In Mozart’s 1787 opera, Don Giovanni rejects the Commendatore’s Ghost’s demand that he repent, and singing “Vivan le femmine, Viva il buon vino! Sostegno e gloria d’umanità!,” the Don descends defiantly into Hell.

Like a lot of us upwardly-mobile types, Dana Gioia grew up in working-class ethnic America where high culture, Opera, Classical Music, and the Arts in general were a foreign country. He describes very well, in the latest Hudson Review, the frustrations of being possessed by passions one can find no one to share and just how much the intellectual in those circumstances was inevitably the alienated outsider.

It burned my cork as a boy to recognize that if Beethoven were to rise from the tomb to premiere his 10th Symphony in the auditorium of J.W. Cooper High School, I’d be part of an audience of roughly twelve and most of the others would be teachers who were obliged to attend.

I thought back then that members of the better-educated, culturally-aware elite were better, finer beings and I yearned to relocate as soon as possible to their neighborhood. Imagine my surprise and chagrin, when I found that exposure to, and familiarity with, the high points of musical and artistic culture did not make all that much of a difference. The national elite was really composed of the same flawed human beings as the dumb yonkos in my Appalachian hometown and that national elite was actually even more systematically delusional in certain prominent ways as a direct result of its members’ sheltered life experiences.

There was something shameful about loving opera. Especially for a boy. Opera was pretentious, boring, effete, and effeminate. By the time I was ten, I understood the unsavory reputation of the art. Opera represented everything that my childhood in postwar America asked me not to be.

I had never been to the opera. I had never even seen an opera house, except in old movies. I knew from the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera that rich people went there, but they didn’t much enjoy it. Only Groucho had any fun. The patrons were old and overweight—bejeweled matrons and potbellied bankers stuffed into tuxedos. There was also something sinister about opera’s orgy of opulence. In Lon Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera, the opera house was built over the city sewers. A mad composer emerged from this mephitic underworld to kidnap and kill. He wore elegant clothes, including an opera cape, but without his stylish mask, he was a monster. Opera was somehow both tedious and malevolent.

I wasn’t sure why opera provoked such distaste. It went beyond dislike, class prejudice, or xenophobia. It roused a sort of moral suspicion. There was something weak or unhealthy about an operagoer. What sort of person craves oversized emotions sung in foreign languages? What grown man could be so soft and sensitive? Such a creepy passion wasn’t normal. The Puritans, who colonized America, banned theater as sinful. If plays were emblems of depravity, what would they have thought of opera with its amplification of violent affection and sexual desire? Opera was sheer depravity, witchcraft so strong it crossed language barriers—a foul and foreign vice only Catholics could have devised.

I was raised among Italians and Mexicans, all deeply Catholic, even the atheists. Yet they half agreed with the Puritans. Opera crossed some boundary. It might not be depraved, but it was virulent in its pretention and sentimentality. In 1960, America was still a Puritan country. Everything in a boy’s education focused on making him manly. The official culture of my youth sponsored Cub Scouting, team sports, and church service as altar boys. Street culture provided schoolyard fights, bullying, and neighborhood gangs. There was no escaping manhood, responsible or otherwise, without persecution and disgrace.

I realized the dangers of opera too late to be saved. By ten I had already been corrupted by my parents. Neither of them had ever been to the opera. The notion would have struck them as absurd. But they loved singing, and that included the operatic arias they heard on variety shows. Back then opera stars were frequent guests on radio and television. There were about two dozen operatic standards that everyone knew. Even Bugs Bunny sang them.

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The young rebellious Sontag.

Nicholas Frankovich notes that youthful rebellion against stodgy, inhibiting norms and standards is great fun, until you find the fences are all down, the norms and standards have disappeared, in politics as in the arts.

Susan Sontag established herself as a public intellectual through original and incisive essays in which she exalted avant-garde over high culture in the 1960s. Late in her career, in the 1990s, she began to have second thoughts. “It never occurred to me that all the stuff I had cherished, and all the people I had cared about in my university education, could be dethroned,” she explained to Joan Acocella of The New Yorker. She had assumed that “all that would happen is that you would set up an annex — you know, a playhouse — in which you could study these naughty new people, who challenged things.”

The “naughty new people” were mid-20th-century artists, particularly American and European writers and filmmakers, who defied existing conventions of the novel and of narrative in general. In your creation or experience of art, try for a moment to stop asking what it “means,” Sontag advised. Relish the “sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it.” The aesthetic she was celebrating — it amounted to an elevation of form over content — was supposed to be exemplified by the “nouveau roman,” in which plot, character development, and all the empty promises of linear thought were minimized or, better, absent. “What is important now is to recover our senses,” she wrote. “We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.”

Alas, what had appealed to Sontag about that kind of formalism “was mostly just the idea of it,” Acocella observed. “I thought I liked William Burroughs and Nathalie Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet,” Sontag told her, “but I didn’t. I actually didn’t.” And now she had regrets. “Little did I know that the avant-garde transgressiveness of the sixties was to become absolutely institutionalized and that most of the gods of high culture would be dethroned and mocked.” In “Thirty Years Later” (1996), Sontag, reflecting on what she had failed to foresee when she wrote the cultural criticism collected in her book Against Interpretation (1966), recounted that she hadn’t yet grasped that

seriousness itself was in the early stages of losing credibility in the culture at large, and that some of the more transgressive art I was enjoying would reinforce frivolous, merely consumerist transgressions. Thirty years later, the undermining of standards of seriousness is almost complete, with the ascendancy of a culture whose most intelligible, persuasive values are drawn from the entertainment industries. Now the very idea of the serious (and the honorable) seems quaint, “unrealistic,” to most people.

…

The difference between the American and the European use of the term “liberal” is often remarked. The former refers, on the whole, to the Left; the latter, to classical liberalism, which until yesterday was the political philosophy — free markets, limited government, individual liberty — of the mainstream American Right. The current populist revolt on the right has flushed to the surface a fact I had underestimated: that when Americans who call themselves conservative say “Down with liberalism,” classical liberalism is a large part of what many of them have in their sights.

Christian anti-liberalism — Alasdair MacIntyre, John Milbank, David L. Schindler, the Communio school — enchanted me somewhat until classical liberalism in the flesh began to manifest increasing vulnerability. It has to fend off enemies on two fronts now, the right as well as the left. Like Susan Sontag lamenting over the rapid dumbing down of American culture in the late 20th century, I see my mood has changed. What had appealed to me about MacIntyre, Milbank, and the whole crew of “naughty new people who challenged things” was not the possibility that their pictures and diagrams of anti-liberalism would ever escape from the page and the screen and result in political consequences. The idea of anti-liberalism, that’s all, is what I fancied. The realization of it, or the attempt to realize it, turns out to be messy, even ugly, and it appears to be tending toward the ever messier and uglier.

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