Fool's Gold: Opera Man

A Plebe among greats

By Zach Hively

If you ever want to feel like the cream that has risen to the top of society, while simultaneously reaching the profound realization that you have wasted your life’s potential up to this moment, then I can only recommend going to the opera.

It is not the opera’s fault that you feel like an underachieving potato in a sportscoat, if you feel that way at all, which you will. The opera is simply doing what the opera does best.
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What does it do best, exactly? I have no idea. I don’t speak enough Italian or Operatic or whatever language they’re singing up there. But the opera is clearly doing something best. Their bestness is in the air of the entire event, and so prevalent that it seemed only natural for me to spend $16 of someone else’s money on a little glass of bubbly.

Maybe not all operas come across so superlatively. There could feasibly be a well-intentioned nonprofit out there staging “Der Ring des Nibelungenenginengnen” with an elementary-school orchestra, because that’s what they wrote the grant for. The odds of an entire grade-school symphony being superlative is slim, seeing as so few fifth graders have twenty-plus years of professional experience. I feel confident in suggesting they could not charge more than $8 for champagne.

What I do know about the opera is what I have experienced at the Santa Fe Opera, renowned for its open-air operatorium, world-class productions, and tailgating in the parking lot. I have only the most glowing things to say about this organization, in case they are ever hiring for experienced operagoing copywriters.

This season, a friend took me to see a production of “Don Giovanni,” composed by Mozart (yes, that Mozart, the one from the movie “Amadeus”) to a libretto by Da Ponte (yes, THAT Da Ponte, the paint magnate). SPOILER ALERT: Don Giovanni is Italian or Operatic or whatever for Don Juan, which translates into English roughly as “Don Juan,” aka a person (often a man) who probably thinks he is better with the ladies (often but not always women) than he really is.

I’m serious. Let’s do the math. Donny G’s age is indeterminate, but he is coded as a young-ish nobleman. So we shall arbitrarily decide that he is a middle-aged 31, the same age Mozart was when he composed the opera. (Feeling good about your own life’s accomplishments yet?) We shall also say, without textual evidence, that he has been intimately active since the age of 16, which was probably actually middle-aged in these ancient times.

Thanks to the unobtrusive subtitle screens provided to each operagoer, I know that Don Gio brags of bedding 2,065 women (so far!), with a complete roster to prove he is not at all obsessive. Assuming a steady rate of sleepless hay-hitting, without even allowing for a decreased initial success rate as he adjusted to the big leagues, ol’ Don G.V.’s cadence of conquest comes out to greater than one partner each three nights. For fifteen consecutive years.

Now, if we as good mathematicians control for him being a man bragging to other men on stage, we can adjust this result by at least a factor of ten. This brings the estimated tally to one partner each month—a more likely figure, considering the Black Death wiped out a third of Europe’s population, including women, some centuries before.

Whichever figure you believe, this fictional hero is still getting it on more than YOU are. Probably because he never wasted a single day of his life pounding Oreos.

But if Don G himself is not to be believed, then neither are the sets. These meisterwerks of stagecrafting genius will have you questioning even more of your life choices. Like, sure, you are sitting in the audience of a world-class opera production, three or four free (to you) doses of Gruet effervescing in your veins; but, should you have paid more attention in that class where the teacher told you you’d be hanging drywall the rest of your life if you didn’t shape up? Because look what you can do with drywall.

Fortunately, you are spared from your rumination by the entrance of the opera singers, who seem like normal everyday people at a Renaissance fair until they open their mouths.

This is when you realize what a commoner you are, no matter how glitzy your getup, no matter how pricy your ticket that someone else gave you. You know that you have achieved nothing as beautiful as these performers’ voices, and that nothing but an intense amount of training and dedication could ever bring you to such fulfillment of your potential.
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And who has time for training and dedication? My track record says, “Not me!” But even though I’m already older than Mozart was when he died, the opera has inspired me to believe, beyond all plausibility, that it really is never too late to pursue one’s dreams. So here I go. Really. As soon as my bubbly wears off.