Merry meets Aïda

I very much wanted to go see the Houston Grand Opera's production of Aïda, but I don't particularly like to go to the opera alone. Unfortunately my family isn't exactly full of opera fans (or, for that matter, sports fans, which is a double whammy for me). Kasia likes classical music, but she was spending a semester with her grandmother in Fredericksburg and wasn't available. At first I thought, "Bummer, it's either go by myself or not go at all." But then I got to thinking...my eleven-year-old Merry loves to sing and is in both the school choir and a rather selective community children's choir, and she is a rather mature eleven-year-old, and she really likes spending time with me. So I thought it about it a little bit, and then decided, "You know, I think Merry is old enough not to get too tired and bored, and I think she would enjoy herself immensely." I went home and asked her if she wanted to go with me to the opera, and to say that my daughter was thrilled would be rather like saying the Sears Tower is a tall building.

It says something about how out of touch I am with current cultural currents, that when I told a friend I was going to see Aïda, she responded, "Oh, I love Elton John!" -- and I was, like, "What are you talking about?" Apparently Elton John and Tim Rice, or Elton Rice and John Tim, or somebody famous, at any rate, have turned Verdi's magnificent opera into a Broadway musical. Hm. Somehow I find my excitement easily contained. Indeed, I seem to have running through my head a couple of lines from one of Tim Rice's earlier efforts:

...I would invite you
But the queens we use would not excite you."

(My parents, by the way, turn out actually to have seen E.J.'s version. They were not particularly impressed.)

I told Merry that we would have to make sure she had nice clothes to wear, because going to the grand opera is not quite the same thing as going to the movies at Katy Mills. So Merry spent about three weeks in an ecstacy of expectation and preparation. And when the big evening came, last Friday night...well, jusk look at her smile yourself:



With her new shoes, new hose, her carefully chosen purse and pearls, and the hairdo she and her mom had worked on so hard, she was as pretty as a picture. So I took several.



We drove off to the opera, and when we walked into the theatre, Merry was simply wonderstruck. She had never imagined that such a place existed outside of the palaces in fairy tales. We got something to eat and then found our seats -- on the very highest row in the theatre, which of course is an opera house and therefore has four or five balconies all of which are built about as close to the pure vertical as one can imagine. Merry almost didn't dare to climb into our seats, and had she been asked actually to try to go down those stairs in her new high heels, I'm not sure she would have been able to summon the courage.

Then the orchestra started tuning, and then the conductor walked out and took his place, and he raised his arms, and the strings began that soft and sweet but somehow foreboding opening theme, and the curtain rose. And I'm not sure Merry's wide eyes even blinked for the next hour.

For those of you who don't like opera, and especially those of you who find it interminably slow-moving because it takes the characters so long to say even a single word...well, I'll tell you the secret I told Merry. It's the music that tells the story, just as much in Aïda as in Prokoviev's charming Peter and the Wolf. The actors are merely helping it along. It's the music that anguishes, that rejoices, that fears; the characters and the lyrics help you visualize the story, but all the real acting is done by the music. I don't know how to express it better than that. But fortunately Merry, primed in advance with that more or less that explanation by her dad (who really would like to have somebody else to enjoy the opera with him), somehow got it.

We reached the end of the first Act and Merry turned and looked at me with stars in her eyes.

"Do you like it?" I asked.

"Oh, Daddy, it's wonderful!" she answered.

We swung into Act II (which, by the way, is my own favorite act of this particular opera -- if the finale of Act II doesn't stir your blood then you're dead), and Merry was enthralled again. And so was I -- I have to say that I would have liked to have seen more of Merry's reactions but I was swept away by the glory myself. Then the chorus soared into that mighty finale, and the curtain fell, and the lights came up for the intermission.

"Is it still okay?" I asked her.

"Oh, yes, I love it." Her beaming face turned rather serious and awed, then, and she added with charming seriousness, "They sing a lot better than I do."

Then she asked, "What time is it, anyway?"

"It's 9:00; we've been watching for an hour and a half."

She was shocked. "Really?? It doesn't seem anywhere near that long. I thought it was maybe forty-five minutes. I can't believe it's been a whole hour and a half."

We walked out to the lobby, and I got a Courvoisier on the rocks, and then we headed over to the Starbucks line to get Merry a hot chocolate. While we stood in line I called up my parents on my cell phone and handed the phone over to Merry, and she caught her grandmother up on all the details (including what her dress looked like, naturally).

At the end of Act III she was still going strong. But by the time we were well into Act IV, her bedtime was just too far in the past, and she started nodding off to sleep and lost the thread. (And I don't blame her; Act IV is mournful and elegaic and not exactly a toe-tapper -- a bad choice of music to keep a sleepy eleven-year-old on the edge of her seat.) We had about five minutes left when Merry leaned over to me and whispered, "Daddy, I don't want to be annoying, but how long is it until it's over?"

So considering that I had taken my eleven-year-old daughter to a two-hour, fifty-minute grand opera with a twenty-five-minute intermission, that didn't even start until 7:30 at night...for her to make it all the way to minute #165 before asking when it would be over, is I think pretty impressive.

I think I'll get two season tickets for the 2007/2008 season (among other things they're doing La Boheme, The Abduction from the Seraglio, and The Magic Flute); and I think that the second ticket will go to Merry probably about half the time. But I think, those times when it is Merry, that we'll go to the Sunday afternoon matinees.

I hope each of you gets a chance, every now and then, to have a night like that one with a child that starry-eyed. My life isn't a particularly easy one, but it sure does have its blessings.