The V&A is about to launch its giant show Opera: Passion, Power and Politics. In this exclusive extract from his new book Hear Me Out, Armando Iannucci revels in the artform’s weird rituals, from Wagnerians in cowboy hats to the sublime music soaring out over your neighbour’s coughing
Opera is the coming together of music, theatre, design, people and coughing in the greatest synthesis of art capable of collapsing at the beep of a watch alarm. It is man’s highest creation, his most expansive assertion of artistic supremacy over the inferior beasts and birds of nature who, proficient though they might be with sticks and spittle, can’t perform tricks as staggeringly complex as mounting a three-act declaration of love from a wooden castle.
Foxes don’t sing and leverets are incapable of costume design, so they needn’t bother trying. Armies of termites, though they may impress us with their 20ft-high mud constructions, haven’t a hope in hell of building anything out of wet dirt as architecturally elaborate as a publicly funded opera house, with its dazzling honeycomb of boxes and its awesome web of sturdy crush bars. Have I made myself clear, animals? We’re better than you, so go back to doing what you do best, which is sniffing at bushes.
The music reaches a peak of intensity – symbolising Tristan and Isolde being at it like knives
There is still a suspicion wafting across the audience that they have paid to watch a huge bad thing
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Source: Opera News from the UK Guardian
