OPERA

WRITERS’ CHAPTER STORY-OF-THE-MONTH – NOVEMBER 2017

O P E R A  

By: Louise Naples

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who are passionate about opera, and those who aren’t. There doesn’t seem to be much of a middle ground here. I am decidedly in the opera loverscamp, in fact I think I learned to love opera before I was born. My mother had a very fine soprano voice, and sang along to her opera records, lullabies to my older sister while she was pregnant with me; thus, I was a natural born opera lover.

Growing up in our house, classical music was a given. Dad loved symphonic music and Mom, her beloved operas. They had a vast and continually growing collection of records, and a Zenith console record player. Mom would stack all the disks of a given opera onto the spindle, and one by one, they would drop, and play, drop, and play, drop and play, all the A sides, then she would flip the stack over to the B sides to complete the performance.  She could name all her favorite singers and recite all their roles, and could sing any number of arias. Opera was her great joy.

On Saturdays, the Texaco Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts would be on, and it was well understood that quiet would reign during that time. In fact, the Met Broadcasts in our home were as sacred as Mass on Sunday. We kids, would read, or play quiet games, or do some homework, or just play outside. Dad too would indulge our mother and honor the silent time, I remember being sent out on an errand one warm Saturday and was charmed to discover that the week’s opera was emanating from the windows of many houses on our block.

The oldest of us children grew up hearing our mother’s singing, but as we aged into our teen years, she became self-conscious, and when she caught us listening, she would stop. The youngest of my siblings never heard her sing at all; and more’s the lament, since several of them grew up to be amazing singers themselves. Catherine sang Broadway ingénue roles in local theater for decades, and in Atlantic City when she was Ms. New Hampshire. Grace, Rita and Jane all were soloists with regional orchestras as well as in their churches, and my brother James was a very fine baritone and was also a church soloist. They performed at most of our family weddings.

This love of music and opera followed most of us well into adulthood. If I am an opera lover, my late sister Grace was an addict. I sent her recordings of operas for her birthdays. Grace would always call me on the birthdays of Giacomo Puccini, Guiseppe Verdi, Georg Bizet, and others, to inquire – no demand is more like it – to know what opera I had on to celebrate. We could talk opera for hours, and when she visited, we would play one completely through without talking. That in itself was a sort of miracle. (She and I could talk simultaneously to each other and never miss a word!) We discussed our favorite singers in their favorite roles, debated vocal quality, compared a single aria by playing every version of it that we had. We talked about the live performances we had enjoyed, and opera specials on PBS, and the HD ones in movie theaters.

My husband and I have a wide collection of some forty operas, and countless recital albums by our favorite singers. One of my prized possessions is the classic Milton Cross book The Complete Stories of the Great Operas. Cross was for decades the voice of the Met Opera broadcasts; I can still hear his gravelly voice explaining the action and describing the scenes during intermissions, and conducting the Metropolitan Opera Quiz at half time with famous singers, conductors, and scholars.  

Opera story lines can be obtuse, or violent, historical or Shakespearian, or totally inane; none of that matters. There is intrigue, extortion, murder, adultery, kidnapping, and treason, as well as love, courtship, and marriage. There is a wide range of emotions to inspire composers. Whether tragic or comic, the music soars. Main characters have their special themes called leit motifs, and even if one doesn’t read the libretto, much can be discerned just by listening. Music speaks it’s own language. Live opera performances have it all, music, acting, dance, costumes, sets, and if you don’t understand Italian, French, German or Russian, there are running translations overhead.

When Mom passed away, there was a scramble over her opera albums. The younger set claimed most of them.   The records themselves were not the legacy our parents gave us; it was the pure love of music that endures and gets passed down. The next generation is populated with opera lovers, and singers.   And by listening to opera as they grew up, and being taken to live performances, our own children will carry on our passions.