For the entire five-and-a-half hours of Les Troyens, and the two-hour drive back home from Coeur d’Alene afterwards, we were captivated and awestruck by Saturday’s dazzling opera production from the Metropolitan Opera. Later, when we were home, some reading about the production got me thinking about how much a role attitude plays in one’s enjoyment of life.
Les Troyens, with music and lyrics by Hector Berlioz, tells the story of the Trojan War and the years following. It is a production of epic proportions, with a chorus of 110 singers (the Met had to add 30 voices to its usual chorus) and many dancers complementing the cast and orchestra. Only a few opera houses and companies in the world are large enough to do the sprawling story justice.
During the behind the scenes interviews in an intermission mention was made of the lead tenor, New Orleans native Bryan Hymel, who replaced the original singer in December. Hymel was wonderful and I later went to the Internet to find out what had happened to force the Met to bring him in from Europe only a couple of days before he went on stage. It turns out that he replaced Marcello Giordani, one of the world’s great tenors after Giordani dropped out from the extremely demanding role of Aeneas, vowing never to sing it again. Twenty years ago, Placido Domingo did the same thing.
In my reading I learned that the current production of Les Troyens has many criticisms (writers, mainly bloggers, complain about conductor Fabio Luisi, soprano Deborah Voigt, the set, the ballet scenes, the orchestra, Met general manager Peter Gelb, and so on) and, as I read through some, it occurred to me how often people bring their own expectations to any artistic endeavor.
It’s much like travel, I thought. In the more than 35 years that Angela and I have travelled together we have had virtually no unhappy experiences. We are both people who take different cultures and experiences as being just that — different — and do our best not to impose our own values on them.
We take the same approach to entertainment. We have seen hundreds and hundreds of live performances and rarely have we walked away without having taken at least some enjoyment from the experience.
So why, I wonder, do others seem to find things to criticize or complain about at every concert, movie, play, dinner or travel experience?
Mostly, I suppose, it’s a perceived way of getting value. “I’m paying for it and I want it to meet my expectations.” But is that really value, or is just a way of putting oneself into the story?
We take quite the opposite approach. When we make the choice to take in a musical performance, or watch a movie, or go to dinner, or travel to new environs, or visit an art show or gallery, we are also deciding that we want to enjoy ourselves, to get an experience that adds to our lives. If that means moving out of our comfort zone or being exposed to something we might not want a lot of, so be it. But rarely are we unable to appreciate the efforts that people make to entertain or amuse or host us.
With that same attitude, we took our sons to live theatre and music and sports when they were still kids. We didn’t expect them to swoon over an evening at the Banff Centre watching Don Giovanni, or to understand everything that was going on in Les Misérables in Edmonton, but we wanted them to know there is more to the world than what they might have experienced from television (though we had only what our cheap TV antenna would bring in to the house) or whatever was available in Creston.
For myself, I’m much happier having found a nugget of pleasure in everything I take in than to search for reasons not to like it.
Lorne Eckersley is the publisher of the Creston Valley Advance.