DALE F. writes:

Here’s a good article by Roger Scruton at the American Spectator on opera authentically done as the last refuge of the bourgeoisie.

I’m not as sold as he is on the quality of the Metropolitan Opera, but certainly compared to the sort of trashy European productions he singles out, the Met is superior. I think our own Music Academy of the West’s recent production of Don Giovanni was, in Scruton’s terms, nearly flawless. (Though to be clear about my own tenuous links to the bourgeoisie, at three hours, I found it a little long.)

Laura writes:

That is an excellent piece, but as you say, Scruton fails to take note of some of the disturbing trends at the Met, particularly the new production of Tosca, which I wrote about here, here and here. To Bartlett Sher, director of the Met’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, those who have dared to boo at some of the Met’s more post-modern productions are engaging in a “self-interested expression of ownership.” (Les Contes, by the way, featured women in various states of undress, including women who were heavily pregnant, and plenty of crass sexual staging.) Only philistines boo. How tired and dreary that le bourgeois still care about anything.

Here is an excerpt from Scruton’s piece:

… The disappearance of the bourgeoisie has therefore led to a crisis in the arts. How can we track down the defeated remnants of the philistine class, in order to disturb them with the proof of their irrelevance? Theatres, galleries, restaurants, and public resorts all offer impeccable post-modern fare, addressed to non-judgmental people. TV has been dumbed down below the horizon of bourgeois awareness, and even the churches are rejecting family values and the marital virtues. Yet, without the bourgeoisie, the world of art is deprived of a target, condemned to repeat worn-out gestures of rebellion to an audience that long ago lost the capacity for outrage.

ALL IS NOT LOST, however. There is one last redoubt where the bourgeoisie can be corralled into a corner and spat upon, and that is the opera. Believers in family values and old-fashioned marriage are romantics at heart who love to sit through those wonderful tales of intrigue, betrayal, and reconciliation, in which man-woman love is exalted to a height that it can never reach in real life, and the whole presented through heart-stopping music and magical scenes that take us, for an enchanted three hours, into the world of dreams. Siegfried’s love for Brünnhilde, shot through with unconscious treachery; Butterfly’s innocent passion built on self-deception like an angel on a tomb; Grimes’s death wish, rationalized as a longing for Ellen’s maternal love — these are dramatic ideas that could never be realized through words, but which are burned into our hearts by music.

Is it surprising that our surviving bourgeoisie, surrounded as they are by a culture of flippancy and desecration, should be so drawn to opera? After a performance of Katya, Pelléas, La Traviata, or Figaro, they stagger home amazed at those passions displayed on the stage, by creatures no more godlike than themselves! They will come from miles away to sit through their favorite fairy tales and drive home singing in the early hours. They will pay $200 for a mediocre seat, in order to hear their chosen prima donna, and will learn by heart the arias which they are never satisfied to hear unless in the flesh. Take any performance of an operatic classic anywhere in the world, and you will find, sitting in close confinement, motionless and devout for the space of three hours, the assembled remnant of the bourgeoisie, innocent, expectant, and available for shock…

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