Grapes of Wrath: The Opera

With a friend of mine I attended last night’s performance of the operatic production of The Grapes of Wrath, with a score by Ricky Ian Gordon and a libretto by Michael Korie. I have no appreciation for opera: I don’t know what to listen for, I don’t particularly like the soprano voice, and I don’t understand recitative. The lyrics were flashed on a screen above the stage, but the indecipherability of the words detracted from my ability to focus on meaning, and what the libretto might have added to the novel itself. I had recently reread the novel in preparation for a discussion of it that I was involved in, and so I had a familiarity with Steinbeck’s text. But everything I knew about the book was all I knew about the operatic version of it.

Which led me to consider that my ignorance of opera meant that I could not appreciate whatever beauty this performance might have contained. And this was certainly a sold-our performance. We bought “Rush” tickets and there was only about a dozen of those available. I don’t know which must come first: the knowledge about opera, the operatic genre, the human singing voice, or the innate attraction to the form which leads to a desire to study the operatic form, etc., etc. But nothing about the performance last evening led to any reconsideration of the novel, nor did I gain any insight into it or even the world.

Dinner was nice, and I thought the sets were lovely. And, despite a few few fur coats, it is nice sometimes to be part of such a crowd.