Omniscience, Opera, and Where's My Cake? I've been listening to L'Orfeo of late, which is the sort of thing I do so that I can act like a pompous ass, chattering about toccati and so forth at cocktail parties. Which I don't attend, but the principle still applies. Generally when I confess an interest in opera I get one of two responses:

"So, do you really like that sort of stuff?" or

"Kill the wabbit! Kill the wabbit!"

Which is all well and good so far as it goes. Yes, I really do; no, I'm not terribly musical (which is why I find many other 'classical' works dull). Well, yes, it does take a little effort to "get into it", like any other area of study worth of the name (previous discussion), but I'm living proof that, firstly, it doesn't take much to start, and, secondly, that once one is hooked investigation becomes a pleasure rather than a necessity.

L'Orfeo certainly rewards both passing acquaintance and (presumably) in-depth analysis. In addition to the obvious pleasure of astonishingly beautiful music, there's the pleasure of hindsight. Even I can hear the seeds of great opera to come. Now one hears a convention which Mozart will transcend, now, the conflict between drama and music that Wagner will either heal or irreversibly escalate, depending on who one talks to. I can pretend, from my privileged position four centuries after, to an omniscience which is refused me in daily life. That pleasure of looking back and seeing the evolution of music laid out before me, of, thanks to the wonders of time, being able to follow the great composers in their thoughts, should not be underrated.

L'Orfeo also rewards a fresh listener. It is a shocking work, a new thing in music (or nearly so), a piece without a category. It is impossible for me to understand, listening to it, why the first audience did not burn down their city. To something so unprecedented I cannot imagine any response except fire, and lots of it.

I don't mean in a destructive sense, but just that L'Orfeo can be so overwhelming that any response can seem inadequate. In The Descent, by Jeff Long, there's ascene where Satan kills a fellow by sticking his hand in the fellow's chest cavity and pinching closed a vein. The dying fellow reflects that it doesn't hurt: it's such an alien sensation that he has no response to it. L'Orfeo is like that. It astonishes. Which is no small pleasure.

The terrible thing is that this pleasure is incompatible with the pretense of omniscience I mentioned. If I listen to it as something unprecedented, I'm not allowed my omniscience view. If I'm omniscience, necessarily I am seldom surprised. I can either interact with it immediately, or through the lens of time. Of course, in any one listening I have both pleasures, though at different points in the opera. But what I really want is the joy of discovery along with the pleasure of foreknowledge.