Why Puccini?
Puccini
Back in the 1980s, my first business partner, Naomi, and I were searching for an entertainment venue we could enjoy together. She didn't like bar hopping, trolling for guys, and I was bored with movies. We decided to take our entertainment experience to the next level by dipping our toes into the classical music concert scene at the Kennedy Center. Naomi had more background in classical music, having grown up in New York City. I knew it would be more challenging for me as I was totally tone-deaf, having been asked to leave the junior high noontime chorus for my failure to carry a tune. And, I was raised in the mid-west suburbs by a father who wouldn't let a piano in the house, thought good music was Henry Mancini, and prevented my mother from playing her Beethoven, Mozart and Bach records because he didn't like that "high brow" stuff. Only after he died, did she bring out those records she had kept stashed away, but by that time I was long gone. So, bracing myself for this new experience, I joined my partner to buy a season's worth of tickets.
I felt sophisticated as we sat among well-healed elders in the concert hall. But, to our regret, one or both of us would invariably fall asleep before the end of the second movement, almost like clock work, again and again. What a bust!
But we weren't giving up so easily. We concluded that if classical music lulls us into la-la land, maybe we should try something more edgy. Something avant-garde, perhaps. And, so with renewed enthusiasm, we took our seats one evening ready to enjoy Bartók. We knew it would be strange to our ears -- his atonal music was certainly music that obscures tonal structures and ignores conventional harmonies altogether. In reality, it was truly, truly beyond anything our untrained ears could withstand. The whole evening sounded like nails scratching a blackboard while a seven-year-old randomly banged on her mother's piano. We gave up. We failed in our experiment in music appreciation. We left the concert hall to those more urbane and practiced.
Instead of turning to Queen or Rolling Stone concerts, we decided that the problem wasn't just the music, but the fact that we missed the action of movies -- the actors, the scenes, and the drama. "Let's try opera," Naomi suggested. She didn't want to give up on the Kennedy Center experience, which, quite frankly, is elegant. When you walk the red carpeted floors, you're dazzled by the sparkling chandeliers 30 feet above you hanging from 50 foot high ceilings, then open the doors to the open air terrace promenade overlooking the Potomac River, to stroll and sip champagne during the interval.
I succumbed to her pleadings and before the season was out, I was in love. The music that once put me to sleep, now was the backdrop to an explosion of live performances with breath-taking singing, costumes, dramatic tragedies and comical stories, and, believe it or not, some excellent acting (although Plácido Domingo did look silly with a pineapple headdress). Over the ensuing five years, our season tickets brought us almost every opera the Kennedy Center had to offer. And when I started dating my husband John years later, I returned and introduced him to opera with The Tzar's Bride, a complex, psychological drama, steeped in Russian history. As we left the opera house, I asked him if he liked the opera. "Well, I can certainly get used to it," he smiled. I took that as "Yes" and ordered our first set of grade A orchestra section season tickets.
Fast forward to a 2007, when our move to Memphis brought us face-to-face with the reality that opera just isn't the same in a backwater southern town with its makeshift opera house where the scenery shakes when the soprano falls into the arms of her lover during her aria. Finally back in D.C. in 2009, we couldn't afford both season opera tickets and a sailing. We gave up the grand opera for the grand Chesapeake Bay.
Now, eleven years later we've given up sailing and realize we how much we've missed opera, but nothing was playing at the Kennedy Center. We'd missed the season. I bought us a couple of tickets to a production of Puccini's Madame Butterfly by the Virginia Opera Company. The venue was the George Mason University's Center for Arts. The concert hall/opera house was good, but it wasn't the grand opera house of the Kennedy Center just a short metro ride from home. It took us 45 minutes to drive into the suburbs to reach it. We were taking a risk, but thought it was worth to experience, once again, the story of love and sacrifice set against a clash of cultures. I'd seen Madame Butterfly twice before. Both brought me to tears when Butterfly tragically realizes she was abandoned and never loved as she loved.
Was it good? Yes, Madame Butterfly was heart bending, as I once again wiped tears from my eyes. Nothing is better than Puccini for me. His music touches my soul whether it's a production of Madame Butterfly, La Bohème, Tosca or Turandot. He always knew how to touch his audience, if not the academic critics who chastised him for not becoming more experimental with his music.
Thank God Puccini ignored them.