It's an Acquired Taste

Opera is not for everyone, and every opera is not for me.  My mother was a great fan of opera, and she managed to drag me to one once.  I thought it was way too long, and I couldn't follow the story line because it was in Italian.  I saw one on TV years later, and the English subtitles made a big difference, but it still was way too long.  Then I started recording or buying them on VHS and, later, DVD, and that made all the difference in the world because I could watch them in installments and take a break whenever I wanted to.  Rossini, who wrote The Barber of Seville, is good of a kind, but my favorite composer is Richard Wagner.  My mother was not crazy about him, said he was "too heavy" for her taste.  When you see a big woman dressed in armor with a horned helmet and carrying a spear they are often making fun of Wagner's works.  I believe she is the original fat lady who sings when it's all over.

Opera is easier to appreciate if you remember that it was state of the art entertainment in its day.  They didn't have cameras or sound systems, so everything had to be overdone so the people way up in the balcony could tell what was going on.  The story lines are pretty hokey by today's standards but, to the audiences of the time, they were beloved folk tales with which they were quite familiar.  They all knew how the story was going to end, so the skill of the craft was to present it in a way that would engage the audience emotionally, much like some of the better movies of today, but live and on stage. 

Our opera house had to be rebuilt back in the 1970s because the building was literally falling apart, but the interior is well preserved.  The acoustics are nearly perfect, making any kind of sound system unnecessary, although some musical groups insist on bringing their own and using it which, in my opinion, detracts from the experience.  Tours of the building are conducted every so often, and I wouldn't be surprised if the same is true for the one in Chicago.  That way you could see the building without having to sit through a performance.