COVER STORY : Opera’s High Notes : Why subscribe? A writer does for the tales of love, fear, joy and grief.

In the way that there’s an impulse to find universal truths in all religions, the same mistake is made with art, which lets us cheat ourselves. You have to see it all. What I get from Robert Crumb I miss in Robert Lowell, and what I liked about seeing the Backstreet Boys with my daughter I’m not going to find at the Music Center when the opera is on the stage, which is why I decided to subscribe last year, instead of waiting for the reviews to tell me if I wanted to go.

For three years I saw half the productions, and after parting ways with every negative review, even when I agreed with them, I realized that someone else’s opinion of any particular production of the Los Angeles Opera missed the point I was deriving from the experience, which wasn’t a simple matter of like/dislike based on all the usual aesthetic qualities, measuring this particular performance against any others I might have seen, by category of voice, direction, design, costume, orchestra. Each opera I saw hinted toward a revelation, and if I was going to take this seriously, I had to spend my money and take my chances.

Actually what I liked about the Backstreet Boys--which was the shock that they were incredibly polished and rehearsed and could dance, and they had good costumes, gave everything they had, and seemed totally dedicated to the generosity of their performance--applies to whatever I’d say about the L.A. Opera. The difference being the Backstreet Boys sing only about love, and the opera goes a little further, to the grave.

The “South Park” movie would not be the greatest political operetta since “The Mikado” (which it is, absolutely) if it didn’t have so much death, and if the Backstreet Boys sang more about death, or if they killed Howie Backstreet in every performance, then in a hundred years there would be Backstreet Song Cycles at the Disney Hall. You can never tell; in 50 years there’ll be Juilliard-trained singers competing for who does the best Springsteen, and “The Ghost of Tom Joad” will be presented like Schubert, by a tenor in black tie.

What had been people’s music will belong to an effete audience, but the music and the songs will still be great, and opera is like that now. It’s a gift from another century that this art experience also calls for perfume and jewelry. The show is everywhere.

My experience with opera outside of Los Angeles is limited. Five years ago in Milan I saw Placido Domingo sing Siegmund in the “Die Walkure” at La Scala, with Riccardo Muti conducting. This was the first opera I went to as a sentient adult with enough money for a good seat. Two years ago I went to New York to see Hildegard Behrens in the “Ring” cycle at the Met. It was the most radically designed theater I’d ever seen, much stranger than anything staged by Robert Wilson, with the most advanced costumes and stagecraft, except for maybe those of Siegfried and Roy, which it resembled, but again, Siegfried and Roy, for all their Teutonism, also don’t go all the way to death, or won’t, until the tigers join a union. The Met’s production was more impressive than La Scala’s, and the full “Ring” cycle, seen in one week, is seductive, confusing and expensive. I hope we get our own.

There’s a criticism that the L.A. Opera is old-fashioned. David Hockney’s “Tristan and Isolde” and Julie Taymor’s “Flying Dutchman” were beautiful, and it would be good to see Patrice Chereau and the stagings of the Paris Opera. Updating operas seems an easy trick, though; I’d love to direct “Don Giovanni” and set it in the lobby of the Mondrian Hotel, but I am mindful that my favorite production of anything I’ve seen at the L.A. Opera was “Werther,” with spare classical sets, ruffles and powdered wigs.

For all that I love going to the opera, I rarely listen to it at home, for the same reason that I doubt I’d subscribe without the supertitles. I go for the stories, for all those famously lampooned displays of grief, joy, pity, fear, erotic excitement, anger, scorn and death.

The opera is a better tutorial in filmmaking, in storytelling, than any of the books and courses because opera knows that the justification for the high note is a high emotion, and that the high emotions, leapt to from scene to scene, as though jumping between rocks to cross a river, sanction the story to move quickly to a real conclusion, not quickly in the sense of time but in synopsis.

The concentration of an important story, important in vitality and consequence, releases all of the other energies, the frightful virtuosities of singers, musicians and designers, and when they’re balanced, as they are, often enough, even here in dusty Los Angeles, something real happens on the stage.