Opera's a lot more than just the fat lady singing

Opera students sing from the tram at the Saturday market during this year's Opera Week in Wanganui. PHOTO/FILE

When I was 10 years old, my father took me to a performance of Lohengrin at the old Metropolitan Opera House and very nearly fostered a complete hatred of opera.

As a young man in Vienna during the 1920s, my father had developed a love of opera. He was a poor lad from a Russian village with only an apprentice-tailor certificate for a qualification, but Vienna was then awash in music and he stretched his spare pfennigs for standing room at the Staatsoper at every opportunity.

Loving opera as he did, he sought to endow his son with similar pleasure. Except, that sitting through six hours of Wagnerian opera felt more like torture to this 10-year-old than pleasure. It took 30 years and a performance of Mozart's Magic Flute under the stars of the Santa Fe Opera House to bring me around to beginning to get the point of opera.

Locally, Opera Week proffers satisfaction of that reawakened desire. But recently, on a trip to New York, I ran into a bit of luck, part of which I'd like to share. The Met offers 50 heavily discounted seats for some performances, available by lottery, to seniors. In a repetition of history I had hoped to take my 15-year-old grandson to see Eugene Onegin but that didn't work. Instead I was lucky to get seats for The Nose.

The Met has produced its operas in high definition video, and while we await the coming of our own Opera Week, a series of the Met comes to Wanganui's Embassy 3.

It happens that the next in line, on November 21, is The Nose, an opera by Shostakovich. It's based on a story by Gogol and there's no spoiler alert when I summarise the plot. A Russian bureaucrat, one of that country's countless mid-level functionaries - a tragic-comic character common to imperial and later Soviet Russia - wakes one day to the discovery that he has lost his nose. The nose has decided to go walkabout and to assume a higher position in society, whence it will have nothing to do with its former owner. The bureaucrat is forced to go all over the town, to the police, to church officials, to anyone and everyone to whom he can appeal to get his nose back. When he finally succeeds, it's only by traditional means - bribery. Though there's union with his nose, it's bittersweet.

Shostakovich was working in the Soviet era and it's reasonable to see the Gogol story in its modern incarnation. That said, the music is challenging, often dissonant, and certainly not easy listening. Just the same, the score brilliantly captures and enlarges the story. What makes this a fully realised operatic piece is the production design by South African artist William Kentridge.

His own family lineage is steeped in seeking social justice. His parents, both lawyers, often defended victims of apartheid. Kentridge is known for his drawings and their reworking with film and animation. He applied these skills to this extraordinary production, which hinges on a curtain scrim upon which the actions of the opera take place, mingling moving images, puppets and people, with slogans, flags, banners and silhouettes elaborating the context. The huge scale of the background makes the characters seem small - in line with Gogol's viewpoint.

The Nose runs about two hours, uninterrupted by those dreadful intermissions with chat-ups with the singers that break the mood.

The upshot is my recommendation that you go to see one or more of these opera performances. Tickets are expensive at $28 for seniors and $33 for regular people but worth it. It's cheaper than the undiscounted price of US$240 for a seat at the Met in New York. The view on screen is much better and you can take a drink to your seat here. That's a no-no in NYC.

Just my suggestion: leave that 10-year-old out of it - until they make an opera about zombie vampires.