So, there I was, sitting in the local Bijou, sold out for this high-def Metropolitan Opera production of Lucia di Lammermoor. And there was Anna Netrebko, singing her lovely heart out and singing beautifully (if a bit raspily in her middle range). Lucia-Anna loves Edgardo (the not very exciting tenor), but there was her cruel tyrannous brother forcing her (in the splendid baritone of Mariusz Kwiecen) to marry the uninteresting but influential Arturo who will rescue the family. As you can see from my parentheticals, I'm not transported. I'm not swept off my feet. Yes, it's gorgeous music, but somehow the opera as a whole isn't grabbing me. What's the problem? Something isn't happening the way it should in my brain.
Opera is "music drama." It is supposedly even more emotion-arousing than either music or drama alone. I remember that, long ago, the old Life magazine called Don Giovanni the greatest work of art in world history because it had everything, music, story, acting, dance, and Mozart.
But most opera plots, even Don Giovanni's, would fit in a short story if that. Lucia consists simply of two warring families in the manner of Romeo and Juliet. Lucia, the daugher in one, falls in love with Edgardo, last remaining member of the other. But Edgardo has to go off to France to repair his family's fortunes (is he seeking a bail-out?). Lucia's brother Enrico intercepts his letters, convinces Lucia that Edgardo is unfaithful, and forces the girl to marry Arturo. On the wedding night, she stabs Arturo and then she collapses, in the famous mad scene, finally dying herself. Edgardo, somewhat left over at this point, suicides.
The music is great, the story is all right, but the combination doesn't get to me the way even an ordinary movie or play does. (I should have used the term psychologists use: it doesn't "transport" me.) I think the problem is that the music and the story are doing inconsistent things in my brain.
Neuroscientists have been writing a lot lately about music in the brain. Music you like activates the same dorsal striatal systems as chocolate, pictures of loved ones, or ideas of revenge. In more detail, listening to music creates expectations that need to be answered, and as the music progresses, it answers those expectations, creating new ones, that then are answered and so on. We are probably dealing with what Jaak Panksepp has called the SEEKING system. Robinson and Berridge offer useful terms for this kind of expectation and satisfaction: wanting and liking. We can think of music as a succession of cycles, wanting, liking, wanting, liking, wanting, liking . . .
Stories do the same thing. What will happen next? I expect, and then the story answers my question or expectation, but at the same time it creates a new expectation, and so on until the end of the story. Then all the expectations are resolved (or else we feel distinctly dissatisfied).
Our brains then are experiencing two parallel patterns of wanting-liking, wanting-liking. They should combine. But notice the difference.
I can tell the story of Lucia di Lammermoor in a paragraph, but the music drama goes on for well-nigh three hours, not counting intermissions. The two cycles are wildly out of synch. No wonder audiences applaud after a great aria, completely disrupting the story side of the experience. Watching opera is more like watching an athletic event than a narrative. Opera as a whole is a classic example of Berthold Brecht's alienation effect.
Opera, then, includes great works of art, but they may or may not transport us. Probably the music can, the individual aria or orchestral passage, but not the story. Its slow pattern of wanting-liking, wanting-liking is constantly being short-circuited by the rapid wanting-liking of the music.
Is my hypothesis true? I'd like to try it out next March 7 when the local Bijou will be playing Madama Butterfly, an opera that always brings me to tears. Am I responding just to the music? Or will my brain be combining music and story in a synchronized way?
If you haven't tried the Metropolitan Opera high-definition simulcasts, do so! They are terrific, in many ways better than going to the opera house itself. Everything is close-up, the sound is good (not quite like the live human voice, but close), and the price is a tenth of what a seat at the Metropolitan in New York would cost you. March 7, Madama Butterfly, be there. I will.
Psychological items I referred to:
Robinson, T. E. and K. C. Berridge. "The Neural Basis of Drug Craving: An Incentive-Sensitization Theory of
Addiction."
Brain Research: Brain Research Reviews 18.3 (Sept.-Dec 1993): 247-91.
Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience (Oxford, 1998), ch. 8.
