Anatomy of the Opera Glasses
During COVID, people got creative as the lockdown hours seemed endless. While public attention was drawn to the heroic accomplishments of healthcare professionals- as it should have been- and while we may now hope to move past the pandemic, I can recall some pretty interesting stories of innovation that emerged. For instance, there were the self-appointed musicians in Italy who serenaded their neighbors while strumming guitars on apartment balconies. And over at the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, burgeoning home chefs were undoubtedly hanging out their Peking Duck to dry.
Naturally, I would love to hear about your pandemic ventures. I am sure they were interesting and could perhaps go into my next blog, but for now please allow me to share that for me there was never a dramatic new hobby.
One day, however, in the midst of the never-ending viral transmission reports, I opened the top drawer of my dining room side board, and drew out my cherished crimson opera glasses, their official title being: The Metropolitan Opera, Burgundy Opera Glasses with Chain. It had been months since I had used the glasses, not just for the few Lincoln Center performances I had managed to attend, but for the ballet as well.
Grateful for the luxury of time to inspect the glasses, I recalled that the width of the binocular set could be adjusted by a gold-plaited focus wheel perched on a 3-rod bridge connecting the telescopic barrels. Truthfully there had never been a whole lot of wiggle room in that regard. Attached to each optic barrel was one end of a chic gold and black chain so that the entire opera glass could be worn around the neck like a pendant. The device was petite-2 by 4 inches, to be precise- in keeping with the compact quality of the modern opera glass. And I still admired the crimson motif with gilded accents around the eye cups, an initial selling point which made me feel that I was stepping back into the Gilded Age or perhaps into an Edith Wharton novel.
By way of background, opera glasses evolved from the Seventeenth Century Galilean telescope, in all likelihood too unwieldy for today’s opera viewing. For a time, there was the monocular, then the lorgnette- opera glasses with long handles- culminating in an array of decorative binoculars as we know them today, structurally similar to the more utilitarian field glasses.
You may not know this, but opera glasses originated in Vienna, Paris, and London. “The Opera Glass” became a collector’s item as it was often bedecked in expensive materials such as crystal and pearl inlay. In that regard, the opera glass served not only to magnify the view of the performance but to display one’s status to fellow attendees (1). And of course, there’s that stereotypic flip of the wrist to be found in period pieces whereby the protagonist whips out their opera glass to spy upon as well as avoid eye contact with some key figure in the storyline who happens to be sitting across the recital hall.
For one opera lover, Anne Betty Weinshenker, Professor Emerita of Montclair State University, it’s all about practicality, taking up her black opera glasses on the way out the door as she remembers. “Honestly, sometimes the binoculars become a low priority especially if I am pressed to make the opening overture.” An opera fan since the teenage years, Professor Weinshenker has reduced the frequency of live production attendance- and, in all probability, the need for opera glasses- due to the array of available media broadcasts for opera.
Returning to the theme of pandemic innovation, a day after I had taken out the opera glasses, during picture perfect weather I stepped onto my deck, glasses in hand, for some serious bird watching. Hoping to catch a glimpse of the Eastern Goldfinch, New Jersey’s state bird, there were at best a few scattered robins and a furtive blue jay who certainly did not appreciate being watched.
Plus, I had forgotten that the opera glass magnification is 3x, not a whole lot different than just regular old eye glass vision. I asked myself whether to become more adventurous and opt for an insider view of someone’s dinner table like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. True, one of my training mentors had once remarked that psychiatry has a professional voyeurism aspect, but I am not sure of that, and boundaries are boundaries. I folded up the opera glasses, returned them to the dining room side board, and that was that.
100% Author written
Acknowledgment: Special thanks to Professor Anne Betty Weinshenker for her contribution.
Reference: