Tuesday’s Opera Outing

Attending the Metropolitan Opera on the evening before a philosophy mid-term exam was one of the greatest things I could have done, and did! I had seen other film an stage productions of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (including one I participated in during my junior year of high school), but Tuesday’s version was by far the most modern. Of course, people often imagine that Shakespeare’s plays are performed with a Renaissance setting, whether this mean the set looks antique or the setting really is Europe. However, this performance changed the way I thought of on-stage opera and the means by which the audience is captivated.

No one doubts the excellence of the Met, so the cast were bar none some of the greatest the opera world has to offer. Yes, the singing of opera is indeed an art form, but the set did just as good a job at sparking intrigue. When my high school put on our production of Midsummer, we tried very hard to replicate the Athenian and forest scenes to the letter. In particular, many of the forest scenes took place in front and within four towering green walls that had been constructed with a red door fashioned into their corners. In addition, a large tree branch had been constructed through the green walls in such a way that it had pierced the walls. At the start, the same frustration that I express towards Duchamp’s “In Advance of a Broken Arm”. Around halfway through the first act, though, I realized that the four walls symbolized the four lovers: Helena and Demetrius, Hermia and Lysander; the branch represented the Puck’s mistake with the love spell and the lover’s quarrels that followed. In many of the world’s cultures, the color red represents love and passion. This made me wonder if the doors represented the entryway to each of the four lovers’ hearts, and that each character who passed through the doors were following an intricate stage directions that followed intricacies of the storyline. Lastly, I wonder if the tree branch had been forced into the four walls or had grown through them gradually, each possibility leading to a slightly different interpretation of the story.

Overall, I had a fantastic time at Tuesday night’s outing to the Metropolitan Opera. In many ways, my opinion of the opera changed for the better. Therefore, I look forward to attending many more operas with the Macaulay class in the four years at Macaulay.