Point of view: What's opera, doc?

By Dan Sarluca

Before I attended my first performance, almost everything I knew about opera came from The Odd Couple reruns and a couple of Bugs Bunny cartoons. I grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood in the seventies, and my parents’ taste in music gravitated toward Frank Sinatra while I worshipped at the altar of rock ‘n’ roll’s electric guitar gods. My musical heroes were Pete Townshend and Neil Young — not Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti.

My wife, Lauren, a longtime opera fan, decided my first performance should be an afternoon show of Don Giovanni, Mozart’s piece based on the Don Juan legend, at the New York City Opera house.

“Now remember, I don’t care if you fall asleep,” she warned me, “but if you start snoring I’ll have to wake you up.”

I found myself enjoying Mozart’s accessible, hummable music and the fine comedic performance of Leporello, Giovanni’s sidekick. And I have to admit to a certain feeling of satisfaction upon seeing the scheming, narcissistic Giovanni get his just reward when he’s literally sucked down into the fires of hell through a trapdoor in the stage. Too bad the elderly ladies next to us missed most of the performance. They chose that afternoon to take a couple of high-priced naps instead.

After a few shows at the triple- A level City Opera, we decided I was ready for the big leagues: Tosca at the Met. I thought Act I was a little slow, though Puccini’s music was pleasant enough and the singers were in — as far as my untrained ear could tell — strong voice.

During the first intermission, I bought us a couple of glasses of the house Champagne and we strolled around the theater taking in the sights. While Lauren stood at the edge of the Grand Tier balcony admiring the cutglass chandelier and the two enormous Chagall murals covering the walls, I briefly poked my head in the Belmont Room, a lounge that was reserved for patrons who, in addition to their ticket subscriptions, kicked in a few hundred dollars extra a season to become Opera Guild members.

“I told you you couldn’t go in there,” Lauren said after she watched me slink back to her side.

“No kidding,” I replied. “Apparently there’s a two facelift minimum.”

While watching the second act I found myself sucked into the storyline as the title character, Floria Tosca, promises to sleep with the head of the secret police, the villain Scarpia, in exchange for his sparing the life of her imprisoned lover.

Once she has the signed safe-conduct papers in her hands, she grabs a knife off the table and stabs Scarpia, proclaiming, “This is Tosca’s kiss!” as he falls down, mortally wounded. That was pretty cool in itself, but when she straddles his prone body and taunts him with, “Are you choking on your own blood? Are you choking on your own blood?” it was more riveting and hard-core than any bullet-ridden revenge fantasy playing at the local multiplex.

Of course, not all operas have been a positive experience for me. There was that strange performance of an 18th-century opera by Rameau at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where much of the spastic choreography could best be described as a cross between Madonna “Vogue-ing” and someone trying to stamp out a fire that broke out in his pants. After enduring one especially convulsive episode I leaned over to Lauren and whispered, “Is someone in the orchestra supposed to steal second base?”

Even though I’m still a novice opera fan who mostly just listens when others discuss performances, I’m learning to hold my own. A few months ago at a party given by a friend who is a huge opera buff, I found myself complaining to him about the unrealistic staging of the climactic scene in Fidelio, the only opera Beethoven ever wrote, where the two leads — a husband and wife who’ve been separated by the husband’s imprisonment — are finally reunited and express their joy at seeing each other while standing 30 feet apart.

Suddenly I realized I’d come a long way from the teenage rock ‘n’ roll headbanger I once was to become the grown-up, sophisticated opera patron I am today. Now when I hear the overture to Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, I never picture Elmer Fudd getting his head massaged by Bugs Bunny backstage at the Hollywood Bowl. Well … hardly ever.

Dan Sarluca lives in Brooklyn. He has previously been published in the ‘My Turn’ column in ‘Newsweek.’

Point of view is an occasional column open to all readers.