Jordan Mattox

I have been making my way through Wagner’s Ring Cycle over the last month. It has taken my longer than anticipated, not because I am not enjoying them, but due the reality that these operas, while beautiful, move at such a slow, plodding pace, it has taken me longer to watch them that I had planned. I am realizing now that one of the main benefits of the opera house is the confinement in the opera house. It’s almost like a roller coaster, where after you have buckled in you just need to see it through.

In latin, the word “opera” means literally work. Pretending that I can watch opera with ease serves further to create mythology and elitism around it. Even aficionados have moments of boredom, where the monkey mind looks down at the program to find the scene and to discern how close it is to the end of the act. I think that if more of us who do enjoy opera were more honest about heterogeneous experience with the art form, it might help to remove some of the barriers for people who don’t immediately understand and enjoy it and remove this dualist vision of the world that there are those who love opera and those who don’t. Some days I am in the mood for arias and vorspiels, some operas are boring, some operas are highest art forms ever created.