Opera itself.
Not until recently, but I learned the hard way in my early twenties, watching opera with most other people my age is torture. We tend to think of our age as an age of irony, and yet there are all sorts of societal conventions we don't see through at all, and while we've been conditioned to see through the cliches of opera, we don't understand that so many artforms people value more today are just as cliche-laden and people have no trouble suspending their disbelief in other populist artforms. Show the average intelligent person of my generation an opera, and they will constantly ask 'why do the characters always keep singing the same words over and over again?', not realizing that most of the pop music they love is packed through and through with exactly the same cliched practices. They bristle and chortle at the archetypal two-dimensionality of the characters, conveniently forgetting that it's no more two-dimensional and cliche-and-trope laden than all the genre fiction they so value. Opera is genre fiction: fantasy and legend, action, romantic comedy, opera has it all, and if this were 1920 or 1820, the same educated people who so loathe opera today would probably be far more passionate about it than I am.
Is opera great art? Well, no artform is great art unless animated by a great artist. There is plenty of opera that wears on the listener like a ill-fitting shoe, but when it comes to life, but I would stake everything I am on the conceit that it is the risk and complexity and rarity of great opera-making that, next to great cinema, makes great opera the most enthralling, most moving, most transcendent experience in all of art, and is all the more rewarding because it happens so rarely, and one has to endure annoyance after annoyance on the path to a great operatic experience.
Speaking personally, I seem to be undergoing an 'Italian Opera' phase right now, coming back to Verdi and Puccini as I have not in years. I'm generally much too cynical to find opera as rewarding a daily experience as I do instrumental music. Unless the composer has the same amount of 'knowing irony' as I do (like Mozart or Janacek), I usually find it incredibly difficult to suspend disbelief, and find myself shutting off Verdi and Wagner in those bleeding chunks that make opera into an incomplete entertainment rather than a true work of art.
But in this despairing clearly 'late' age of a civilization, one can be forgiving finding oneself relishing the comfort of the very cliches that once drove one crazy. One misses the very fact that one could take these cliches for granted, becuase these are the consensus cliches that animate societies, and create composers like Verdi, Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Gluck, Puccini, Dvorak, Weber, Bizet, Massenet, Handel, Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Rimsky-Korsakov, Smetana, Mascagni, Cilea, Ponchielli, Meyerbeer, Charpentier and Charpentier, and of course, Mozart, and many more, create toweringly sublime experiences that require nothing more to appreciate them than an appreciation of the human heart and a good tune.
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