opera – i'll apple your turnover

I think their primary prejudice is, Why does it have to take seven minutes to sing “I love you,” or five minutes to sing “I’m dying now”? I always say, “But that’s extremely fast.” Not in realistic terms, of course. But if you go to opera and expect realism, you’re really stupid. It’s not realism, obviously – even if we build a realistic set. Trying to express yourself about love in five minutes is fast. It can take two years to say that or to even understand that. Saying “I’m dying” in seven minutes is fast. Thinking about death occupies people from puberty through the rest of our lives. It’s the biggest existential question there is. But to express yourself about the feeling of dying, or the anxiety of dying, in seven minutes is actually pretty fast. My point is, in one evening, you go through in two and one-half hours what the rest of us spend our whole emotional lives living through. (…) It’s a workout, intense and focused – if you look for the emotional dimension and not the realistic one. Opera tries to show life as it is, not as it looks. (…) The reason it seems long is that we spend time on what’s important in life. When you look at your life, what’s going to define what it was? Not the everyday business, but the emotional highlights, disasters, or triumphs you had. That’s what we focus on in opera. and that’s because we have music.

Kasper Bech Holten (director of the Danish Royal Opera) answering the question “Do you think your average spectators have difficulty investing themselves emotionally?” in Joshua Jampol’s book Living Opera

accras:

At 33, Ms. Yende has become one of the most accomplished and charismatic coloratura sopranos of her generation. Last season at the Met she appeared in three productions; her recent Met appearance as Adina in Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore” will be broadcast nationally on PBS on April 29.

She will be the soloist in the Met Orchestra’s concert at Carnegie Hall on June 5, singing Mozart’s “Exsultate, jubilate” and the solo in the finale of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. Next season she stars in “La Fille du Régiment” and “Les Pêcheurs de Perles.”

But when Ms. Yende was growing up in a Zulu-speaking home in South Africa, the daughter of a businessman and a primary schoolteacher, she was aware of few role models for a black girl who wanted to be an opera singer. As human beings, she explained, we are inspired by the “pictures” of life we see.

“I guess at the time I hadn’t seen so many on the world stage like me,” she said. Singers like Leontyne Price and Kathleen Battle had by then paved the way for black artists, but while growing up, Ms. Yende was essentially unaware of their existence in what seemed to her an almost all-white field.

As a teenager, Ms. Yende dreaded her name. “I didn’t feel I was pretty at all,” she said. But she came around. Her name is “delicate,” she said, with “so many subtleties” — suggestive of “wish and will,” sentiments that still guide her.

She showed up for “Lucia” at the Met this month with clear ideas about the opera and the inner strength of the character, a role closely associated with great divas like Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland.

Ms. Yende’s success hasn’t pushed aside her questions concerning race and opera. For sure, she said, classical music institutions, music schools and universities have much work to do to recruit young artists who have been historically excluded from the art form. On the positive side, though, Ms. Yende said that both opera companies and audiences have mostly embraced colorblind casting.

“I think we are experiencing a big change,” she said. “The world might
not see it. But the operatic world is really breaking this wall, and we
have to thank the opera houses and casting directors.”

‘I Could Barely Sing a High C’: Pretty Yende Finally Conquers Lucia