The Death of Tragedy?

They used to say of opera: “It’s over when the fat lady sings.” (Incomprehensible stabbings; foreign lingo; over-the-top hammy acting…) Things have to be larger than life though. Otherwise, why are these people singing and not speaking?

And then, there’s the killing. Is it the blood and the killing that’s thrilling?

Despite the Sixth Commandment and the strictures of our laws, aren’t we still as obsessed with “taking people down” as we ever were?

Violetta and Mimi just cough themselves to death, of course. Then there’s Cho Cho San stabbing herself; Peter Grimes off to sea in a sink-prone boat; the guillotining of all the remaining Carmelites, and Mario shot by a firing squad with real bullets while Tosca gets splattered down the castle walls of the Castel San Angelo.  These all seem to reinforce the point.

Oh dear! Why do we love it so?

At least, in my own operas, Judith does the head-severing herself; and, while Voland does get himself hanged (in Fortunato), he’s kindly resurrected by his girlfriend, Mariella, and her little coven of witches. Brava Mariella!

Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher postulated, in his early work, “The Birth of Tragedy” that the ancient Greeks’ development of tragedy; the seeming inevitability of the wild “Goat Dance”, with its crazy maenad followers of Dionysus, led somehow inevitably to the operas of Ricĥard Wagner.

I wonder?

Soon after, Nietzsche was hounded out of his professorship at the university of Basel.