Somewhat along the lines of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s well-known essay “The Aporias of the Avant Garde,” one could write a piece about the aporias of opera today. Especially so as one contemplates the production of Leos Janacek’s The Makropulos Case at the Metropolitan Opera, the first time the venerable house has mounted that great but demanding work.
It is not that opera as such has lost its validity or appeal for our era; the problem is merely its feasibility. With the need for education apparently a recessive gene, with our schools teaching little of value and even that poorly, and with universal ignorance fostered by all the media spurred on by television, the taste for and cultivation of opera is ipso facto imperiled. Add to this the economic climate of global cooling, and subsidies for this costliest form of theater may prove to be less and less forthcoming. Hence the contradictory needs for higher ticket prices and greater ticket sales. And, worst of all perhaps, the necessity of self-defeatingly large opera houses.
A person attending the Met, even in a good and expensive seat, but perhaps short of the very best, gets to experience an opera only slightly more faithfully than someone at an art opening attended by milling multitudes of cocktail-sipping, canapé-munching, yaketty-yakking clutterers gets to absorb the art works on exhibit. But at an art exhibit, you know at least that you were unable to see the art properly; in a vast opera house you
