Day 278: Old lady at the opera, with a score
36yearsago.com
Vienna 1971—A Student Journal
A year of music, study, travel, sightseeing &
friends.
Day
278 — Old lady at the opera, with a score
06-May-1972
(Samstag–Sat.)
TRANSCRIPT
Practice and organizational work—of project—for most
of day.
Der
Rosenkavlier. Very enjoyable. As with
most of these operas, I feel that I have to hear and
learn the music, much more than one time. Still
enjoyable.
REFLECTIONS
Normal
day. Nothing
much for the journal. Working on my
Fantasy
composition
documentation and an opera at night.
Listening to opera. Tonight
is Richard Strauss’ Der
Rosenkavalier. When I
go to the opera in Vienna, I have not studied it in
advance. I am not looking at the score. I almost
always do not know the story but I read the program
notes (in German). I simply take in the music, the
singing, the stage performance, the sets, and the
drama, as a musical performance. I am not an opera
aficionado. If you ask me to tell you the stories of
operas or to sing the melodies, I can’t do it. It is
still extremely enjoyable to me—to experience the
music as pure music. In the journal, I state that I
should be studying and learning these operas over and
over again. That’s how you become an opera fan, an
opera expert. For me, it’s enjoyable to just
experience opera as opera.
Opera is perhaps one of the first multimedia musical
experiences.
Old lady with a score. I have
mentioned before that we had a “standing room” ritual
at the Staatsoper for every performance—lining up
early, the doors opening, then the crowd moving
slowly up the stairs led by an usher, and finally
darting (running) into the various standing room
places on one or two of the top floors of the opera
house. Every night, in the same spot, there was an
old lady who sat in her special standing room place.
She had a small light and a musical score or
libretto. She never watched the opera itself, she
just followed the music in the score. Opera as a
“live” CD, perhaps. It was fascinating to watch her.
I was told that she attended many, many opera
performance over many years. She was an opera
patron during
the time of Mahler. Imagine
that. A slice of musical history. Wouldn’t it have
been interesting to speak to her?
Link:
Der Rosenkavalier
in
Wikipedia
John
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