opera is a damn silly thing

so i'm pretty sure opera is a fundamentally bogus form. it really doesn't work. its parts don't fit. you simply cannot foist incomprehensible singing onto narrative. the singers that can act cannot act saddled with the tempo of the music, cannot be characters, cannot feel anything but the most laughably crude emotions.

i think opera'd be great if it didn't insist on having rigorous narratives. if it was more expressionistic, more painterly, less clunkily claiming to represent a world in which people talk and love and murder just like us, except while singing SO FUCKING LOUDLY. how can it so tediously claim its verisimilitude when its fidelity is not to human heartbeats but the conductors wand, to the music. we sway internally to music, it's effect on  us is real and important, but imposing it on actual human movements is ridiculous. as actors, they're marooned by those arias.

also, isnt it hilarious how in operas people can only feel in duets? because they're frozen in the music, all romances are loved and all conflicts are hated in equal proportion by the parties involved. 

and that there have to be subtitles? 80 feet above the singers (not actors) heads? im not saying operas should be better enunciated, that the towering notes should cross their t's, only that it's such a goddamn  unnatural stretch to have operas depend on those words. 


and it's also why operas are so long. the clutching, loving pain with which opera clings to its every word and note makes it simply ridiculous to insist on it having so many words and notes. again, free it from the responsibility of saying them, ennumerating those operatic stories. let it full throatedly embrace the opera! the voices!
the sets are great! the singing is sometimes revelatory, like the voice of an oak tree or a racing heart or a dying bull. the costumes are wonderful! the sets divine! there just can't be all that plot, it does not fit.