The Master Class
Friday night July 14, 2023
Congregation Bnai Brith, Santa Barbara CA
During the strange year of the Covid pandemic lockdown, while we were all in our homes month after month, and all of the movie theaters and churches, synagogues and concert halls around the world were shuttered and dark, the Metropolitan Opera decided to ensure that the voice of opera would not go silent. Every night, for months on end, the Metropolitan Opera broadcast, for free viewing, recordings of the great performances of Opera at the Met.
Personally, I have always had mixed feelings about opera. Whenever I heard or saw an operatic performance, I recognized the skill and talent of the singers, but honestly, opera left me unmoved. To my uneducated eye, all I could see were wildly exaggerated gestures, supremely unnatural posing and preening, completely unbelievable emotion and worst of all, opera struck me as an art form that seemed to be, more than anything else, about showing off.
Of course, I realized that this opinion reflected badly on me! I knew that opera is loved all over the world as one of the great art forms, and I knew that many people whom I respected were passionately devoted to the opera. So for most of my life, I assumed that one of two things was true. EITHER I simply lacked the ability to understand and appreciate opera. Maybe I just am missing the opera appreciation gene. OR I have the ability to love opera, but am not prepared to give it the time and attention it requires to develop an appreciation.
But during the Covid lockdown, there we were, at home every evening, month after month after month, and the Met was broadcasting into our homes…for free….every night, all of their great performances. La Boheme by Pucini. The Pearl Fishers by Bizet. Rigoletto by Verdi. Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Dvorak’s Rusalka. Beethoven, Wagner, Offenbach, Gounod, Donizetti. The Met gave the world an extraordinary gift during those months. It was one of many miracles during that surreal time in our lives.
Marian watched the broadcasts from the Met every night. I did not watch every night. But I watched some. Sometimes in small doses, and other times I watched the entire opera. Slowly, I began to catch glimpses of what I had never understood. So much was happening on that stage. The exquisite music. The mindboggling technical skill of the singers. And in many cases, the profoundly moving acting. How does a woman, or a man, sing a demanding, virtuosic piece of music at the same time that they are lying on the floor, or running across the stage, or kissing or making love? And how does that man or woman make the emotions of the story believable?
Of all the opera superstars we came to know, I fell in love with one. Renee Fleming. Marian is ok with this. To me, Renee Fleming was different from all the others. In the interviews between the acts, she was completely natural, warm, intelligent, utterly herself. Of course, she is brimming with confidence, but not even a hint of arrogance. Never showing off. And when she sang, I felt that here was a singer who had learned to use her voice to connect her own soul to the soul of any human being ready to listen to her. Any opera with Renee Fleming I would watch, in its entirety, and I felt that at last I understood the power of this art form.
Last week Marian and I were in Aspen, Colorado with two of our lifelong friends, and we sat in the audience in the Wheeler Opera House, about thirty feet from Renee Fleming, as she conducted her weekly master class with opera students from around the world. She did not sing a note in the entire two-hour master class, but we were watching one of the most exciting dramatic performances I have ever seen.
Two young opera students would come out on the stage, or occasionally three of them, or just one, and they would tell us a few words about themselves, where they were from, and a fun or interesting fact about themselves, and then they would perform a piece that they had prepared, under the direction of one of the faculty of the Aspen Music Festival. These young singers averaged 23 years old, and some were younger than that, performing in front of a live audience, and knowing that they were about to be critiqued…in front of that audience… by one of the most famous opera singers of our time. Renee Fleming.
The young singers were, of course, immensely talented and their initial presentations were consistently brilliant. Then they would finish and Renee Fleming would begin with “that was wonderful” and offer a specific compliment, and then offer some piece of very direct, brutally honest, constructive criticism. Often about the way the singer was holding or using some part of their body. Sometimes it had to do with the way they were infusing meaning into the words. I thought to myself, “she is trying to teach them her unique gift. Her ability to bring her soul to the words.”
To one young singer she said “let me hear you speak the lines, without the music, and communicate the meaning of the words.” He did manage to speak the lines, with difficulty, but all of us saw him suddenly connect in a new way with the words he had been singing. And then, with each of them, she would say “OK, now do it again.” And these talented young people, having just been critiqued on stage by the one of the greatest living opera singers, would have to pull themselves together and remember everything that they prepared earlier, but now change it to incorporate the gift they had been given, the carefully offered suggestion, of what could help them grow and deepen as a musician and as a human being. We were watching human beings grow on stage, before our very eyes.
I would like to connect the drama that we witnessed in the Aspen Opera House to this moment in the Jewish year. Each of those brave and talented young people went onto that stage knowing that they would need to be broken down in order to grow, as musicians and as human beings. That is the deep truth of this moment in the Jewish year.
In all likelihood, you are sitting there thinking to yourself “this moment in the Jewish year?” What moment? Passover is long past, and Shavuot was a month and a half ago, and the High Holy Days are still off in the distance. Let me explain. We are in the middle of a three week period known in traditional Judaism as “bein hameitzarim,” meaning “in the narrows.” These three weeks run from the 17th day of Tammuz, which fell on Thursday July 6th and ends with the 9th day of Av, or Tisha B’Av, which falls on Thursday July 27th. Throughout Jewish history, these weeks have been remembered as the time leading up to the destruction of ancient Jerusalem. The walls of the city were first broken through on the 17th of Tammuz, and the Temple went up in flames on the 9th of Av. The Temple was our people’s sacred center, our collective home, and at this time of year, the walls of our home came tumbling down.
About twenty years ago, an American rabbi named Alan Lew wrote a book about this time of year which has become the single book I recommend most often to Jews looking to reconnect to their Jewish heritage. “This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation.” Rabbi Lew grew up a conservative Jew in upstate New York, and like so many others, as a young man he became interested in Zen Buddhism. He spent twenty years as a serious practitioner of Zen meditation, and then returned to Judaism and became a rabbi. In his book, Rabbi Lew takes the story of Tisha B’Av, the destruction of our ancient Temple, as a metaphor. The walls of the Temple, he says, are a symbol for the walls of our self, which we carefully build to make ourselves feel safe and secure in the world. The walls of ego.
But if we hope to grow, just like Renee Fleming’s students on the stage in Aspen, we need first to allow the walls of our ego to be torn down. Those students were so brave, stepping out on that stage, knowing that this great opera singer was about to criticize them. She did it with great kindness, but she breached their walls. She forced them to grow, in front of us all.
Thankfully, as we move through this season and consider the walls we have built, which might need to come down, we are not on stage in front of an audience. We can do this work in private. But each of us has work to do.
A new friend said to me recently, after hearing about some issues that were bothering me, “you are beginning a journey” and my immediate response was “I’m sixty-six years old! I want to be coming into harbor, not setting out on a journey!” But the deep wisdom of the Jewish year is that every year, around this time of Tisha B’Av, we are invited to set out on a journey of transformation…. a journey of growth and change and renewal, which is the true purpose and goal of our High Holy Days season. But the journey begins with the same kind of courage that we witnessed on that stage in Aspen.
The walls of our Temple have to come down.
Shabbat shalom.