It’s not often that I send you, my faithful and enduring readers, to another site then ask you to come back, but that’s what I want you to do right now. I’d like you to read the synopsis of Giuseppe Verde’s opera “A Masked Ball”, then come back. It won’t take but a couple minutes.
Okay. Now that you’re back, I want you to try to imagine what knucklehead would think that story could be well-told by people in pink Elvis costumes, a couple guys dressed like Uncle Sam, a woman in a pink dress and a Hitler mustache doing Sieg Heil salutes, and a bunch of naked old people wearing Mickey Mouse masks. Oh, and most of this “artist’s” vision of the opera takes place in the wreckage of the World Trade Center (Warning: the link not at all safe for work, or for viewing by opera lovers, people with good taste, or anyone with a low tolerance for supreme displays of idiocy).
The funniest part of the story (yep, folks, there was a funny part of this story) is where the production is described by the artist as “a populist critique of modern American society”.
So, opera’s populist now, is it? The average Joe just can’t wait to take the family out to a rousing performance of “Aida”, “Cavalleria Rusticana”, or “Die Zauberflöte” instead of, say, a ballgame or a movie? I must have missed that traveling performance of “Der Meistersinger von Nurnberg” that swung through my town last week.
My guess is that any opera producer who fancies his work as anything even close to “populist” is just dumb enough to think that wrinkled, old Mickey Mice and Hitler salutes in an abattoir for thousands of innocent people passes for trenchant social commentary.
(via memeorandum)
It’s my observation that targets of satire rarely appreciate the artistic value of that which mocks them… I admit I find the mental image of a stage full of stereotypical representations of Americans partying away amidst the ruins of the WTC a trifle banal, but in the context of the opera, it’s amusing. Apparently the humor is lost on the fine, upstanding members of the “arts community.”
It’s my observation that much of what masquerades as satire is blunt insult, not nearly as cleaver as it thinks it is. It is often naked hatred hiding in plain site.