Thread 127545131

I can't get enough of classical music, I can listen to a piece over and over again and never get bored. But every time I try to listen to opera my mind immediately disengages after the overture ends. Wagner is so beloved and I love the instrumental music I've heard from his operas, but I cannot for the life of me find them compelling. The acting doesn't grab my imagination and I get tired of the singing quickly. How do I learn to like it?

You don't. Opera is for faggots and women.

>>127545131 (OP)
Start with easier to enjoy operas, like Mozart and Weber.
Make sure you're watching (if you're not listening to a classic recording) a high quality performance, such as this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjcDVmV0Zhw

Most opera performances on film are bad. Wagner especially doesn't have many good performances on film, so your best bet is just to listen to a classic recording from him. Aside from some very weird interpretative decisions, Edith Cleaver gives a fantastic performance as Kundry in this film, which may give you some idea of what people like about opera:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL5-I3IR4uo

>>127545665
you would know

>>127545131 (OP)
I'm not an opera guy but I'm a fag whose birthday coincides with the opera season so I'll go to the opera house on a Sunday afternoon if one catches my interest. It's not something I'd listen to casually. I watched a performance of Das Rheingold and that rocked. It had my attention the whole way through and the ending brought the house down, but there were some great performances, and they mixed the German Paganism with Valhalla as construction cranes and corporate skyscrapers, and I'd glance around and see these really rich old guys in the audience contemplating their doom.
https://youtu.be/-FpORD59Lnk

Then I went and saw a performance of Strauss' Elektra the next year and that was pretty good too. More of a whole aesthetic experience.

>>127545665
Monteverdi, Handel, Gluck, Mozart, Cherubini, Weber, Rossini, Wagner, Verdi and Strauss all wrote their greatest works in opera. If you don't like opera, you don't like classical music.

>>127545131 (OP)
>and I get tired of the singing quickly
do the singing yourself
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNiHzOsjoLQ

>>127548132
Crazy that someone has probably done this.

>>127545131 (OP)
Watch them if you haven't already. That helps, I think. I don't like opera either, but the great opera composers (Mozart, Wagner, R. Strauss) somehow just make it work. Wagner is so complex and musically interesting that I can't imagine not finding him amazing to dive into. The lack of traditional musical "numbers", the Leitmotifs evolving and combining, the stretching harmony...

>>127545131 (OP)
Operas are tedious I agree, but the operas of "Wagner"? The Bard of Bacchus? No. Wagner was a philosopher first before a musician, he grasped the concept of "will" passed down to him by the great Schopenhauer. He understood the human condition i.e. desires and emotions, which is why he invented leitmotifs. These recurring notes carefully employed and scattered like gold dust which sparkles the imagination when struck by the eye of "will". It is not even hypnosis, it is complete capitulation of the senses. You can say Opera is bad, but Wagnerian Opera is different.

Wagner is different. "He" is something else, something the ordinary mind cannot grasp. I suggest you forget about Wagner, lest you find yourself completely disturbed. This is truly "dangerous" stuff you are treading on. Immediately change course.

>>127548732
You write like a Jacobean comic relief character attempting to flaunt his minimal erudition and wit.

>>127548732
Idk why but I feel like you should have been bullied more in high school to set you right

>>127545131 (OP)
Wagner didn't write operas, he wrote "music dramas".

>>127546530
Mozart's 20th piano concerto, 41st symphony, clarinet concerto and Haydn quartets were not operas

>>127549289
Mozart's greatest works are his operas. He would most likely agree with that, as he also considered himself first and foremost an opera composer, by the way. He pretty much said opera was where a composer could make a real name for himself, and that opera is the field in which he could show he was really capable of, and that only in opera could he combined all his skills (melody, harmony, orchestration, drama).

>>127548732
You’re right though desu

>>127548732
>These recurring notes carefully employed and scattered like gold dust which sparkles the imagination when struck by the eye of "will". It is not even hypnosis, it is complete capitulation of the senses. You can say Opera is bad, but Wagnerian Opera is different.
It was awesome. I can't explain why. I'm not an opera person. Maybe you did with "complete capitulation of the senses." There was something that lulled me or something that buried itself into my mind and then I was up in the mezzaine like Oh My God during the finale. I think it's what philosophers talk about the "sublime."

>This is truly "dangerous" stuff you are treading on. Immediately change course.
There are some real Wagner freaks out there.

>>127545665
Fpbp

>>127549289
All great works, but only the dilettantish fascination with formal ingenuity, at the expense of all other qualities in an artwork, could lead one to claim them superior to Don Giovanni.

>>127550866
Pretentious nonsense

>>127550968
It's pretentious nonsense to say the 20th piano concerto is greater than Don Giovanni.

>>127550866
Nta but Don Giovanni is formally ingenious too, is it not?

Do You know how to read music?
I just put on the score vídeo and read along, or download the PDF.