Opera 101: A decidedly un-snotty user's guide to the melodrama

My first experience with opera was a televised fat lady in a Viking helmet breaking a glass with her voice. Naturally, I repeated the experiment without success and concluded that I wasn't fat or Viking enough to shatter crystal. I go to the opera regularly and can assure you that corpulent invaders have no place there. I now think of operas not as alien spectacles, but as plays that run according to very specific rules, most notably that everyone sings. Consider that if you're going to escape from Princeton and are planning to see a musical on Broadway, why not spend less money (yes, less money) and see an opera instead?

My companion and I entered the atrium of the Metropolitan Opera in our jeans amid a throng of penguins, however not a champagne glass was hurled in our direction, nor even an eyelash batted. We had better seats than many of the Met's hoi polloi thanks to the godsend that is student tickets ($25 per seat for a weeknight performance). We came to see Verdi's "Otello" in celebration of my having taken the GRE. I found out my score and really was in the mood to see people obliterated on stage, which is what happens in basically every tragic opera. I come to the opera not to be seen, but for the emotion.

I find that the feeling behind Britney's "Hit Me Baby One More Time" is as well expressed by the aria "Dove Sono" in Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro." This is not snobbery. Snobbery is knowing all the Major League batting averages and judging others for not knowing them. You can do that with opera, of course, and some people gleefully call you stupid if you can't rattle off the titles of all of Verdi's operas (in order) and hum them. That need not define the operatic experience, and in my opinion, it defeats the whole point.

Opera is unique among all the things you pay money to see in that it exists entirely outside of reality. The premise is absurd: People sing at you in a foreign language for three hours. Since there is no need for realism in this medium, humanity bursts through the larger than life plots and overdone choreography. We see not people onstage, but projections of emotion and virtue animated by music. There is tremendous artistic scope, and one of my favorite productions was Berlioz's "La Damnation de Faust" done in an S & M theme. If you learn a little shoptalk ("aria" and "mezzosoprano" etc.), the whole experience comes very naturally.

When Puccini was composing "La Boheme," he expected people to learn the words and sing along. When Baz Luhrmann staged the opera on Broadway with that popular accessibility in mind, it closed in three weeks. Think of it this way: The fantastically popular musical "Rent" is just a loose translation of "La Boheme" with electric guitars. Yet people recoil in horror from the original work. Excuses are made, usually having to do with the burden of reading supertitles, but after all, anyone who's seen a foreign film knows that reading doesn't destroy the experience. The real problem is opera's success. It's lasted so long as an art form that people don't believe it can be accessible, and yet with supertitles and new productions, it absolutely is. Julie Taymor, who was the guiding force behind Disney's musical "The Lion King," is producing Mozart's "The Magic Flute" at the Met right now. It is as though Times Square has been moved uptown to Lincoln Center.

New York City has a glut of opera companies. Standing in the plaza at Lincoln Center, one can take in both the Metropolitan Opera and the City Opera without moving one's head. I get the sense that there should be zoning laws against this kind of thing. In any case, the two companies have very different artistic lives. The Met borders all its promotional materials with its stars, each portrait with a renowned name underneath. They are always organized from most famous to least famous. I am not exaggerating if I say that they have more money than the ancient kings portrayed in their operas. The City Opera is proletarian by contrast. Tickets cost less, the stars are mostly unknown, and the audience members are palpably less concerned with their appearance. Though it's in the shadow of the Met, the production values are extremely good, and the cast is usually made up of Julliard graduates trying to make a name for themselves. Both operas are very kind to students, and there are different options for rush tickets (buying right before the show), student half-price tickets and specially priced student tickets. It's just a matter of searching the internet and calling the box offices for availability. If you're truly daring, there are other, small opera companies in Manhattan, which I have yet to experience for myself.