Italian Opera - Part 1
Once vaudeville for the peasants, now circus for the nouveau-riche

Opera was what Italians had for Dynasty before they had TV, and most thinking Brits and Americans require something a lot more intelligent than opera (ie schmaltzy melodrama) for entertainment. Gee, at least the dames on Dynasty had decent figures, unlike the bejewelled Miss Piggies that get up on an opera stage, and we're all supposed to play mental gymnastics to imagine them as super-vixens worth killing or dying for, (which is the oh-so-sophisticated essence of almost every single opera plot).

What a joke! That Italians should have for so long touted and been hooked on opera as their highest national art-form shows both the historical and contemporary impoverishment of mainstream art appreciation in Italy. Old fashioned touring 'Big Top' circuses, with acrobats, dancing dogs and whipped elephants standing on their hind legs are also still hugely popular in Italy, so that tells you a lot about Italian audience sophistication.

It's not hard to see the genre link between circus and opera. Visit both while you're in Italy, and the scales will fall from your eyes. Both circus and opera are bawdy, transparent, noisy, flash exhibitions of dubious talent with no earthly use or value outside of the crimson tent, low on substance and even lower on style. Opera is the biggest con trick ever exported to a worldwide audience, the classic real-life example of The Emperor's New Clothes. If I ever went to an opera performance, (unlikely) I'd consider myself to be slumming. I'd sooner be caught dead in a whorehouse - At least it would show I had an orthodox brain, unlike those who think that opera is something for intelligent people to watch.

Modern Romans, especially those in the tourist industry, make their biggest mistake in thinking that they are the most culturally sophisticated nation on the planet, and that a bunch of hundred year-old shmaltzy old stage re-runs of overblown music hall pulp fiction dramas (that they didn't write), a bunch of crumbling two thousand year-old ruins (that they didn't build) or a bunch of murky, samey, five hundred year-old religious oil paintings always of the same thing - a woman holding a baby, (that they didn't paint), plus yesterday's pickled mushrooms, are a good enough tourist draw and adequate compensation for the lousy store service, dangerous traffic conditions and fascistic bureacracy which tourists visiting Rome tend to remember long after their memories of Michaelangelo's statues have faded.

As you lie on your deathbed in fifty years time and look back over your long and colourful life, what you will most remember about Rome is that at least one person gave you a hard time here.

If the Romans would just sort these overiding problems out, then they'd have a pefect city, because on good days here, it's almost heavenly. The city of Rome, and Italy in general, is so close, and yet so far from both heaven, and modern, streamlined civilisation - The cool lines of a new Alfa Romeo cruising down the Lungotevere riverbank at night, and the useless proletarian pomp and pap of opera. Perhaps that's its real charm.

Click here
for more about the history of opera
and its resurgence as a popular art form