Ink Tea Stone Leaf

As I write this, I’m taking a break from cleaning and tidying in preparation to receive company at our home this evening. It’s November Second, but this is a Halloween party of sorts, and a themed one at that: Ariele and I are screening an appropriately spine-tingling opera, Bluebeard’s Castle. This is actually the third such screening we have put on for our friends this year, in which we encourage people to dress as fancy (or in this case, spooky) as they like, enjoy some snacks and wines, and partake in the sort of culture that isn’t exactly “popular,” but rewards you for not ignoring it.

My serious interest in opera goes back at least to my college days, when I downloaded an mp3 recording from 1953 of the complete Der Ring Des Nibelungen, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, and listened to it straight through with a tab open to Google Translate, attempting to follow the plot by plugging in the German titles of each two to three minute section, while referring repeatedly to the plot summary on Wikipedia. It occurred to me later that there were better ways to approach an opera than listening to it without visuals, and that there were better starter shows than fifteen hours of Wagnerian mythology, but I was a young man with a particular set of interests, and I was operating on youthful exuberance and obsessiveness.

More recently, Ariele and I turned our eyes and ears to an offer by New York’s Metropolitan Opera during the covid pandemic in 2020. While other people were on Netflix watching Tiger King (as I understood 95% of the entire world to have done), we were enjoying high-end productions of some of the most well known and well regarded operas in the repertoire, doled out one at a time for free. Among them were the Ring cycle, which is a lot more entertaining and makes a lot more sense when you are watching it played out by actors with subtitles on screen, instead of whatever madness I was up to more than a decade earlier.

We kept up with that for about a month before an opera a day came to seem like kind of a lot. But when I learned that operas were regularly staged in Portland theaters, a mere hour’s drive away from us, I realized that there was a truly sensible way to plug ourselves into this fascinating branch of the performing arts: by attending live performances. It turns out you can show up at the theater, and they won’t turn you away for lack of monocle and ermine coat; they’ll just let you in to watch the opera, and they’ll even put translated captions on over the stage! Opera, as it turns out, is ridiculously accessible!

In the spring of 2022, we saw our first live opera, The Central Park Five, followed in the fall by Carmen. The following year brought us to The Marriage of Figaro, and while we don’t have any tickets for 2024, we do have seats in 2025 for Falstaff. Going to see about one show a year adds some real excitement to our calendar, and a chance to see something a little uncommon.

Having established this as one of our hobbies, it became necessary to begin the process of converting our friends into fellow aficionados. To that end, Ariele crafted a website, allowing invited attendees to vote on a set of four choices, the winner being projected on a screen out on our deck (or, as the weather has grown colder, in our living room). Now every couple of months, we corral as many friends as possible into our home and have a wonderful time.

I do want to stress, this is actually very fun. Opera has a certain reputation among people who have never seen one (which, as the inverse of Tiger King, is nearly everybody), but it truly is one of the best forms for delivering powerful drama, exciting music, and imaginative stories. To the extent that it is perceived as being a little weird to be into opera in the 21st century, I say that’s nonsense: opera is a living art form and many amazing shows are still being produced. But I also say, as I say about everything else, that weird is good and that weird is fun. If you count yourself among our friends, you’re always welcome to join us, however often we put these events on going forward, and for as long as we have a great time doing it.