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Starting the New Semester, Uh, Season

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The social/moral ante of scholarship rises through 20th century opera. In Weill’s Street Scene (1946), a girl celebrates her graduation from Julia Richmond High (the actual school song is interpolated here), rejoicing that she has won a scholarship to a commercial art school, even as her family faces eviction for non-payment of rent; when they are down, scholarly Sam and his working-girl neighbor, Rose, rapturously recite a Whitman poem he had introduced her to. Both scenes make the case that education – specifically in the arts and literature – can improve even the poorest of home lives. The great tragedy of The Tender Land (1954) is not Laurie’s abandonment by the hired hand she loves, nor even that her future is likely to be rough, but that she won’t be there to publicly accept her diploma as the first person in her family to graduate from high school. Her absence punctures her family’s pride in their own accomplishment…but for their fervid hope, as the curtain falls, that her younger sister will not fail them come her own graduation day.

Delusional perhaps, but cheerful, is the classroom scene in Bernstein’s Candide (1956) in which, Quod erat demonstrandum, Dr. Pangloss blithely assures his students that, whatever their concerns, this is the best of all possible worlds. Though presented humorously, Menotti’s Help! Help! the Globolinks! (1968) contains a much more serious message. When their school bus is attacked by music-fearing aliens, the students – who have left their instruments behind to avoid practicing during spring break – are temporarily protected by one girl who loved her violin enough to wish to bring it home. Meanwhile, at their school, the teachers bicker over how to handle the invasion until the music teacher, Madame Euterpova, bullies them into taking up the children’s instruments themselves, declaring, It will be the end of the world when music dies. The combined forces of children, teachers, and even the school janitor overcome the Globolinks, and Madame Euterpova delivers a final lecture, to keep music in our souls lest we live by clocks and dials. Beauty, she admonishes, cannot be boring.

Have you dismissed operas as being dull or silly? Think upon these examples. They are a living oral history of their times, documenting the mores and tastes of the people who produced and attended them. Instead of dismissing opera as irrelevant to your life, listen for its deeper messages that tell us where we’ve been and where we are going as a human community. In this day of rampant technology and "rage," we need music in education more than ever.