The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #90211 Message #1728894
Posted By: Don Firth
27-Apr-06 - 01:08 PM
Thread Name: Classical music - what makes you listen?
Subject: RE: Classical music - what makes you listen?
No need to bug off, Al. What prompts my remarks here is that there is a great deal of enjoyment to be found in the whole run of classical music, and I think it's a pity that, for some reason, you're missing it. Perhaps these things are a matter of early exposure, but I have met people who've told me that they hate classical music, but when learned something about it, wound up real fans.
I'm thinking particularly of a woman I know who thought that my wife and I were some kind of culture-snobs because we had season tickets to Seattle Opera. "Nobody could really like opera!" she used to say. "All that screeching. . . ." I asked her a few questions, learned that she had heard a few opera singers on the radio (one or two cuts from a "highlights" record), and that was it. It was a style of singing that she was not familiar with, and they were singing in a foreign lamguage so she had no idea of what they were singing about. So I challenged her, she winced a bit, and accepted the challenge.
I picked a full-length recording of a fairly short, well-known opera: I Pagliacci (The Clowns). This is the one that contains the famous "Laugh, clown, laugh" tenor aria. I gave her the libretto (little booklet with the Italian lyrics in the left column and the English translation in the right column) so she could read the words they were singing, and if she got lost, I could explain what was going on in the plot. Anyway, we listened to the whole thing.
The opera ends tragically (I did a very brief synopsis in one of my posts above), and she was deeply move, practically teary-eyed when it ended. Her response to the opera when she knew what was going on? "That was beautiful! I had no idea!"
She's a real opera fan now. Never misses the Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. Has a book on opera plots and reads up on whatever opera is coming up.
I think it's a real pity when people don't like classical music, because there is so much there, not just to enjoy, but to be inspired by. I just wish there were some way I could show you the way I did her.
Okay, I don't enjoy it all, but the field is so broad that there is a huge amount that I really love. As Helen says, there are many styles and many interpretations. But the whole smorgasbord of classical music is so broad and varied that it doesn't seem reasonable to issue a blanket dismissal of the whole thing.
Don Firth