Out of earshot

COMPARED with what I remember from a few years ago, when opera chic was in the air, there’s less talk in my circle about the opera these days. Last year, my date and I were at an Oscar party when we had to leave to catch “The Magic Flute” at Los Angeles Opera. People shrugged their shoulders. What’s with him? It felt like a generational betrayal.

But I wasn’t entirely alone in my interest. Opera had been, when I moved to town in ‘97, that rare high art that drew the under-30 crowd -- something that stood out in a city where the audiences for high and pop culture were more fiercely segregated than anywhere I’d lived. Buzz magazine even suggested the opera was replacing the Dresden Room as a retro pleasure. But by 2002, I see fewer young faces.

Did opera turn out to be another pop-cult fad, or did the L.A. company blow the opportunity to capture this most sought-after demographic?

Lacking the mass audience, and the advertising and visibility that huge budgets bring, the high arts will never be able to compete with movies and TV, especially in Los Angeles. Here, there’s a sense that the traditional arts are stuffy, old; they’re associated with that fading WASP class Angelenos love to hate. So a televised movie awards show with stars in slinky gowns is like a double-barreled culture killer: It’s entertainment about entertainment.

But opera should connect with young people. Unlike the more cerebral and abstract medium of classical music, it hits young ‘uns where they live: sex, violence, loud singing. It’s a blood-and-guts spectacle.

A night at the opera can’t be as cheap, or as easy, as a trip to Spaceland. But it can offer something different, and the Los Angeles company could, without pandering with cheesy operas based on Hollywood films, do better.

The opera’s programming has budged little since Placido Domingo took over and principal conductor Kent Nagano was appointed almost two years ago, though it has exploited his cool haircut and sublime way with Wagner.

Nagano made his reputation with risky 20th century works; virtually none of these have found their way onto our stage. Adventurous productions of war horses, another way to draw new audiences, have been sparing as well.

And the greater ambition of the opera company under Domingo has made tickets forbiddingly expensive, especially for those of us with minimum-wage jobs still in memory.

Some of what’s wrong with the experience isn’t exactly the L.A. company’s fault. The Music Center, for instance, needs a better bar than Otto’s, an overpriced corporate watering hole. (The fact that young-member events take place a bus ride away attests to this.)

The lack of any real street life or restaurants, except for the Stalinist central planning of the Patina chain, gives Grand Avenue an airless, artificial feel: Only if the show’s great does this add up to a romantic night out.

By comparison, the Grove is a wonder of diversity. Music Center parking is now $8 a car, and there are few other options.

For all the cheery talk about Los Angeles as a city where high culture is fusing with low, art with pop, the opera’s current season remains, in comparison, monochromatic.

Next week’s opera, “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” is a step in the right direction, a rarely performed piece with intense, often violent music by Shostakovich that speaks to our time.

A great opera production fuses the genres with a visual, emotional, narrative and harmonic power that nothing else can match, with a physical presence that cinema can’t offer.

Consumerism, bad education and TV have marginalized the high arts and standardized audiences, but opera -- which once had a popular following in Italy, New York and elsewhere--may be the best suited to fight back.