I read the Wall Street Journal because I need to know these things.
Coming up is an opera which will feature live scents, all through the action. A small canister of spray, attached to your seat, called a 'scent microphone', will intermittently emit a spray of smells orchestrated with the music, relating to the action of stage.
Some of the smells will be good. Some will be bad...I do worry about the bad ones, specifically described as real 'stinkers'. But some of the scents, such as the one used for 'earth' which includes moss, beet and patchouli, I find I am tantalized by, in spite of myself.
The spray will shoot out for sixteen seconds, enveloping the smeller/listener/viewer of the opera, thereby involving them more completely into the...er...moment.
Apparently hotel chains and casinos and such have experimented with using scents unsuccessfully before.
But this goes further, with more technical knowledge and determination. The opera will debut at the Guggenheim, which seems an...encouraging way to do it.
I go to the opera once every ten years whether I need it or not. I choose the opera by the venue at which it is playing. I am particularly fond of the opera house in Brussels, as well as the opera house in Chicago. The one in Brussels has box seats and velvet drapery to die for. And the one in Chicago has a ladies room with the most gorgeous yellow cabbage rose wallpaper I have ever seen...or at least it did fifteen years ago.
I do have favorite operas--Carmen and Madam Butterfly--but basically I don't like opera because I can't abide listening to dying sopranos bellowing out their distress, prone on the floor. Which is what happens at the end of most, if not all, operas.
Spare me--
Except now--an opera where one will be diverted from the distressing story by scents blowing out, at the appropriate moment, to further involve the opera lover quietly weeping in their seats.
It has taken one Christophe Laudamiel, a high-end perfumer, two years to develop the twenty-three scents to be used. The name of the opera is "Green Aria'. It is about the struggle between Nature and Industry...I will try to ignore that, because--
One of the scents smells like caramel with hints of leather and black cherry.
I can taste it.
Comments