Pope Joan

Driving home a nail into the door of the Schlosskirche in Wittenberg in 1517 on which to hang a list of 95 clerical abuses was Martin Luther's act of whistle-blowing, unequivocally calling the Catholic Church to account for its intermingling of theology and capitalism that he found so reprehensible. This was the primary catalyst of the movement that we call The Reformation, officially blowing the whistle on the church's immoral tactics and practices, and legitimizing the opposing forces that had been amassing on its flanks.

Chief on his list of grievances had become the selling of indulgences, by which, for a price, the hapless could purchase future heavenly release from the consequence of their misdeeds on earth. This would not sound quite so benighted to our 21st century ears if the church had not recently reintroduced the practice. Of all the barriers that the church had erected for its own financial gain between God and the believer, Luther considered this the most egregious.

Chaucer satirizes the Pardoning profession in The Canterbury Tales, deriding the man who shamelessly ble$$es the gullible with his bag of 'holy relic' meat bones to support his bawdy alcoholism. His appearance and demeanor are of a piece with his insalubrious attitude to the rest of the party, and the tale that he contributes to the set of stories, of three louts keen to out-swindle each other, is humorlessly nihilistic.  

Luther's goal was twofold; to attack the corruption within the clergy that was taking advantage of the general populace, and to attack the church's gaudy trappings that had become such a lucrative sideline even though they littered and impeded the believer's path to the divine. The regalia of the church had actually become a barrier to the thing to which the organization was claiming to provide access, and instead of making God more approachable, the path to God had become strewn with more and greater obstacles that were removable only by the application of cash, or by the exchange of some useful worldly influence.

Which brings us to the world of grand opera. The death last week at the age of 83 of Joan Sutherland, La Superba, unofficial pope of the church of bel canto opera, rings the knell on an age of interest in the specifically grand operas of Donizetti, Bellini and Verdi, similarly high artifacts on the scale of the Gaudy Trappings Quotient. They too draw attention to their own tawdry magnificence by introducing yet more layers between the worshiper and the deity. The church has thuribles, thurifers and reredoses, grand opera has cavatinas, recitatives and turbe dramatice. The church is presided over by the pontiff, the opera is presided over by the prima donna.   

Credibility in grand opera is not of prime concern; you can hardly throw a brick in a work by Donizetti without hitting a beautiful village maiden who is in love with a penniless painter who turns out to be a Viscount, and who later goes insane. Verdi's Il Trovatore is so famously opaque that "to have an chance at all of understanding it, you first have to learn a background story that's even more complex and unlikely. Then, when it all shakes out in the end, it's hard to know who betrayed whom, who threw which baby into the fire — and whether we've just seen a bitter old man unwittingly execute his own brother or a vengeful old woman plotting to get her beloved son beheaded. Or both." (NPR)

Rather than a road to the divine, which I take to be the amplification of drama by music even to the point of danger, the road itself has become a diversion from the divine, and the objects along the road have assumed falsely divine significance. The magnificence of the display, the costume drama dress-up of it all has replaced the initial relationship of the seeker to the goal, the very thing that Luther was wishing to reestablish. When the audience forgives the dramatic ludicrousness of a corpse singing from inside a sack because she sings so beautifully and the high notes are so stratospherically gorgeous, there may as well be pig bones in that sack because the mission of sustaining and intensifying a narrative by musical means has been derailed, it has indeed been undermined, and who cares any more if the relics are real or not.

Operatic reality is when the actors on stage are so full of their characters that it comes out of them in the form of song; they are not singing about being angry, they are so full of angry that the only way to express it is to sing it out. Try to say, "Let there be Light!" as if you were ordering lunch and you'll understand; things take on their own natural weight and intensity. Intensity of emotion is the root of song.

However, what what is important is not the altarcloth, the crozier or the chasuble. Sung drama is by definition drama that is sung. Take away the narrative, and all you have is pompous singers playing with make-up. Take away God from the church and all you have is an old man in purple Prada slippers and a hat like a tea-cozy. And why would you want to take that away?