Musings, part 2

While writing my last post, I found myself continually referring to "Willie Stark" as a play or a work, rather than an opera. While I maintain that there is some beautiful, affecting music in the piece, somehow, the story is what most engaged me about the work (see...there it is again).

I'm not sure how I feel about that. On one level, that sort of troubles me because part of me argues that “opera is all about the music”, while the other part says, “no, opera is about the storytelling.” In that sense, I think Floyd did succeed. I found the story to be engaging and entertaining and I find that the characters of this opera have stayed with me for the past few days (and not just because I was debating what to write about it).

The music may not have been the most appealing or memorable, but I've found while reading my classmates posts that there are definitely certain phrases that have stuck with me (more than I thought, even). If you think about it though, there aren't all that many operas for which you could say differently (especially in this time period). I mean, mostly what we are left with after seeing a work for the first time are just fragments that keep circulating in our heads. Perhaps with multiple viewings, more of Floyd's score would begin to stand out for us. Then again, perhaps not. It did seem to me that the drama was the driving force in this piece.

~

On another note, Sadie’s line, “Shake ‘em up…Even if you make ‘em mad, they’ll love you,” seemed to me to encapsulate a major theme of our previous class discussions. All of the operas we have covered thus far have had definite statements to make, whether it be political (Candide, Satyagraha) or aesthetic (Willie Stark, I would argue). It seems to me that in this day and age, the goal in writing an opera is no longer to make the most beautiful music ever written, but to make a work that transports, that entertains, that affects, and that is maybe just a little bit controversial. Even if we, as a class, didn’t really like this opera, it certainly generated a large amount of discussion. Perhaps, in the end, that was the point.