我在百老汇看过两场歌剧，一是４２nd Street, 另一场是雨果的悲伤世界。
在罗马最古老的歌剧院看了费加罗的婚礼。在LA看过 Producer.
在举世闻名的悉尼歌剧院看过唐潢。
在百老汇看的，座位都比较后面。４２街是歌舞剧，适合初看歌剧的人。
最幸运是在罗马，我们住的旅馆就在歌剧院附近。吃完饭，碰到有人退票，很前面的位置。以一半的价格可拿到，但也还是一百欧元左右。我一直喜欢费加罗婚礼那段男子汉大丈夫应该当兵。想着难得到罗马一次，就忍痛去享受了一次。进去才知，意大利人看歌剧，很多女士是穿着古装一样的去的。氛围特不一样。
Producer不错。男主唱居然是电视剧Seinfeld里演秃顶的George的，没想到他歌剧里唱歌非常好。又挺幽默。道白的声音跟电视剧中一样有特色。
这些只是我西方歌剧的一些亲身的体验. 但是西方歌剧艺术的文化意义是什么呢？后来我才读到一段文字,牛津大学的艺术史教授Kenneth Clark在他的著作中写到：
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.
