Infinite

One of my favorite films of all time is The Legend of 1900. I highly recommend it. It's about this boy born on a ship traveling between England and the United States. He is raised by a crew member and never leaves the ship. However, he somehow learns to play the piano and creates wonderful music unlike anyone has ever heard. As the grown musician considers the daunting prospect of leaving the confines of the ship and exploring the infinite world he remarks that there are 88 keys on a piano and on those 88 keys you can play infinite music, but what would happen if you had an infinite number of keys? How would you choose even one? Commonly, when we create a work of art in the form of staging we have limited resources. There's only so much money you can spend on performers, musicians, props, costumes and staging. You have a limited amount of time that you can rehearse and often times the performance space is very limited. Yet with these limitations countless of memorable, fabulous, touching performances are achieved for the audiences. Mozart's operas come to mind as I think of how he many times composed operas so quickly out of necessity yet they are of the most memorable in the opera repertoire. This may explain why I think that Barber's Antony and Cleopatra was such big flop. Perhaps for the first time in the history of opera, there was practically unlimited resources available for production of an American Opera for the inauguration of the new Metropolitan Opera House. The eyes of the world was on this production. Barber had unlimited resources at his disposal; he could have any poet he wanted, practically any subject matter he wanted yet he chose a dead, English poet that is often the fall back for many composers. Zeffirelli as well had unlimited resources which he certainly managed to show off. The unfortunate disconnect between the introverted music and the bombastic staging is the most obvious reason for the failure. But I would hypothesize that the greatest art is created when elements are synced purely out of the necessity to create, inspire and entertain. This opera from the beginning of its production missed the point of the art form and therefore was a failure.