Creation and Control in Opera

Opera has turned out to be such a significant part of my life (despite my gradual and unremarkable progress in it) that I think it deserves a place in my cyberspace for collecting what I learn. This to clear my thoughts and share my lessons and thoughts as I encounter and process them and as I discover something seemingly worth sharing.

Opera is predominantly about performance to me, but also about music and art. Performance is the giving, as opera doesn't exist for itself, but as a composite gift from one set of people to another. Each receiver receives it uniquely and responds both visibly and invisibly. What they receive is an animated art-work that is a combination of the artistic contributions of a group of people spread out over time and space to please, edify and even enlighten. The music is like an abstraction of the essence of life itself, tying the material pieces together and providing a massive unbounded space in which protagonists and elements move and express themselves.

For all involved, the fuel that drives opera is emotion, with love in many forms dominating: love of music, love of spectacle, love of imagination, love of art, love of love, love of surprise, love of communion, love of bright colour and costume, love of emotion and of course love between lovers. Every performer loves to know that their gift is moving his or her audience and every manager or performer loves to read success on others' faces. Every participant sobs at disappointment and every member of the audience hopes, in presenting themselves to a show, that they will be taken during the opera beyond the often mundane mode of real life to a place where emotions are extreme and colourfully, but safely, explored, so that on leaving the performance at its end, he or she feels enriched and in some way even renewed.

But there is cold hard science in opera too, even engineering. You'll find these in a solid infrastructure of thought and process that support and rein in the emotional fuel, the excitement, the disappointment, the lightening, the eruptions, the erosion and the fireworks. Science and discipline help join all of these volatile ingredients into a cohesive functioning whole that culminates in a successful opening night. The technician at work, the manager, the planner, the singer learning. No one individual's contribution is all art or all science either - every contributor gives both. And beyond opening night rational and disciplined activity and thought remain in place, keeping the creative juggernaught on track like the skeleton in our bodies that holds us firm and upright even as we dance.