Introducing “Exploring opera”
Rights: Anastasiia Mantach / CC BY-SA2.0
Our In house opera Authority, Anna milioni, presents to you the start of the new series “exploring Opera.
In an analysis of the function of narrative, the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) suggests that literature is a“vast laboratory of thought experiments”.
When we are reading a story, we find ourselves in a world similar to, but distinct from our own, in which different characters proceed to various different actions as a response to the circumstances they are dealing with.
Literature thus becomes a way for the reader to understand the world and discover different possibilities for action.
Moreover, following the characters of the story, the reader suspends her own moral judgments, adopts a different viewpoint and probably reevaluates her own moral beliefs.
The audience of an opera undergoes a similar experience: the opera being a “staged sung drama”, it confronts the audience with a narrative in which characters dealing with challenging circumstances, and often facing moral dilemmas, follow different courses of action.
Combining music, textual narrative (often with poetic qualities, since large parts of an opera’s libretto can be read as poems), and on-stage representation, the opera constitutes a particularly strong way of telling a story, capturing the senses of the audience and stirring up strong emotional reactions.
Reflecting the mores and conventions of their times, but also focusing on emotions and human traits that are still relevant to our age, operas may provide valuable guidance in our efforts to understand the world and our role in it.
About The Series
The “operatic explorations” that will follow do not attempt to analyse the examined operas as artistic forms. The music education, as well as the knowledge of the history and practice of opera as a genre that would be necessary to provide such an analysis, go far beyond my level of expertise. However, one need not be a music expert to enjoy an opera, nor to think about the questions that it raises. And while operas are often thought to be a relic from the past, or accessible only to a small cultural elite, the continuous existence of passionate opera lovers of different cultural backgrounds challenges this belief.
Rather than offering an expert’s analysis, then, these “explorations” will discuss the ways in which different operas raise questions relevant to their contemporary audience and explore their impact on the different courses of action available to us today.