Confessions of a Cultured Ass: An Apology

I love opera though my joy is complicated. As a child I found a Victrola in my grandmother’s attic. I was blind and often terribly alone. I wrote about this in my memoir “Eavesdropping” where I describe how I heard Enrico Caruso’s voice for the first time on a solitary afternoon. From the start I was hooked on great singing.

I’m sure all opera lovers have stories like mine. Someone in Nebraska hears Jussi Bjorling on the radio and the die is cast. My sister heard Maria Callas as Medea. For my grandmother “the voice” was Lily Pons. It doesn’t matter who the singer is, the moment is greater than a particular voice–“the moment” is liminal, to borrow anthropologist Victor Turner’s term–you step outside the small circle of your life, cross an invisible threshold and you’re never again the same. This liminal and transformative experience is true for all arts–it’s even true for sports or peering through a telescope. For Galileo “the moment” came when he saw the valleys of the moon, valleys like the fingers of a giant hand. Whatever “the moment” may be in your life nothing afterwards is ever again the same.

Why then am I a cultured ass? Because culture depends on discernments and comparasons refined and even redacted by one’s earliest artistic discoveries; because nothing ever again rivals Caruso or Shakespeare or Fats Domino and there’s not much one can do about it minus a large dose of comic irony–a fancy way of saying “unless you love an art form more than your own nostalgia and sentimentality” which is no easy thing.

So I hear a tenor and instaneously wave my opera lover’s scepter, a wand of tin foil and dime store glitter, an amateur fetish but reliable. “He’s no Caruso!” I shout. I make a little abbra cad abbra gesture to the empty air. (All critics do this, even professionals, though they won’t tell you. I once saw art critic Clement Greenberg abbra cad abbra-ing all over the place at an academic conference…)

Pushed to extremes such knee jerk wand dabbing robs a man or woman of irony and wonder. “He’s no Caruso” means almost nothing, for even if you grant the tenor from Naples is the foundational voice of Italian tenors (the metaphor is Pavarotti ‘s) who wants to stay forever on a solitary floor of the building? The answer is the child wants to–the child would prefer to live forever with the neuro-plastic charge of first hearing a voice, a voice like milk and iodine, a voice that calls you into a secret house, a house of candles and moonlight.

Culture depends on comparisons. Discernment, taste, ambition, all are built from the declaration “He’s no Caruso” but the ironist knows this is a fine thing. A necessary thing. A beautiful and liberating thing.