The secret

The secret to enjoying high-culture arts like operas and the ballet is to know the storyline before watching the performance.

We go to symphonies for the pure enjoyment of watching the conductor and the orchestra paint their tableau of music. There may be a backdrop of information behind the music, or more often than not, there is nothing but the music. But what if intead of just music, there is a storyline? The music by itself is not enough to convey the narrative. This is when the music and the musicians go into the background, and characters emerge to carry the narrative. On one end of this is a musical, with dialog and songs. Moving up the scale is the operetta where almost all of the dialog is rendered in song. At opera scales, the dialog itself becomes more stylized in the form of poetry. Topping out would be a ballet, where there is no dialog, and the narrative is danced as a strict discipline.

Most people start distancing themselves at the opera level, largely because the vocals weren’t quite comprehensible. When it comes to ballets, men flee, and women watch it for the beauty and elegance of the dancers, and not necessarily for the plot.

If you know the storyline to the opera or the ballet, then the audience gets to fill in the context for the artists expression of the story.

Without knowing the storyline, Swan Lake is a nice dance. With the storyline, it is a tale of love, betrayal, and redemption. Not knowing the plot, you lose the motivation for Odette: she is just a dancer moving here and there for no really good reason. Knowing the story of Swan Lake transforms her performance to one of sadness at being cursed to live as a Swan by day, and why even though an evil sorcerer cursed her thus, she still protected the sorcerer from being killed by the Prince because the curse could never be broken if the sorcerer was dead. It requires knowing the story of Swan Lake to understand that Odette and Odile are two very different people, even though in this production, both parts were danced by the same person.

Even without knowing the full backstory to Swan Lake, it was a beautiful perfomance by the dancers. The swans were especially graceful, using their bodies, arms, and legs to mimic the sway of swans.

Part of looking up the backstory of Swan Lake, I also discovered that over the years, there has been several different endings to the ballet, from the romantic to the tragic. The production in Pittsburgh is the version danced by the American Ballet Theater, which has a bittersweet ending in apotheosis after their deaths.