BACKGROUND MUSIC Rise Stevens, “Habanera,” from Bizet, Carmen
No opera plot can be sensible, for in sensible situations people do not sing. An opera plot must be, in both senses of the word, a melodrama. (W. H. Auden)
Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings. (Ed Gardner, Duffy’s Tavern)
She sang, of course, ‘M’ama!’ and not ‘he loves me,’ since an unalterable law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences. (Edith Wharton)
And now, on with the opera! Let joy be unconfined! Let there be dancing in the streets, drinking in the saloons, and necking in the parlor! (Otis B. Driftwood, aka Groucho Marx)
I was thirteen when the Met came to Cleveland. Schoolchildren from all over the county were bussed to Severance Hall to hear the Metropolitan Opera road company perform refined music, in this case, Bizet’s Carmen. Rise Stevens played Carmen.
I went but hated it. At the time and for a long time afterwards, opera seemed to me to be composed almost totally of overweight divas and bald old men, all of them mediocre actors. As to the sopranos, they seemed never to see a crisis they couldn’t screech their way out of, and the tenors, baritones and bassos sounded beefed up, like alley cats spraying their pheromones across the air. There wasn’t solid dramatic content to most opera and god! operas seemed to go on forever! My viewpoint at the time was that opera was a florid medium and whatever I did and did not like in music, I didn’t like florid at all.
I did respond to Rise Stevens, though, whom I thought was hot. Which she probably was. I disliked opera intensely for a long time afterwards but never forgot her hotness.
It’s been sixty-eight years since then. How do I feel about opera now, with, I hope, a more balanced judgment of it? I’m still not crazy about whole operas though there are a few (very few) of them that I do love. Tosca is tops in my book, especially with Leontyne Price in the title role. I can listen over and again to Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas but it’s barely an opera, nor is Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, which I like almost as well. I dislike almost all of the operas of the great opera era, which is the Romantic nineteenth century.
I love individual arias, skipping past the dross of recitative and heading straight to the meat of it. I love, absolutely love Leontyne Price’s ‘Vissi d’arte.” Eileen Farrell’s “O mio bambino caro.” 
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s Handel. Emma Kirkby’s and Catherine Bott’s Purcell.
I just bought a CD of the Rameau opera Pygmalion, performed by Les Talens Lyriques (2017) and it’s great.
But in general, opera still strikes me as a bastard form, cursed with flabby plot and dialogue, weak in acting and with way too many long arid passages between brief glorious moments of sung and instrumental music that make it worth the effort of listening to it.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Leontyne Price, “Vissi d’Arte,” from Puccini, Tosca (1960)
MUSIC & ME 