An O-Puccini...

The Metropolitan Opera House at the Lincoln Center for the performing arts provided my first encounter ever with Opera on this Saturday. Premiered in Dec 1910, this Italian Opera, La Fanciulla del West,  by Giacomo Puccini was a treat even after a century of its first show. The MET subtitles in English were also a great aid in maintaining my interest in the opera and they also helped me to appreciate it even more.

It's significant to note that Opera was becoming popular in New York at the same time as the subway was being built and new artists from diverse backgrounds were encouraged to try their luck at the performing art centers throughout the city. The Opera outing on Saturday gave me a flashback of those days when different people from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds were getting together to perform and entertain the people of New York. So this 'tradition' of being modern had something to do with the infusion of different cultures into each other, something to do with mixing. I do not know if I gained some significant musical insights from the Opera performance but what I gained was an understanding that Opera represents a seamless "mix" of different arts including literature, poetry, music and theater. Thus, Opera has been an important part of the modern culture in many of the big cities in the west for the last hundred years or so.

In the 'La Fanciulla del West', Puccini uses the idea of three distinct one-act operas with different kinds of music for different situations and characters that take place on the stage. For instance, there is a special native american music for some characters in the Opera performance and there is sad, melancholic music when all the miners get nostalgic about their homes and their relations. Furthermore, there are various rise and falls in the music depending on the emotional outlook of the characters on the stage as well as the dramatic rise whenever the audience is anticipating the climax of a scene or that particular act.

So the exhilarating possibility of different people coming together with different kinds of music and mixing together and performing together is what characterizes the New York modern art scene because it not only speaks for the art that is being showcased but also for the cosmopolitan face of the modernity of New York.