The best in this kind are but shadows.
Roland Barthes put a lot of impressionable people off realistic art by announcing that signs that pretended to be natural were very wicked indeed. Bourgeois. The only ethically OK sign was the one that called attention to itself as sign. (The period was big on portentous italics.) The stage, for example should never try to look like bits of the world. It should emulate the Brechtian theatre, where the stage is a stage, people, and Stop gawping! (Glotz nicht!)
Oh what a fuss. Later, Barthes said he actually rather liked reading realistic novels.
But enough of these lavender-scented memories. In recent years, I find myself vastly enjoying certain kinds of performance, broad, shamelessly manipulative and completely conventional, which in my youth I considered the work of the devil. I like hokum: Godzilla movies for example – apart from the one with Matthew Broderick – the anim? series R.O.D. (Read or Die), best of all Italian blood-and-thunder opera. It’s not that I’ve forgotten or no longer register the difference between Adriana Lecouvreur and The Marriage of Figaro. But age (I find) brings a perspective from which the experiences of masterpiece and hokum can peaceably coexist.
Sometimes, especially in performance, it is difficult to tell them apart. Here’s an aria from Adriana Lecouvreur. I probably should have chosen something from La Gioconda, one of the hokiest of operas, but I think this one will do (“I am but a humble handmaiden of the arts”.) The first version, on mp3, is from a 1959 live recording and includes a brief ensemble; the YouTube version is from 1993 and includes the recitative beforehand; the soprano in both performances is Magda Olivero (b. 1910). Warning: lousy sound.
No soprano today could get away with the liberties Olivero took in 1959 on the last two notes of the aria. But the Italian audience didn’t care, and neither do I. And the way she sings them at the age of 83 is a miracle of vocal husbandry.