I enjoy most genres of music, but for the last seven or eight years, opera has been my go-to genre. Why do I connect so much more strongly to opera now, what is different about opera? The answer I keep returning to is opera’s beauty. When I was a young boy, watching the 1933 movie “King Kong” on television made quite an impression on me. I have never forgotten the closing lines. The airplanes had just killed King Kong, shooting the creature down from the top of the Empire State Building where he was trying escape having captured the object of fascination, the beautiful actress Ann Darrow. I felt such sadness for the beast; I felt like taking a swat at the airplanes myself. Having observed the action, a police lieutenant says to the movie producer Carl Denham, who was responsible for bringing the captured beast to NYC for display, “Well, Denham, the airplanes got him.” Denham answers back, “Oh no, it wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast.”
Beauty may not be an irresistible force, but it is a powerful one. I also think that opera has a unique type of beauty, a beauty that stops you in your tracks, lifts you up, connects us to each other as humans to something larger than ourselves. Perhaps you know the scene in “The Shawshank Redemption” where a rogue inmate plays an opera duet over the loudspeaker in a prison. The inmates stop in their tracks and listen, momentarily transfixed by the beauty of the sound. Had a pop song been played instead, the inmates would have grinned, maybe swayed or danced to the music, and enjoyed, even shared in the experience. But Mozart’s aria provided the inmates with a transcendent experience. I think that perhaps without knowing it that this is opera’s goal, to use the human voice and music enhanced by a story and staging to share with its audience a transcendent experience that connects us to each other and to something greater than ourselves.
During my journey with opera, I find there are a few recordings of arias and duets that I go to for comfort that consistently draw me into opera’s spell and the beauty washes over me like warm, soothing water. I’d like to share two of these, both duets, one by the ladies and one by the gentlemen. I find the blending of voices in duets can be especially beautiful.
The first is the Flower Duet from Léo Delibes’ opera Lakmé. I ran across this duet searching opera arias on YouTube early in my love affair with opera. I have not seen Lakmé and am only vaguely aware of its plot. I have listened to the duet being performed by several different sets of performers, but I have never felt the desire to look up the libretto or to find out what the song is about. The music and the voices speak to me very clearly what the aria is about, though I can’t put the meaning into words, reminiscent of Morgan Freeman’s voice over during the opera scene in “The Shawshank Redemption” when he says that he doesn’t know what the ladies were singing about, but liked to think it was about something too beautiful to be put into words. Here is a performance of the Flower Duet sung by coloratura soprano Sabine Devieilhe and mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa that I especially enjoy:
The second is a duet from Georges Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers for tenor and baritone, performed in this case by the world famous singers, tenor Jonas Kaufman and baritone Dmitri Hvorovstosky. I heard this duet first while watching a video of the opera, and in fact, felt there was a disconnect between the music and the words. I think it’s best heard like the Flower Duet, without knowing what it is about. Let these extraordinary voices and Bizet’s extraordinary music tell you what it means to you. This is an overt example of how opera brings us together – a German tenor and a Russian baritone sing a duet written in French – as the audience add your own nationality.