AIDA, CARMEN AND LA TRAVIATA, WHO ARE THEY?

L’amour est un Oiseau Rebelle
Love is a rebellious bird

By Verdi
It's in Italian and is set in Egypt

Today, I was beset by one of those flashbacks that happen to old people now and then.  This one was a nice warm and fuzzy, good humored one.  I didn't get the shivers that usually attack me when I think of some of the calamitously stupid things that I have done along the road of life.  I remembered the gang of three or four WWII veterans who had been friends forever.   Two of them happened to be my uncles.  They were the younger brothers of my father.  You know him, EFR Dion.  The four of them were opera "buffs" and they usually spent Saturday afternoons listening to opera during the Texaco Radio broadcast of the Saturday matinee from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.  I would occasionally be there with them.  Not for the opera, mind you, but because I liked being with them and they did not seem to mind my being there.  After all, I was still a teen ager at the time.  
Well, as most of you know, I am not a teen ager any more.  But Saturdays still do come and go. And there is still a radio station here in Southern California that carries the opera from the various opera houses around the world.  Today was Saturday and I was running around town doing "this and that" and listening to Aida in between short hops from "this" to "that."  During one of the hops the memory of one of those post meridiem sessions struck me.  It was the time that one of the gentlemen in the room said that he was of the opinion that the words of the "tunes" that are sung in Opera were not meant to be understood.  Well, he didn't get far with that statement.  The other three chimed in with loud and monosyllabic dissent.  They are printable, but not appropriate.  Then I remember my uncle Ed coming to the defense of the brave heart who dared to venture such an inconoclastic opinion. Ed simply said that if the words were not meant to be understood, the writer would not have provided any for the singers to vocalize.  He also said that just because we five could not understand them didn't mean that there were none in the world who did.  The person with the daring opinion then challenged my uncles who were fluent French speakers if they understood Carmen.  They, to their everlasting credit, confessed that they did not.  So he won...or he thought that he did.  Not so fast, Red Ryder!  Other opinions flew around the room and it was really nice for me to hear what they had to say.  
Some of the ideas were really quite philosophical.  I remember some of them.  
One was that the singers also had to act.  So they needed real words to be able to convey the emotions that the play was meant to portray.  I thought that was pretty intelligent.  Then one said that a Boy Scout skit conveyed ideas and there no words in many of them.  True enough says another, but Boy Scouts don't sing.  The actors in an opera have to sing.  If the author of the play is sophisticated enough he can match the words with the notes in the music so that the sound of the voice and the pitch indicated by the music match and help to make the emotions clearer for the actors and for the spectators.
But then another said that he didn't think that was a good thought at all.  In fact, said he, French authors wrote plays in Spanish and Italian people wrote some in French, and so on.  
But wait, says the originator of the discussion, that just means that the words don't really matter to the audience.  
One of the thoughts that made the rounds that day was that the audience did not go there for the play anyway, they went for the music...the instruments, from the strings to the brass to the percussion and, yes, to the human vocal chords were the true and only reason why people paid to go sit there during a play that they could not follow.
The four of them decided that they would all sleep on it and talk about it on the morrow while fishing for pickerel at Lake Arcadia.  I don't know if they did or not.  As for me, I only have two things to say. 
1. I know the words to the Aria cited above from Carmen.  She is a tough broad, believe me.
2. I also know the words to the drinking song from La Traviata.  By the way, it is not nice to be called "una traviata."  In fact, the song in the opera  says plainly that the woman is not going home with the fellow who brought her!
I like to listen to opera for some of the reasons that were brought up on that Saturday PM some 60 years ago.  I am glad that there is still some opera on the radio.  It is true that it is no longer sponsored by Texaco, but that doesn't make it any the less enjoyable.