Cinema’s Illusions, Opera’s Allure

"Let’s take the Italian film director Sergio Leone who made films like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. He based all his dramatic structure on opera. You can hear that in the music in the movies and also in the way the drama was built up and the way the characters were introduced. It is all following in the dramatic line of Verdi and others that came before him. But, especially, Verdi honed this structure of storytelling through music and stagecraft that goes so fantastically into the early movies. Sergio was also an assistant director to famous operatic directors before he got into film-making. That is a huge subject. First of all, I think that opera is the most advanced art form that ever came out of Europe . In the history of Europe opera is the most complex and difficult art form. That is something that people often forget. It is similar to martial arts in Asia in terms of the dedication and training and tradition that goes into the art. But in Europe we celebrate martial art in a different way to operatic art because of the way we approach it. We approach it less and less from a grassroots type of mentality and I think that is where the problem starts. I am worried that people are going to try to focus more on big opera houses and less on the grassroots. The big danger is that when young people stop criticising or stop idealising and being naively optimistic about the arts, when they stop having any opinion, that is when the decline begins. And that is because they don’t feel that they have anything to do with it. I am introducing young people to the whole map of the operatic world immediately. I don’t do easy introductions or glamorise it or try to make it hip. I think that is the worst tactic. I want to show the complexity and the depth and the variety of it. So many people at the age of 12 or 13 are already interested in anything that is complicated and deep and profound and those kinds of people are those that continue an art form, whether as practitioners or as an audience, and they are the people I want to show the real world of opera. If you take something like pop music versus classical music or a pop singer versus an operatic singer… I object to the fact that all things are equal in terms of sophistication and essential value – just because all humans have the same rights it doesn’t mean all humans are equally qualified for complex tasks. A Formula One car is more expensive than an Audi TT because of the technology, effect, research and design that goes into the machine; there are definite differences in quality and function. In today’s society we find that individuals with immense wealth and physical beauty are somehow innately qualified to be adored and worshipped, but when someone attains skill or/and intellectual superiority from study and practice, this most often is disregarded or looked upon with suspicion – as something less valuable than expression of the ‘self’, that is ‘innate talent’. The direct expression of the ego is more important than the skill that somehow makes us more than normal individuals. What you have from birth is somehow, in our culture, more valuable in this context than the toil and work that goes into raising your skill way above that which is attainable by sheer intuition. My take on that is that we are all tempted to give animistic values to all kinds of entities and skills, as if a spirit of music entered our bodies at birth and gave us the talent to play and practise – thus allowing the rest of us who didn’t practise countless hours the alibi ‘we never were gifted to start with’, and therefore there wasn’t any point. In fact, it’s the other way around: to be able to practise countless hours you need a huge supporting system around you, you need the cultural surrounding for accepting this very anti-social behaviour, the acceptance from friends and family to sacrifice normal spontaneous life at an early age and the guiding ‘elitist’ idea that it’s important to improve all the time instead of accepting incorrect and imprecise expression. Also, only when you really master an art form can you be really free to express your humanity through the art – and then it sounds like or looks like ‘no effort’ – well, the effort is in the decades of training beforehand."