Ted Gioia’s Memoir of the Conflict Between Opera and Ordinary American Culture

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.

RTWT