It's often thought a folly for rock stars to go and write their own opera, After all, you don't hear of actors becoming mechanics, or poets becoming chefs, so why do rock stars think they can write opera?

Macca did, as did Elvis Costello. Never heard them. I'd rather chew my own face off than consider it.  

For Roger Waters, the guy who famously jumped the shark with "Dark Side Of Moon" only to ride the wave of acclaim into producing 1979's horrible "I Miss My Dad, I Blame The War, Mother, Can I Build A The Wall?", "Ca Ira" is yet another pompous irrelevant concept about Something Incredibly Important, with an orchestra. This time, it's The French Revolution.

In short, Ca Ira ("There Is Hope") is an immense conceit : as an opera it fails - unless the purpose of an opera is to be pompous and melodically slight. As a listening experience it's the kind of record that you can only really listen to when everyone else has gone to bed. Or you live alone and are doing the gardening.

Lloyd Webber's awful stuff runs for years and years and years.

Musically then, it consists of 38 pieces. Short unmemorable songs rise and fall, and there's no such thing as a recurring musical motif (unless you count a chord progression he wrote for "The Wall" and also used on a solo album, or the opening notes of "All You Need Is Love"), let alone anything memorable. The lyrics are fantastic - in places - and a choir of children singing "I Want To Be God" and about the afterlife is well, mildly intruiging and not your standard opera fare. But then again, opera is, by it's nature a rightly reviled art form.

And rightly so.

Thirteen years after Waters masterpiece ("Amused To Death"), he has seemingly painted himself into a corner. The final two rock albums of his career, - including the imminent "Heartland", which has been due any year now for a decade - and their failure to appear despite prolific writing sessions, seem to indicate that for a while at least, Roger Waters had a crisis of faith and instead immersed himself in this, which was first started in 1988. It wasn't worth the wait.

Comments

Ca Ira was good Written by jkoorts on 2008-06-02 15:04:45 I think its quite an amazing piece of work. This is the first opera piece i could listen to and im only 34     In Ca Ira you can for sure hear the Pink Floyd style, which means roger waters, old as he is, has not lost his touch.    we can now only pray that roger will do one more classic rock masterpirce like Amused to death or The pros and cons of hitch hiking, before he leaves this shitty world.    Or could we even dare to hope for a one time only Pink Floyd return?

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