The Ride Awaits Us!

I was at a local theater recently, watching an HD documentary about the Metropolitan Opera’s latest production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

Surprisingly (for me), one of the Met’s executives talked about how the Met had fallen two decades behind in its staging technology, until they attempted this Ring.  How can that be? I thought.  I remember when the Met moved to Lincoln Center; the technology was state-of-the-art.  But of course that was 1966!

We lose track of time.  I once worked in Youth Programming at a Unitarian summer institute.  I decided I’d dazzle the teenagers with stories of Jack Kerouac and the Beat poets.  But this was 1980.  I was old, so old:  Twenty-nine!  My source-books lay unused in my dorm room; the teenagers had disappeared to who knows where.  They didn’t care about the rebellions of earlier times.  We all lose track.

That film about the Met give me a visceral “punch” in several ways.  First, sheer physical amazement:  Cirque du Soleil-style acrobatic-stand-ins ascending an eighty-degree wall that resembled Yosemite’s Half-Dome, at the end of the first Ring opera; and the soprano Brunnhilde hanging upside down from a similar precipice at the end of the second.

But equally visceral was the mental punch delivered by that executive who declared (I’m paraphrasing) that “art cannot stand still.  It has to change and move forward, always.  If it stops changing, it becomes irrelevant and dies.”

It’s good to remember that.  And I ask myself, not without misgivings:  Will you climb on the Bus of the Future?  Will you buy into the Age of Change? 

It’s always hard to break with our habits.  But the ride awaits us—the journey into the Future.  Come aboard and let’s embark!