Operatic tragedy on streets of home

David Sherman

Reisa decided I needed to expand my musical culture, something beyond electric guitar, bass and snare drums. On good nights, a few horns. So, she took me to the opera at Montreal’s Place des Arts.

I am not completely ignorant. You say opera, I say Puccini and Pavarotti. But, it would seem, the canon is a little larger. And the Opéra de Montréal was doing Hamlet, not the world’s most popular production, but ambitious nonetheless.

There are about 3,000 red plush seats at PDA’s Salle Wilfrid Pelletier, including the requisite loges for those who want privacy as they look down upon the angst on stage.

Before the lights go down, one can kill time by listening to the orchestra tune in the pit, lights on the music stands twinkling off the brass. Or the lights of 1,000 iPhones. Some can’t sit without staring at a screen. A couple in front of us were watching a video of a dog getting its claws clipped, a curious overture to the Metropolitan Symphony.

Opera is a great spectacle. Costumes sweep the floor, rolling sets, voices that can shatter crystal, a sweet orchestra of strings and harps and horns and unflinching, unrepentant agony.

Man, the suffering. The tragedy. The death.

Zoloft, I thought. They all need Zoloft. And maybe an editor. No shortage of redundant lofty choruses of, “Oh, the pain! Oh, the perfidy! Oh, the treachery! Oh, it’s time to stab someone! Or, maybe a dab of poison!”

After two hours of it, I was in similar pain, though the orchestra was somewhat palliative.

The pain was not entirely of the stage or the story. I had parked a few blocks away in front of a meter ($20) – paid via friend’s phone; the meters don't accept that amount -- and walked past buildings I didn’t recognize and down a new pedestrian corridor that is Ste. Catherine St. W., once downtown’s main thoroughfare.

It is part of the Quartier des spectacles, or entertainment neighbourhood, which hosts a summer full of outdoor festivals from jazz to comedy to Les Francos and I don’t know what else because I left the city 10 years ago and haven’t been downtown since the pandemic. It is fun city, a cure for the summertime blues. Maybe.

I spent 50 or so years exploring these streets, on the way to work at Maison Radio Canada, seeing shows at PDA for pleasure and work and marching through the underground city on my way to Chinatown, my second home. My blood pulses with MSG. But the pandemic laid waste to Chinatown thanks to some American asshole that kept calling Covid the "Chinese virus."

But, on my little venture from parking meter pay station to restaurant before the operatic misery of Ophelia and the guys – heathen that I am, I still prefer the Band’s version of Ophelia: “Honey, you know I‘d die for you … the old neighbourhood … just ain’t the same” – I discover the pedestrian corridor is thronged with hungry and homeless. No comedy festival here, only outstretched hands, broken and twisted bodies draped in ragged clothes. This is Montreal?

Our friend with whom we shared the evening says her friend abandoned the Gay Village down the road, once a party hearty stretch with restaurants and good housing, often occupied by those working at Radio Canada. It’s gone to hell. He no longer felt safe on the streets and moved to a trendy condo above the madding crowd of less privileged. Cut backs at CBC a few blocks south meant good salaries had fled.

On show nights at Place des arts or the new home for the orchestras, the Maison Symphonique, thousands descend, many to eat a good meal before settling into their $100-plus seats. We had veal at an Italian spot in Complexe Desjardins, a Quebec government/Caisse Desjardins tower of government offices and several floors of struggling shops. It’s been re-energized by a international array of fast food in an expanded and polished food court and several restaurants, from the barely edible St. Hubert BBQ and Baton Rouge to the upper-scale eateries for those with more time and money.

The meal was good but I left half. My mind was struck on my hometown on the other side of the windows. Our friend told us of tent cities here, too, just like most towns in the country. In the continent. Cities the governments intend to cleanup. Can’t have the hungry and homeless stain the good times of people like me and our indulgence in an opera of fictional angst.

But, I wondered, did Reisa need to splurge to educate my uncultured ear to the majesty of torment gilded by orchestra and gifted baritones, sopranos and tenors?

Torment is right outside the door, running for a dozen blocks or more. And in several other parts of town. No arias, no orchestra to embellish tears.

It is also in our little Laurentian town as well, where tents go up in the dark of night in the back of the ancient, wooded cemetery eight kms down the road. Or in the multiple parking lots where people sleep in their old cars under cover of darkness.

Opera here is for the privileged. In Buenos Aires I bought a ticket to one of the world’s great opera houses for about four bucks, the stipulation being the less well-heeled enter by the side door so as not to sully the evening for those in silk suits and tuxes. It is not always for the privileged in Europe where culture is thought to be non-exclusive. Don’t remember tent cities or outstretched hands, either, but I was only there a handful of times. Maybe every city has its corridors of the forgotten.

There is nothing wrong with fine food, fine culture. But there’s something wrong when it is walled off by security guards lest the unfortunate and hungry stumble in. And something wrong when one of the wealthiest countries in the world, a social democracy, decides not to feed and house the less fortunate.

We paid a few hundred to see classical misery on stage. And, we witnessed present-day misery on the street, minus the orchestra to embellish it, for nothing.

The tragedy of Shakespeare’s court is long ago and far away and that’s entertainment.

The tragedy of my hometown and most others is best swept away, per chance to ignore.