On Feb 10, 2005, at 1:42 PM, Chuck Israels wrote:
I go to the opera in a state of suspension of disbelief, otherwise I cannot enjoy it. Many opera plots seem ridiculous to me, and taking 15 minutes to die while singing...well, you see what I mean. So that's the price of enjoyment of the spectacle and the music.
But that's not what we're talking about. There are different levels of suspension of belief. The fact that characters are singing where in real life they would either speak to one another or think silently to themselves is a function of the operatic medium. Likewise for the non-equivalence of stage time to real time, that characters are (almost) always facing forward and never away from the audience, that we never see the boring parts of life such as going to the bathroom or sleeping for six hours between one day and the next, etc -- characteristics shared with related media such as film or theater.
In our discussion of Magic Flute here, all of the practical artifacts of the operatic medium are taken for granted. We're discussing the unrealism of the story beyond that.
When Otello overhears only fragments of the conversation between Iago and Cassio, and Cassio hears none of Otello's asides, in spite of the fact that all three are singing loudly enough to be heard clearly by the audience, that is merely a function of the operatic medium, outside of the story. Inside the story, we can imagine that they are speaking in quieter tones and Otello's hiding place is something better than just on the other side of a cardboard tree. Our suspension of disbelief requires us to forget about the stage mechanics and imagine a story which is fundamentally realistic.
At the end of Magic Flute, when Monostatos, the Queen and the Ladies sink into the earth, that's not just a function of staging. Inside the story, a hole has opened up in the earth and swallowed them all whole. Our suspension of disbelief requires us not only to ignore the trap door on the stage floor, but to imagine an event which is itself unrealistic.
These are two different types of disbelief. One is a plausible (albeit exaggerated) story distorted by operatic presentation; the other is a story which is entirely fanciful whether operatic or not.
mdl
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