There's never been an opera about me, never in my entire life. Normally this wouldn't bother me. There hasn't been one about you, either, and besides, I'm still young. If my life were a play, this would be the last few minutes before the lights lowered and everything began. The audience would be milling around -- the older couples in formal, non-funky suits with pearls hanging around the women's necks like drops of semen, and the younger people in black shirts and jeans because the formality of theater is an elitist tyrannical paradigm and lots of people in the clothes they wore to work because, frankly, by the time they got home and jumped into the shower and changed their clothes they'd either be late, which they hate, or they'd be on time but so stressed out that they couldn't really enjoy it, and frankly, if you're going to pay that much for tickets what's the use if you're not going to enjoy it, so what they do is just wear some slightly dressier work clothes to work and then go right to the theater, locking the briefcase in the trunk and sometimes even having time for a cocktail or something, but not for dinner because they hate wolfing down dinner and rushing to the theater, it's so stressful, they might as well go home and shower and change if they want to be stressed out before the show even starts.
This is some snatch of lobby-talk that Stan, the manager of the Pittsburgh Opera, overheard and never forgot. And never forgot to repeat. “That's our audience, Joseph,” he said to me. “Just regular working folk. We have to create opera for them that's not just interesting but fascinating, mesmerizing. So that they transcend all the stress about whether to change or where to have dinner or parking or whatever, and really hear the music. That's what opera's for. Do you have any more of those candies?”
Because this is, you know, an opera. Fiction, like all operas: a lie, but a lie is sort of a myth, and a myth is sort of a truth. All summer long I was watching things happen with Cynthia Glass and her family that were melodramatic, heart-wrenching, and absurdly -- truly -- tragic. Dire consequences lurked around their house like the growl of cellos when the jealous fiance´, or the enraged father, or the Old Spirit of the Mountains descends on the lovers, flushed with horniness and the effort of singing over a fifty-piece orchestra: La Forza Dei Glasses. Le Nozze Di Incest. Cyn. They were an opera and now the lights are lowering and here we are, reader or readers. No need to stress. An opera in book form is more convenient than the real thing, because you can eat when you want and wear whatever pleases you. Nothing, maybe. Read it alone in bed, the sheets lingering on your bare belly, your hips. Read it when no one's watching. Go ahead.
I know there are some operas that start right up, but this isn't one of them. Like Beethoven, whose only opera clears its throat with not one but four possible overtures, I've written a bunch of openings, all introducing the subject matters and what surrounds them. As somebody said in a book I've since lost, all behavior exists within a social and cultural context, so I hope these overtures will not exactly influence you, but tap you on the shoulder to get you looking in the right direction. Their purpose is similar to those hyphened taxonomies you can find clinging to the back of the title page like mold on a shower curtain, infecting your naked and vulnerable skin. You know the words I mean. I know that deep down you know what I'm talking about. Those Library of Congress things...
