一個人的親密
人未識，情己在。這是一種追求，追求一個人的親密與寧靜。
我在百老匯看過兩場歌劇，一是４２nd Street, 另一場是雨果的悲傷世界。
在羅馬最古老的歌劇院看了費加羅的婚禮。在LA看過 Producer.
在舉世聞名的悉尼歌劇院看過唐潢。
在百老匯看的，座位都比較後麵。４２街是歌舞劇，適合初看歌劇的人。
最幸運是在羅馬，我們住的旅館就在歌劇院附近。吃完飯，碰到有人退票，很前麵的位置。以一半的價格可拿到，但也還是一百歐元左右。我一直喜歡費加羅婚禮那段男子漢大丈夫應該當兵。想著難得到羅馬一次，就忍痛去享受了一次。進去才知，意大利人看歌劇，很多女士是穿著古裝一樣的去的。氛圍特不一樣。
Producer不錯。男主唱居然是電視劇Seinfeld裏演禿頂的George的，沒想到他歌劇裏唱歌非常好。又挺幽默。道白的聲音跟電視劇中一樣有特色。
這些隻是我西方歌劇的一些親身的體驗. 但是西方歌劇藝術的文化意義是什麽呢？後來我才讀到一段文字,牛津大學的藝術史教授Kenneth Clark在他的著作中寫到：
What on earth has given opera its prestige in western civilization—a prestige that has outlasted so many different fashions and ways of thought? Why are people prepared to sit silently for three hours listening to a performance of which they do not understand a word and of which they very seldom know the plot? Why do quite small towns all over Germany and Italy still devote a large portion of their budgets to this irrational entertainment? Partly, of course, because it is a display of skill, like a football match. But chiefly, I think, because it is irrational. “What is too silly to be said may be sung”—well, yes; but what is too subtle to be said, or too deeply felt, or too revealing or too mysterious- these things can also be sung and only be sung. What, at the beginning of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the Don kills the Commendatore, and in one burst of glorious music the murderer, his mistress, his servant and the dying man all express their feelings, opera provides a real extension of the human faculties. No wonder that the music is rather complicated, because even today our feelings about Don Giovanni are far from simple. He is the most ambiguous of hero-villains. The pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of love, which had once seemed so simple and life-giving, have become complex and destructive, and his refusal to repent, which makes him heroic, belongs to another phase of civilization.
我抄的這段話，跟你說的是一個意義。歌劇的意義就是表麵上很深奧，其實也就是讓人非理性地熱鬧一下。