Acting Opera
Source: arts.endow.gov
Topic: Acting Career
Sort Desciption: Letters from the Board Acting Opera By Leon Major and Michael Laing (This article originally appeared in OPERA Americas Singer Career Network newsletter, Voices , Volume 5.
Content Inside:
Letters from the Board
Acting Opera
By Leon Major and Michael Laing
(This article originally appeared in OPERA Americas Singer Career Network newsletter, Voices , Volume 5. Number 1. Summer 2001)
O
pera is artifice; its not everyday life. What makes it
work—what makes it lively and absorbing, not to
mention grand and elaborate—is craft. Craft in opera,
as in any other art, is built up out of precise details,
imaginatively forged into a whole. If the specific,
detailed demands of either music or drama are sloughed
off in favor of generalized attitudes or vague gestures,
however grand or passionate, the artifice is not sustained.
The performance fails.
If the artifice cant be sustained—if the details of music
and words and action cant be forged into living theater—then
we dont have an opera. We have something
else: At best, an expensive display of costume and music;
at worst, a waste of talent. Luckily, the craft needed to
create and sustain the illusion of opera can be learned.
Why Action is the Basis of Character
In an opera, as in a play or movie, there must be
progress. Characters begin somewhere; they end
somewhere else. Where they end must be different than
where they began. Watching a character on stage not
move or change or develop would be like watching
cement dry.
Action starts with desire, with wanting something. A
man and a woman love each other. Once one of them
has said, "Io tamo, " the audience knows where it is, and
is set for what comes next: Finding out how the lovers go
about achieving their love. How do the man and woman
break down the barriers that prevent them from coming
together? They dont just stand still, having emotions,
expressing themselves. They do things, they make
discoveries, they act. ...
