Is it worth getting into opera?

I've spent most of my life being an Opera Person, and it's been very rewarding, for the most part — some of the most emotionally and artistically satisfying experiences of my life have been at the opera. I love going to the opera so much that occasionally I wonder if I should organize my life around attending as often as possible, which would probably mean living in New York and blowing all my money on Met tickets and opera trips to Europe.

But sometimes I'm apprehensive when other people, not devoted opera people, ask to go with me or ask about how to get started. When in the company of someone else, I'm always aware of how boring, how silly, how overwrought everything is. Being an opera fan, to a large extent, involves being willing to go along with things.

Occasionally I think about what makes opera suit me — why I'm up for five hours of Tristan und Isolde when there are many other ways I might spend my time. I think that the people likely to enjoy themselves at the opera, rather than feel themselves crushed with boredom or distaste, share a few things in common.

Principally:

1. An affinity for old things

Some people are drawn to old things, and enjoy stepping into that foreign country of the past. This quality isn't really correlated with intelligence, morality, or creative vigor, as the marble statue guys on twitter demonstrate daily. But if you're into old movies, old music (let's say pre-1960), old books, old buildings, or old styles of clothing, there's a decent chance you'll enjoy yourself at the opera. If you pride yourself on your erudition, it's likely you've attempted it at least once.

Some will object to my characterizing opera as old, but the hard truth is that despite every effort to "stay relevant," opera is certainly the least relevant of the major art forms. Theater — even musical theater — regularly produces new work, both popular and experimental, as does the dance world. The visual arts are very much alive and healthy. New novels and poetry are constantly being written, much of it genuinely popular. But if you look at the season of almost any major opera company, anywhere in the world, the majority of the works on stage will date from "the long 19th century" — that is, the period between the French Revolution and WWI. The more popular the opera, the more likely this is to be true.

2. Europhilia

Another hard truth, when it comes to opera's relevancy: again, look at the seasons of any major opera company, and most of the works will be set in Europe and sung in French, Italian, German, or Russian. Opera is certainly the most Eurocentric of the major art forms. For some people, this is part of the appeal.

3. A love for the sound of opera singing

Once, I overheard a woman talking about her multiple attempts to enjoy the opera: "You go there, and everyone is beautiful; everything looks beautiful. But then they open their mouths, and all you want is for them to shut up!" Opera singing, for many people, is rough on the ears. Nothing wrong with that!

One thing that I'll note: if you're just getting into opera, chances are that you like the sound of light, clear, sweet-sounding voices: Kathleen Battle and Luciano Pavarotti might sound good to you, while Maria Callas and Jon Vickers sound shrill or harsh. If this is the case, give yourself a chance to acquire a taste for the hard stuff. Famously, large and complex voices don't record well, and can be truly understood only when heard live. Once you hear what a big voice is capable of doing, you might find yourself craving the thrill.

4. Tolerance for boredom

As much as opera companies try to market their productions as exciting, the truth is that opera plots tend to move slowly, sometimes deathly slowly. There are long stretches where people sing about how they feel, or re-tell events you've already seen on stage, or belabor a point — and the music may not even be interesting in a way that compensates. An old boyfriend told me that, when going to the opera with me, he had to train himself not to expect the plot to move steadily forward the way it would in a movie or even a play. Shakespeare moves things along more briskly than most operas. Think of it as an opportunity to practice mindfulness.

Are you the kind of person who can sit through Jeanne Dielman or Solaris and stay riveted? Then most operas will be a cinch.

5. Tolerance for cringe

A lot of opera plots are overwrought. A lot of great singers are not great actors. A lot of singers who have great voices but whose age or body shape would ordinarily disqualify them from certain parts are routinely cast as wasting consumptives and youthful ladykillers. In opera casting, the voice comes first.

On stage, you're likely to see stiff acting, outmoded melodramatic gestures, or (worse) "silly" dances and swiveling pelvises trying to pass for comedy. None of it is cool. For some, the secondhand embarrassment is too much. Myself, I don't mind. I am not cool, and I understand that many things I like are not cool.

6. Tolerance for misogyny/orientalism

This goes along with point 1: a lot of opera plots reflect the gender and racial politics of the time they were written. This tends to take the form of misogyny (women suffer and die when they step off the 'correct' path) and orientalism (see Madama Butterfly, The Abduction from the Seraglio, etc). A wish to avoid encountering these things is a very valid reason not to go to the opera. A good director will find ways to complicate what's in the text (and some operas lend themselves to new interpretations), but there's only so much a clever production can do.

The "voice first" casting policy of most opera companies can sometimes seem forward-thinking when people of color are cast in traditionally white roles, but sometimes uncomfortably regressive (white women as Cio-Cio San, complete with "Asian" makeup). Take from this what you will.

7. A basic level of romanticism and willingness to get carried away

One of the things opera does best is serve up ecstatic and intense moments of pure feeling. The music in the "big moments" is meant to transport you, to blot out everything else, and the chance to experience moments like these is the whole point of going. If you love it when a movie gives you goosebumps and makes you cry, the opera might be for you. But if you're the kind of person who goes to see old movies at a theater and spends the whole time laughing performatively to demonstrate your distance from it, the opera is not for you. Most operas (at least in their original form) are very light on irony.

8. Love of connoisseurship

The highest level of opera fandom is when you can have a good time even at a bad production because you can savage it afterward with other connoisseurs.

Back when I was learning about opera in my teens, I absorbed everything from lurking on online forums: particularly rec.music.opera and Opera-L. I marveled at how those people seemed to know everything about every opera and every singer. They had vast collections of bootleg tapes, and they could rank fifteen recordings of Tosca on a five-dimensional scale. I got emotionally invested in the (frequent) flame wars and saved the particularly vibrant outbursts to my own files. I also read Parterre Box religiously (RIP James Jorden) and was enormously influenced by it: the lingo, the zine-style cutout art, the gleeful trashing of some opera stars and reverence for others. This is the type of obsessive-yet-critical online community that's much rarer these days, and I'm glad that my operatic education coincided with its golden age. The website still exists but without its former bite.

Opera rewards investment: there's intellectual and aesthetic depth to be found and nuances to apprehend; over a lifetime of attending the opera, you'll see the operas of the standard repertoire — plus new works and interesting rarities — revisited in fascinating ways, with brilliant new voices. The highs from truly great opera are so rapturous that it feels like being on drugs. I’ve seen at least a hundred performances, perhaps close to two hundred, and I know I’ll be going the rest of my life.

Finally: it's worth getting the good seats, and it's worth seeing the good stuff.

My recommendations below.

Operas to see if you're a normal person (all of them are masterpieces):

Carmen

La bohème (my post)

Rigoletto (my post)

Tosca

The Marriage of Figaro (my post)

Operas to see if you're an intellectual, or want to be thought of as one:

Peter Grimes

Tristan und Isolde

The four operas of the Ring Cycle (c'mon, they're great and it's only a week of your life, plus everyone will know you're a serious person)

Don Giovanni

Wozzeck

Dialogues of the Carmelites

Nixon in China (my post)

Operas to see if you're a cool person:

The Rake's Progress

Fire Shut Up In My Bones

Salome

Orfeo ed Euridice

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

Magnificent if you're an opera person, difficult otherwise:

Der Rosenkavalier

La Gioconda

Boris Godunov

Don Carlo/s

Parsifal and Lohengrin (masterpieces, but for true Wagner-heads only. If this is for you, you know who you are)

My personal favorites not listed above:

Jenufa

Faust (my post)

Les contes d'Hoffmann

Ariadne auf Naxos

Bluebeard's Castle (my post)

Eugene Onegin (my post)

Les Mamelles de Tirésias (my post)

AVOID:

Ernani (mediocre)

La Cenerentola (mediocre, actually avoid any Rossini that’s not Barbiere)

Simon Boccanegra (boring)

Turandot (just listen to a good recording of Nessun Dorma instead)