When you see ‘opera’ represented in a image you frequently see, (say it with me) a woman in a horned helmut holding a spear and wearing a metal brestplate.
Is this from a real opera?
If it is it must be Wagner but having never seen an opera, ( I do listen to them) I’m wondering where this generalization comes from. Does it all come from Bugs Bunny? At the time WB made the opera cartoons was that an icon of opera already?
Does anybody know?
It’s Wagner, yes.
The woman in the helmet is a Valkyrie (a minor deity of the Norse pantheon who conducts fallen warriors to Valhalla), most probably Brunhilde, who is a major character in the Ring Cycle.
Wagner is actually not very representative of opera as a whole, and I don’t know when it became such a ubiquitous symbol of it.
Alex B.
You’re right about it being Wagner - the lady with the horns is Brunhilde, a character in the Ring Cycle. She’s a Valkyrie.
I always thought that she was used as an example of the exptreme absurdities that have to be accepted to enjoy opera - there’s a great cognitive dissonence between beautiful warrior maiden and fat soprano in a plastic helmet.
Also, since opera is more of an auditory, rather than a visual medium, it’s hard to come up with an iconic character. Who else is there that’s easily recognizable as an character from an opera? (OK, I now have a mental image of Bugs Bunny dressed as a hunchbacked jester.)
I think that people found the image of Brunhilda in Wagnerian operas as bizarre and funny (a heavy woman, usually wearing a blonde wig with long pigtails, like this), so it stuck. I note that the link I gave shows Kirsten Flagstad, who was considered the pre-eminent Wagner interpreter of the 30s. It’s quite likely that Warner Brothers got their image from her.
Wagner has stirred intense love and hate since back when he was alive to enjoy it. I think the “speaw and magic HELmet” image has stuck simply because his operas have always been among the most visually striking (he was among the first to emphasize that component himself).
The old saying that “the opera ain’t over 'til the fat lady sings” is also probably largely Wagner inspired. Wagner’s works demanded particularly powerful singers, even moreso than opera did generally, and daintily constructed singers didn’t usually have that kind of resonance.
Wagner had a lot of popular detractors back in his day, perhaps the most famous bon mot being “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds”. Cartoonists back in the late 1800s enjoyed lampooning the staging too, which popularized the image among people who had never been to an opera, but enjoyed laughing at the absurd ways the “upper crust” spent its time.
There are plenty of pieces of opera music that are kind of symbolic of the whole genre (e.g., the “Habanera” from Carmen, “La Donna e Mobile” from Rigoletto), but Wagner has the visual symbol pretty well sown up.
I’d say the only real contender to Brumhilde is Pagliacci, except he has the pathos element that makes him less of a humor icon.
While the image comes from a real opera, I’d be willing to bet that its popularization (to the point of cliche) very likely comes from Warner Brothers.
–Cliffy
All at once there’s a fat guy in a clown suit!
'Tain’t Halloween, that’s for shore.
Then this here feller,
This Punchy-neller
Begins to beller
Like we all was deef!
tragic laughter
That was Pal-yat-chee
And he sung…
Thank you, music lovers!
You folks need to go to Villa Wahnfried in Bayreuth. This is the house built for Wagner. It is across the street from the house where Listz died (which has a nice little museum). Wahnfried is across town from the “green hill” where his Festspeilhaus, a temporary structure, is still in existance. A measly 1 dM fee gets you a nice tour of the auditorium, orchestra pit and stage. I was there once with a friend, we were the only ones at the tour and the manager of the house just let us wander around (“But please do not touch anything.”) The stage is large and is constructed to allow the entire set to be rolled out an enormous door and into a shop in a separate building.
But I digress. Villa Wahnfried is now a museum to Wagner. There are costumes from the original (Bayreuth) stagings. These include the breast plates and horned helmets. The orginals are not plastic. The museum is nice and not expensive. You can sit at the piano in the parlor and listen to music that is piped into the room periodically.
In addition to the Walkure/Brunhilde image, Wagner’s music includes the fat lady singing at the end (Tristan und Isolde), the one eyed hero (Wotan from the Ring), a chorus of lusty sailors (Flying Dutchman), a rainbow bridge activated by a hero with a big hammer that leads to a castle (Rheingold), naked swimming sopranos (Rhinegold), bad opera humor (Meistersinger), the first steps of atonalism (Tristan), Siegfried the dumb but powerful hero (the Ring, he sings and forges a sword on stage after abusing a dwarf, ah opera), a tree with a sword stuck in it (Walkure), singing contests (Meistersinger and Lohengrin) numerous other great images and sounds.
An remember what Mark Twain said about Wagner’s music “Terrible quarter hours, fabulous moments.”
*Invest in a tuba
and somethin’ or other ‘bout Cuba.
He sung about a lady
who weighed 280!
When she takes a powder
he just starts chirpin’ louder.
And he don’t do a goldurn thing,
'cept to stand up there and sing.
When we listen to Palyatchee,
we get itchy and scratchy.
This sure is top corn
so we go and buy some popcorn.
We hate to go back,
but we can’t get our dough back.
Ain’t no use complainin’
‘cause outside it’s a-rainin’…
<musical interlude>
Seven hours later
we’re still in the durn the-a-ter
takin’ turns a nappin’,
waitin’ for somethin’ to happen.
Palyatchee he ain’t hurryin’,
but the folks onstage are scurryin’
and it sounds like Katchyturryin’s Neighbor Dance.
Then ol’ Palyatchee finds the guy he’s seekin’
cheek-to-cheekin’
with his wife,
he grabs a knife
and stabs the louse
who stole his spouse
and then he stabs the lady and himself.
'Tain’t very
sanitary.
They all collapse but Old Palyatchee sets up,
and he gets up,
sings “I’m dyin’, I am dyin’, I am dyin’”
We start cryin’,
cause to tell the truth we’re dyin’ too.
As the footlights fade out,
we see Palyatchee laid out
but the dagger never caused it.
Palyatchee…was plumb…exhausted…*
Sorry. Someone mentions Spike Jones and my brain just goes into output. It’s like a musical binary dump…
Wagner’s operas are very easy to satirize because they’re just so darned over the top.
They’re long (even as operas go). The Ring Cycle consists of four operas, each one running over four hours. Rossini (who himself composed the six-hour William Tell) once wrote: “Wagner has some good moments, and some pretty lousy quarter hours.”
They’re noisy. The soloists have to be able to sing quite loud to make themselves heard over the brass-heavy orchestra, and this requires special training. Wagnerian sopranos and tenors have their own voice classifications, which is pretty unique within the opera world.
They’re awfully hammy. Extreme emotions are par for the course in opera, but Wagner composed an EPIC, which means everything gets kicked up a notch or two. Love at first sight, jealousy, greed, torment, madness…it’s all there. Oh, did I mention gods, curses, giants, a dragon, incest, and the entire world burning up in a giant bonfire? Kind of makes starving artists or Gypsy flirts look tame, don’t it?
They made a tremendous impression on the popular conscience. The iconography was unmistakable, for one thing. To this day, the image of the fat soprano with a horned helmet, pigtails, a steel bustier and a spear is instantly recognizable. Secondly, the Ring Cycle was the Star Wars of its day – audiences had never seen (nor heard) anything like it before. And the barbaric German flavor came as a nice alternative to the overly genteel and sophisticated fluff that was the more standard fare in opera houses of the day.
And finally, much of the public lost their respect for the artistic value of Wagnerian opera when the Nazis embraced it.
I attended a performance of Die Walküre at the Dallas Opera some years ago. When the curtain rose for Act II, the stage was bare except for a huge rock jutting up some twenty feet, on top of which was a robed figure clutching a staff (Woton). There was an extremely convincing illusion of clouds sweeping by at great speed. It’s the only stage performance I’ve ever been to in which the set design got a standing ovation.
I once saw a production of Walkure where all 9 Valkyrie, in green metal breastplates, ended their big number in a lineup at the front of the stage. When they hit their high note, all their chests thrust forward in unison, the metal caught the light, and we were treated to the sight of 18 green flashing metal breasts.
Oh I wouldn’t necessarily agree with that - at least not for every opera. I’ve seen almost 30 operas and sometimes, for me, the thing I remember most will be the scenery. Consider Mefistofele - I don’t remember any of the music from it but the scenery was stunning. Of course, all of the operas I have seen have been at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, one of the best in the world, and so the visual productions have been top-notch.
While I don’t mean to downgrade the importance of the music in operas (i.e. best reason to see Cavalleria Rusticana is for the intermezzo), the visuals can definitely have as great as an impact as the music.
A real Lil’ Abner type, as Anna Russell calls him. And every woman he meets is his aunt.
I’m sure the popularity of the breastplate and horned helmet image has something to do with the Ride of the Valkyries music. No one ever slept through that.
(And now I’m going to dig up my CD with Spike doing Carmen.)
I’m not sure if anyone has mentioned it, but the Ring Cycle (all 17 hrs of it) ends after Brunnhilde sings the last bit.
Kinda funny…
Oh yeah, count me as a wagnerite. I enjoy it very much, but I still have a sense of humor. The best production I ever saw did in fact make use of the “viking” costumes. Not all productions are faithful to that, but, if it is done right, it can be very good.
Here’s Arthur Rackham’s interpretation of Brunnhilde, circa 1910. Alongside her sister Waltraute, in full Valkerie regalia.
Hardly a pair of middle-aged lard-ass sopranos…more like a pair of young Olympians.
I’m not sure that’s true today. Most performances of the entire Ring cycle, for example, now sell out sometimes years in advance. Except in Israel, Wagner’s music has ceased to be especially controversial. Of course, expressing admiration for the man himself, anti-Semite and wife-stealer, isn’t so hot, but the music’s great.
UnuMondo
I really should see an opera sometime.
Zebra, if you enjoy theater and classical music, then opera is something that you must experience at least once. There is simply no comparison between listening to a recording and attending a live performance.
And now is a pretty good time to get started. I think a lot of companies have come to accept that the “snob” factor was bad for business. So they go out of their way to court newcomers.
They sell inexpensive tickets so you won’t necessarily have to shell out $35 for a seat. The trick is that the closer you are to the center of the floor section, the better the accoustics (and the view) and thus the more expensive the seat. Seats closer to the edge (including the front row) are cheaper. And there’s always the nosebleed section in the balcony. If it’s a production worth its salt, though, you’ll hear everything just fine no matter where you sit.
Translations of the text are often projected over the stage so that you can follow along without brushing up on your Italian or German or Russian first. I’ve even seen supertitles (as they are called) used when the opera is in English.
The program will always have a synopsis of the plot. Familiarize yourself with it before the performance begins and you’ll find it easier to see how the music itself tells the story.
You no longer get sneered at for not dressing “to the nines”. I always thought it was pretty silly to wear a tux for an occasion when you would be sitting for four hours.
Since you say that you already listen to opera, you’ll already have a good idea of what you like. You’ll find (almost) as much variety in operatic productions as you will in rock concerts. So good luck, and enjoy the show!
Good post Kizarvexius, you’ve got me wanting to see an opera. What are some good cities to see them in? I’ve got friends and family pretty well spread out across the country and I love an excuse to get away for a few days.
