So I spent my spring break mildly depressed and sleep depraved. But beyond these silly suicidal theatrics, I managed to score free tickets to a live high definition broadcast of a Met Opera. I'm a loser of the squared degree, but I was well tuned for the occasion, and blown away by an opera that my tiny mind can only partially compute.
Walking out of Peter Grimes, I was struck at how desperate and bleak a thing I'd just seen. The darkness of the opera had swallowed me, and the brightness of the food court was like coming to the surface too quickly. All of the noise and people were too much; I wanted to scream, and for Benjamin Britten's piercing score to pour out my mouth, shaking the souls of the people eating their fast food. But alas, the only way out is down: for me, the escalators, but for Grimes, a death that plunged him into the deep giant abyss that surrounds our lives. And there is no hope, only the fatal delusion that we can change it.
Maybe I'm being a bit too grim for my own good, because the fatalism of Grime's libretto is offset by a score that is as alive as the sea, rising, breaking, and shattering the nerves like the worse case of sea-sickness. It almost acts as a substitute for that very object that can't ever be recreated, only represented through metaphors, but none so mystically as the music that Britten has given us. The way the chorals collide, climaxing at frantic nail-bitting peaks, and somewhere in between the thing becomes so stark that the shades of light that make it through the blinds are a welcomed relief. And Britten has given those moments, those visions and dreams of love, prosperity. No matter that Grimes is lost from the start, because we ourselves are lost in that great bottomless mystery, struggling to surface the truths that might save or destroy us.
The work of Dickens and Poe, Melville's Moby Dick, and Crane's the Open Boat all are evoked by the nihilism of Grimes, but I am never one to mistake darkness with absurdity. Somewhere at the root of Grimes is a mirror reflecting the heart of madness, the dark soul, a product of a society that has lost it's community. Perhaps Britten's Grimes is most frightening because it reflects our sex-obsessed, hypocritical age. Torn by ideals lost, ravaged by hatred, we live on the threads of a better future, but are meanwhile so reckless in our actions that all may be lost. When there is no longer a core, a vision for the future, society may drift recklessly till it's upended by the tides of a perilous age.
As for the broadcast itself, I think it's peculiar that this is perhaps the most exciting thing going on in theaters today. While the audience was mostly the elderly, there was a vibrancy in the theater that cannot be mistaken for some slick Hollywood machine. There was actually discussion going on during the fifteen minute intermissions, people trying to formulate and articulate their feelings for this archaic art form. And to be as close to the flutist, and to see the sweat drip off of the maestro's face, these are visions that echo the dramatic qualities of the music itself.
