25 reasons to remain CONFINED

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

Don’t believe you have to go to Paris, to the Old Opéra Garnier, to meet this Phantom. You can meet him in your living room, or even your kitchen, why not your bathroom. You can even be that phantom in your own home, but you have to bring the opera in your sitting room, drawing room, withdrawing room, or parlor, with cookies and tea, coffee, and brandy. Be aware that Detective William Murphy from Toronto finds coffee a lit bit bitter.

Two years ago, everyone would have told you it was impossible. What is supposed to be evanescent on a stage cannot and must not be watched over and over again in five or ten or even twenty various productions from all around the world “The evanescent has to remain evanescent,” the effete members of the cultivated jungle used to say, and strangely enough they still effetely say so. Once an effete Tarzoon, always an effete Tarzoon, though once a knight is enough.

It only took eighteen months of a pandemic for people to realize that they could have at the tip of their fingers on their remote control all the operas they wanted for something like 10% of an economical (vision poor and hearing so-so) ticket in the main opera houses in the world. And what’s more, you could have the DVD for maybe 15% of the best seats in the main opera houses in the world, maybe even less (€22.50 versus €150), and for the same price you could watch it ten times if you wanted, or at least two or three times over two or three months and with a choice of five languages for the subtitles, or none.

You can thus get up in the morning with Georges Bizet’s Carmen, have breakfast with Charles Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet, go to work to all the arias of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Figaro’s Wedding, work all day singing The Nose by Dmitri Shostakovich in your head, go back home with the medieval Ludus Danielis, have supper accompanied by Vincenzo Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi, spend the evening with some Fliegende Holländer by Richard Wagner, and finally go to bed rocked to sleep by Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice, or if you…