The opera season is over for me at the Lyric in Chicago, having been at opening night of the final run, Peter Sellars' beautiful, haunting, but too often plodding new production of Handel's understandably neglected "Hercules." It was not my favorite year at the Lyric or in opera generally. Some of the Lyric shows simply fell flat, especially the two openers I saw in a two-night marathon, a rote "Carmen" and a turgid "Macbeth."
But part of it was my fault. I've become too familiar with my favorite Italian classics to get chills from anything but an unusually fine or innovative performance. As an opera lover I feel a growth spurt coming on. There's no other explanation for a season in which my favorite show turned out to be, of all things...
Wagner.
If you know opera and me at all, you know I have the markings of a quintessential Wagner hater. I like my opera with two gin-and-tonics. I like to hum the hit melodies on the way home. I complain all the time about acts and shows being too long. I trumpet emotion over taste and heart over intellect. I yell bravo and brava when performers are carried off the score into flights of non-composed fancy by a mad scene gone AWOL. I derive a keen and morbid satisfaction from the deaths of major characters. In short, I am vulgar.
But I've been exposed to opera, sometimes against my will, since the cradle. After 50 years of it I wouldn't say my taste is becoming less vulgar. But I'd say my vulgarity is maturing, in a way that puts Wagner firmly into the repertory for the next act of my life.
People wonder how Wagnerians reconcile their love of the music with their disgust at the composer. I don't think reconciliation is the point. Drama is the point.
Watching Lyric's phenomenal "Lohengrin" a couple of weeks back, I got my first Wagnerian spine-tingles - not just from the performance, but from the utter morality of a masterwork by a man who was, by all accounts, a monster. Wagner exhibited the symptoms not of mere immorality, but of a chillingly recognizable über-morality easily twisted on the rigid letter of its law. In life, that made a mess. In opera, that made magic.
Opera is about contradiction. We don't need art for anything that makes sense in real life. Wagner may not strum the heartstrings like Verdi or Puccini. But if you listen carefully, in Wagner's relentlessly gorgeous music - eat your heart out, Mozart - you can hear a plaintive cry. If only I were a character and not a man. If only I could write me instead of be me. I would be Tristan. I would be Lohengrin. I would be a hero.
