," the Hutcheons conclude...

...While seeming to lean toward trimming the fat off performers, they admit that "the power and the mystique of the big singer and the big voice remain strong...

...It is a pretty erratic eroticism that can descry sexiness in the theoretical disrobing of a Wagnerian soprano like Rita Hunter (350 lbs...

...grateful for what the ear receives, the throat responds by opening...

...On page 15 he speaks of his childhood tonsillectomy foreshadowing his commitment to the throat...

...In addition there is one chapter I particularly wish to address, "The Performing Body...

...And if the writer is both a gay opera buff and obese, he may well, like Albert Innaurato, bemoan the general "miniaturization of beauty...

...Isn't there an inconsistency between "tend to" and "no two ways...

...Compared to this, Robert Donington's Opera and Its Symbols, fancifully portraying opera in terms of mostly Jungian symbols, is tame stuff indeed...

...So Marilyn Home tells Joan Sutherland, "It's like a rocket, dear...

...Opera is a heightened form: It does not waste time on psychological exploration or dawdle (with a few exceptions such as II Trovatore) on elaborate exposition...

...He writes: "Confrontation with the archetypes is the chief business of opera, spontaneously or deliberately, as the case may be, and in mediocre specimens scarcely less inescapably than in the finest masterpieces...

...Not so, generally, in opera—at least not before the innovations of Bizet, certain Russians and Janâcek...

...The authors investigate every aspect of the physical in opera, onstage and, yes, in the auditorium...

...When opera is, as Wagner was first to itisi st, the gesamtkunstwerk, the total artwork, its appeal will be multifarious...

...But support for these dreadnoughts comes from the gay and lesbian communities, too...

...This appeals to every sort of outsider: the effeminate man and the overweight woman, the bookish sissy and the mannish girl, the glamour-craving drudge and the action-starved loner...

...Thus Koestenbaum writes: "The body must be huge...

...Lesbian and other feminists likewise encourage corpulence in opera...

...The best answer to this is provided by Mary Garden, one of the greatest singing actresses of all time: "My voice is no more important to me than my shoulders...

...and "A Toast to Opera's Bodies" is a rather gratuitous section about operatic drinking on both sides of the footlights...

...Catherine Clément celebrates, as the Hutcheons put it, the heft of Montserrat (sometimes, I might add, referred to as Monsterfat) Caballé over Callas' thinness: "She weighs so much that she is incapable of expression...

...Yet there is also "the recent combination of social disapproval, new knowledge of the health risks of obesity, and increased exposure to (or vulnerability in) the visual media [making] many large singers today self-conscious...

...Oh Caballé, deformed idol, never get thin...

...The myth originated (although the authors are too polite to stress this) in the self-justification of fat opera singers...

...The biggerthe voice, the more behind it...

...on whose verdict the life of a work of art depended...

...To Koestenbaum, operagoing is an exalted form of oral sex: "We drink sound through our throats...

...Note the repeatedly positive evaluation of embarrassment...

...Just as mythical, apparently, is the tradition that upholds the mystique of singers' body size...

...It is concerned with various aspects of a singer's body, but mostly with the eternal question of whether size matters, i.e...

...Zajick, a decent singer, nevertheless appeared overweight...

...Psychoanalyst Michel Poizat's The Angel's Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera interprets opera as subliminal sadomasochism...

...The Hutcheons cite loads of scientific, historical, critical, and anecdotal lore, plus pronouncements from singers, voice teachers, doctors, etc...

...No less inflamed are the flagrantly homosexual opera books, most conspicuously The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire by Wayne Koestenbaum, who teaches English at Yale...

...One thing is certain, you can project onto opera whatever you wish or wish for...

...And, as the authors remind us, "José Carreras' voice seems as loud as Pavarotti's...

...and how close she stood to the mike, and what restaurants she frequented after performing at the Rome Opera House...

...The Performing Body" discusses all aspects of this weighty problem...

...Pavarotti hates being photographed or seeing himself on television...

...It's the worst thing for you...

...As Alfred Alexander observes in Operanatomy, "The only thing one can say is that the beauty and strength of the voice are due to some lucky shape of one [physical] resonance area or another...

...The picture reduced my appetite for the production, and may have turned some people off opera altogether...