Ars longa
Wendy organized a great trip on Friday evening to Mozart's Così fan tutte at the San Francisco Opera. We all dressed up; the best-dressed of all was Annalee, who wore a real tuxedo.
The opera was very well done. This production was "modernized" so that the sets and costumes were anachronistic but the plot was still the same. (I liked the Mesmer box, which is actually in the original opera.)
One really apparent thing about live performance of classical music is the immense attention span they require by our standards. I noticed this when I went to hear a live performance of Bach's Mass in B minor earlier this year, the second time I had heard it performed by the San Francisco Bach Choir. I love the Mass in B minor, but I was amazed to find how hard it was to pay attention for the entire three hour performance. (I don't think I had that problem the first time I heard it performed. Perhaps there was a greater sense of novelty for me, or perhaps I was a little more familiar with the music that time.) Così fan tutte was, I think, at least as long as the Mass in B minor, and one of the most salient things for me about seeing opera -- apart from the incredible skill of the performers -- is that length.
Almost any live classical music performance is much more demanding of sustained attention than popular contemporary music. Right now, I'm listening to the Run Lola Run soundtrack, which is made up of self-contained tracks of about 5 minutes apiece. I can't think of any classical work that would fit in that space. (Several of my favorite Dance Dance Revolution tracks are also based on well-known classical compositions. Wouldn't you know it, they're edited down to the DDR-standard 100 seconds. Remixes all.)
I wonder if our attention spans are really getting shorter in some kind of physiological sense. I wonder if attention span is really a matter of conditioning and we are getting conditioned differently than people in the past. Just this afternoon I bought a novel and had a co-worker remark that we would probably all be reading serializations (of perhaps 1,000 words at a time) instead of books soon.
I think there is evidence that attention span is affected by culture or by experience. I read about people in other parts of the world who don't feel the same kind of pain from waiting and doing nothing that we do. (For that matter, people who practice meditation often become downright eager to wait without any outside stimulus.) If we can learn conversational styles and condition emotional responses, why can't we learn attention styles?
Beyond that, there are anecdotes from other times when people would routinely do things that now seem practically superhuman, or at least "unrealistic" as expectations of others today. To quote again from Entertaining Ourselves to Death:
The first of the seven famous debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas took place on August 21, 1858, in Ottowa, Illinois. Their arrangement provided that Douglas would speak first, for one hour; Lincoln would take an hour and a half to reply; Douglas, a half hour to rebut Lincoln's reply. This debate was considerably shorter than those to which the two men were accustomed. In fact, they had tangled several times before, and all of their encounters had been much lengthier and more exhausting. For example, on October 16, 1854, in Peoria, Illinois, Douglas delivered a three-hour address to which Lincoln, by agreement, was to respond. When Lincoln's turn came, he reminded the audience that it was already 5 p.m., that he would probably require as much time as Douglas and that Douglas was still scheduled for a rebuttal. He proposed, therefore, that the audience go home, have dinner, and return refreshed for four more hours of talk. The audience amiably agreed, and matters proceeded as Lincoln had outlined.
