Unlike song, opera is a highly specialised form; one that's frequently portrayed, by both admirers and critics, as having at least as much cultural significance off-stage as on-. It's at the opera that Anton Chekhov's ‘The Lady with the Dog’ is reunited with her lover. Their key scene takes place ‘On the narrow, gloomy staircase over which was written “Entrance to Circle”’. In today's Kyiv, the contemporary Ukrainian poet Yuri Burjak has a remarkably similar encounter ‘At the Rear of the Circle’:
Just in front of me
at the rear of the Circle
I saw your eyes, as they are since
we've said goodbye: unearthly,
their earthy beauty
hidden as ever.
I turned left. The semicircular maze
would bring me, I knew,
to just where I saw you
but you weren't there, you seemed
to have melted away.
This view of opera as a primarily social occasion seems paradigmatic of Edward Said's analysis of the social role of Classical music, which we looked at in Chapter 2. But it's worth remembering that, in Chekhov's story, The Geisha opens not in Moscow but in the provinces: ‘As in all provincial theatres, there was a haze above the chandelier, the gallery was noisy and restless […] to the sounds of that atrocious orchestra, of those wretched screeching violins, he thought how lovely she was.’ In nineteenth-century Russia, opera may indeed serve as a relative signifier of wealth, but its exclusivity comes from the price of the tickets, not as a result of being artistically abstruse, metropolitan, or cutting-edge. In this context, opera isn't something ‘difficult’, or remote from the culture that surrounds it. On the contrary, that culture has successfully incorporated it.
Still, with its costumed cast of singers and its professional orchestra (unlike, say, the simple church choir and organ that liturgical music requires), and indeed the large spaces it needs to work with such forces, opera is inevitably expensive to stage. By the nineteenth century it had swollen to the four- and five-act monsters, demanding huge performing resources, that we call Grand Opera. The nineteenth century even saw live elephants regularly exploited for Guiseppe Verdi's Aida. In a similar vein, since the 1980s, impresario Raymond Gubbay has staged ‘Classical Spectacular’ operas at the Royal Albert Hall.