Opera-lover? Mad, bad and clearly dangerous to know
A sinister habit?
James Jolly 2:25pm GMT 10th February 2011
Hermione Norris: very angry...and listening to opera (Photo: BBC)
I’ve just started watching the BBC’s new sci-fi drama series Outcasts set in a colony 35 years hence on a planet far, far from earth called Carpathia (which looks suspiciously like South Africa). Among the cast is Hermione Norris playing… well, playing Hermione Norris as characterised by the producers of Spooks – emotionally stunted, as tightly coiled as a high-tension spring and clearly very angry about something. (I really hope and pray that she’s not like this real life – I suspect not.) Now this blog is not a plea to Ms Norris’s manager to think carefully before accepting further roles in the enforcement business (spies, assassins, police etc), but rather to question one of her interests in the new series, opera. Partway through the first episode she settles back in some kind of contraption for reading the mind, and listens to a chunk of La traviata. The sub-text: whacko!
My point? Why, when you have to create a character who stands apart from the herd – innocently like a brilliant but maverick cop, or more sinisterly, like a psychopath – do film and TV directors turn to opera. Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs loves opera, Senator Palpatine in Star Wars adores it, and both Morse and Kurt Wallander listen to their opera CDs. And it was surely not just the setting that had the baddies all assembling on the floating opera stage of the Bregenz Festival at the dénouement of the James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace. And is it any surprise that both Don Ozvaldo “Ozzie” Altobello, quite the most unsavoury character in The Godfather Part 3, or Al Capone, in The Untouchables, are also partial to a little opera (but then aren’t most Mafiosi?)
Why opera? The extravagance (decadence? megalomania?) of the art form… The dislocation from reality, perhaps… The larger than life characters… The ease with which people slip into an obsessive passion for the form… The gruesomeness of so many of the plots… It’s a pretty potent mix, I'll concede!
Comments
My father, a proud member of Mensa, is fond of saying, "Being intelligent doesn't always mean you make smart decisions!" I'd wager to say that there is a line of thinking among the literary set that opera lovers tend to be folks with discriminating taste, and a strong mind - and if their fictional criminal characters are any indication, that's true. I've not met many opera fans that didn't have some high intelligence. The characters are getting a little hackneyed, though: usually a discriminating white man who loves old scotch, and has a wine cellar, loves opera, and a good cigar. Really? But if opera is what I know it to be, the tales are simple: many love stories, political statements, the eternal hero, self-sacrifice, and growing up. History has blown much of it out of proportion and the simple story is usually lost. Orchestras were smaller, singers didn't have to be born with bellows for lungs, and theatrical intimacy was cherished.
Yes, there is death and destruction for love's sake (Lucia di Lammermoor, or Rigoletto) but I doubt L'Amico Fritz comes to mind when you think about mafioso types, eh? It's sad that opera has been put into such an elitist category, relegated to hushed velvet theaters that most cannot afford. Your lunatic-criminal is also a social statement. Opera is out of the mainstream. We'd be fools to think that classical music is in any way commonplace. I love opera, have studied it, have many friends who fly about the world and make a career at it. I'd hardly call any of them whackos (except the odd artistic director who forces the performers to wear Crocodile heads while performing Parsifal!)
Why don't the maverick characters like Broadway? or Hip Hop? Writers are the loonier lot, I think.