This month’s New Criterion has a great article on the folly of “updating” classic operas to make them “relevant” for modern audiences. (Derek’s first experience at an opera–Don Giovanni–was such a one. The sexually explicit costuming and choreography and “updated” conclusion (he doesn’t go to hell, but a lunatic asylum) were so over-the-top that I found myself apologizing that this wasn’t exactly the Mozart opera I knew!) I can’t pretend to talk authoritatively on musical culture when I am surrounded with friends and relatives who actually know classical music, but I knew they were on to something when they started talking about literature!
But do Mozart or Strauss or Verdi require the ministrations of the bad-boy pseudo-avant-garde establishment in order to speak compellingly to us? The same question might be asked of Shakespeare or Milton, or indeed of Aeschylus or Homer. The literary critic Irving Howe, writing about this issue some years ago, recalled a colleague complaining that the classics of Western culture did not address her experience. Howe witheringly asked, “Why should they? And more to the point, can her experience address the classics? One … reason for reading the classics is that they widen and deepen our experience, pulling us out of the all-too-visible limits that any single self is likely to have. Precisely the ‘irrelevance’ of the classics is what makes them relevant.” Indeed.
The biggest reaction I get when I tell people I’m planning to do classical homeschooling is the question of relevance. I’m a firm believer that the strange adventures a king trying to get home from a war might not be considered “relevant” to your typical high school student, but The Odyssey can teach us a lot about human nature, love, courage, integrity, and fidelity. I had a public high school English teacher who really played up the sexual angle of world lit in order to “help us relate to” the literature, and the greatest joke of the year was her euphoria with my tongue-in-cheek project, “Woman in Bondage.” (Penelope was represented by a Barbie doll I’d woven into a loom to represent the sexual and physical bondage we’d spent most of the unit discussing instead of talking about the poem. You see, Odysseus got to sleep with everyone he wanted to and Penelope didn’t. Obviously The Odyssey is all about how wives are merely slaves.) “Woman in Bondage” hung at the front of the classroom in a place of honor for the rest of the year, a symbol to me (and I hope to the other students) of how misled this teacher was in reducing great world literature to its lowest sexual common denominator.
So yes, Tommy and his siblings are going to read the classics, hopefully starting at a young age. And we’ll revel in the relevance of their irrelevance! =)
Great post, Emily 🙂 I agree wholeheartedly. Tommy is so blessed to have such an intelligent and capable mom/teacher!!!
[…] came into town to go see Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde” with us! Derek and I had bad luck the one other time we saw an opera together, but this was as fun as four hours and fifty minutes of […]