This is Your Brain on Culture

How Stories, Poems, Plays, Movies and Other Arts Matter

Norman Holland specializes in the psychology of the arts. His latest book is Literature and the Brain, available at literatureandthebrain.com See full bio

March 22, 2009, Neuroscience

Opera Does Make Brain Sense--Sometimes

It isn't the story, it's the situation.

So, there I was, sitting in the local Bijou, sold out for this hi-def Metropolitan Opera production of La Sonnambula. And, like Lucia di Lammermoor and unlike Madama Buterfly, it's not getting to me.

I suggested, in my two previous blogs on opera, that it was not exactly "music drama" that makes opera the extraordinarily moving genre that it is. The plots don't do it. Rather, it is the situation around a given aria from which we in the audience make the extraordinary effect of "music drama." It seems to me that La Sonnambula proves the point.

Even by opera standards, this plot is idiotic. I thought it was further confused and its emotional possibilities even further reduced by Mary Zimmerman's re-setting the original hokey Swiss village as an opera company's rehearsal in a studio in New York. In effect, we are seeing, not the opera, but a rehearsal for the opera.

Natalie Dessaye as sleepwalker The plot: Elvino and Amina of elaborately emphasized chastity are to be married. The challenging role of Amina is sung beautifully by the delightfully playful Natalie Dessay. She gave us both wonderful coloratura and wonderful acting. Elvino is played by the handsome Juan Diego Flórez, whose singing is skillful but rather reedy for my taste. They are to be married, and the village (in New York street clothes) is joyfully celebrating. Count Rodolfo appears (the splendid bass-baritone of Michele Pertusi), praises everybody, flirts with the ladies, and retires to a room at a nearby inn. In the morning, Amina is found in the Count's bed, and Elvino in a jealous fury dumps her. But aha! in the second act the Count is able to show that she is (gee! gosh!) a sleepwalker (which we knew anyway from the title). And all ends happily.

Really! What nonsense and nonsense that does not allow for much in the way of the emotional situations that are key, as I believe, to fully feeling the arias.

There is one aria where I did respond deeply. Amina is still sleepwalking, and Dessaye sings it poignantly (on a platform extended way out over the orchestra isolating her from the rest of the company). She sings in a lovely muted, sleepwalking voice (Ah! non credea mirarti . . . ) of her pain and sadness at the fading of the flowers Elvino had given her and the cruel way he took their engagement ring back. Yesss! Yesss! Her sadness got to me and there was a hush in the audience.

I believe this aria got to us because the situation re-created primal feelings of loss with accompanying increase of stress hormones, and they added to the feelings we brought to the aria itself. But there are few other situations in this opera that evoke basic reactions in our primate brains because, I think, of the artificiality of the whole sleepwalking scheme.

So that's my theory, that opera works not by plot but situation by situation to get us to superhcharge the music with our own emotions derived subcortically, willy-nilly, from our mammalian brains responding to basic situations of primate life (like jealousy or loss). I'll be interested to see if you agree. The next Met Opera hi-def will be La Cenerentola, a prosaic re-working of the Cinderella story. I don't have much hope of basic primate emotional situations there.
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This has nothing to do with opera, but do not miss the Ébène Quartet--they are marvellous!