Not so sure about that new opera in town. My Grandad went to see it, having been a proud member of Melbourne last will and testament providers up until he retired, and he said that it butchers the profession. It focuses everything on the love between these two people from rival companies and doesn’t seem to leave any room for the actual, beautiful process of crafting a will from scratch. There may have been a brief aria about probates and such, but it felt thrown in as a last minute thing. Or rather, that’s what Grandad said. He’s not exactly the musical type, but he sees through stories like no one else, so I’d trust his opinion. Although…a lot of his complaints were about how modern it was. Modern opera just sounds very odd to me, but I suppose operas are still around and they can’t ALL be from the 1700s. Maybe I’ll see it myself, just to be extra sure.
I suppose what makes them modern is that they deal with the concerns of here and now, rather than those of yesteryear. Rather than being based on mythology and olden day wars, you can actually write an opera about some estate planning and succession strategies. Imagine writing that sort of thing in the 1700s! I mean, they had their own rules about that sort of thing, but it was all in the family. The head dies, the next son gets all the stuff. If anyone besmirched the family name, they were stricken from the will. It was a much simpler time indeed. Then nowadays you actually have folks whose sole job it is to collate assets and all that. I suppose people just have more complicated stuff nowadays, so you can write operatic songs about who gets the stocks, or Grandpa’s old manuscripts, or what sort of executor of will does the best Melbourne based work. I should check this opera out.
-James