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My lady and I paid $360 each for seats at Verdi's Macbeth last Thursday night, which crossed my mind briefly as we got out of the cab at Lincoln Center and crossed the plaza past the big fountain and got in line at the Met. I'm old and so $360 is a hefty price for the privilege of sitting in a chair for three hours, but the woman I love loves Verdi and so there I was.
I married up. She comes from a musical family and went to her first opera when she was 12, seeing Grace Bumbry sing in a Met production of Carmen. I come from an evangelical family and we wouldn't have gone to see Verdi if he'd written an opera about the Second Coming. My taste ran more toward Loretta Lynn and Lefty Frizzell. "Long Black Veil" about the guy who goes to the gallows for a crime he didn't commit rather than tell the judge that on the night of the murder he was in the arms of his best friend's wife — that's my idea of opera.
But marriage asks us to go the extra mile and I'm glad I went. When Verdi took on Shakespeare, he turned a haunting tragedy into something truly magnificent and when the Met does Verdi, they do him proud with amazing dancers and swordplay and witches and the stage full of villainy and conspiracy. The hall was packed for the 6'2" Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen — opera craves a superstar for the dazzle and the gossip and also to fill the seats — and beautiful things come out of Miss Davidsen that when they draw to a long finish you cannot help but shout Bravo or O my god. And she is not the only starfish in the sea –– no, the Met chorus has some amazing Verdi choruses that make you rapturous. And Quinn Kelsey who plays Macbeth sings a magnificent Pietà , rispetto, amore after his Lady has died and Macduff is coming to kill him — singing that neither love nor honor shall cheer his old age, not a flower shall blossom to cheer his declining years — a gorgeous baritone lament that breaks the heart of the 84-year-old man in row W as Kelsey draws out the last notes and I couldn't help it, I shouted, "Yes!" even though I'm a happy man, my beloved sitting next to me, still you have to sympathize with him.
This is the difference between Shakespeare and Verdi. In Helen Story's 11th grade English class at Anoka High School, Macbeth was a villain, but at the Met the bastard has this glorious aria and then dies, the curtain drops, the crowd rises for the standing ovation for the stage full of heroes, and the amazing maestro Yannick Nézet-Séguin dances out and signals the orchestra to stand and the place goes wild.
I was still sort of stunned the next morning. This is the power of great music: you don't need to study it to be moved by it, any more than you need to know climatology to be impressed by a hurricane. As for expenses, $360 is piffle compared to what I spent on a couple miserable vacations I can remember.
I wish Helen Story could've seen it. She grew up on a Minnesota dairy farm in the Depression with an anguished mother and an alcoholic father and "when in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes" Shakespeare's lines gave her great wealth, and she skipped marriage and devoted herself to teaching poetry with a passion. There were many farm girls like her. She believed in the value of memorization and so I carry the sonnet "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments" around more than sixty-five years later. It's helpful.
What is magnificence worth? More and more, I say. The magnificence of the great city at 11 p.m. as the airliner makes its approach to LaGuardia in a series of banks, the vast network of streetlights below, a freeway, a body of water, another freeway, a neighborhood of houses, the sight of alleys and backyards, the ground is not far below, and I have a keen sense of competence and order, everyone is doing their job, and then runway, white stripes, the wheels touch down. Amore, amore, that's the story, morning glory.
Garrison Keillor is an author and radio personality. His latest book is "Cheerfulness". Buy it at a 54% discount! by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR.