Despite being a classical singer, I’ve fallen asleep at every Wagner opera I’ve ever attended. “Das Rheingold,” for example, makes it too easy. The seats are comfortable, the lights are dim, the exposition is endless. I feel cocooned, sardined up next to countless other people who all seem to have a higher tolerance for leitmotif than I do. My fellow audience members understand true genius, I find myself thinking. I am merely a sleepy bystander, an opera singer stifling a yawn, betraying the very art I claim to love. Is my boredom a failure? If so, whose? Is it possible to demoralize this boredom and examine it neutrally, without guilt or shame?
Boredom! At the Opera
The dull performance as dark watering hole for the psyche
