A few weeks ago, my roommate and I went to Opera Omaha’s free outdoor exposition and listened to two hours of glorious opera.

It was a gorgeous day out, yet the park was only about half full of operagoers. We were the youngest people there by about 10 years, excluding the kids who were dragged there by their parents and grandparents. And honestly, that made me sad for our generation; we’re missing out on this time-honored tradition.

The conception of opera is unique because it did not slowly emerge from a predecessor but was distinctly invented (by Galileo’s dad!). The Italians of the 1500s wanted a way to tell a story exclusively through music, and oh boy, they succeeded.

Originally, only the elite were able to attend opera performances, but they became more publicly available a few hundred years later.

Opera operates in the same vein as Shakespeare; so many original operas are still being performed today, but for some reason, no one seems to care that much about them. If you’ve never seen an opera, firstly, you’re missing out.

Secondly, it’s essentially a combination between a play, a ballet and a musical. I think the general public assumes opera is just people singing extremely high notes and standing in the center of a stage with a single spotlight, but it’s more than that.

The point of opera was to revamp Greek drama and add to its emotional component through music.

If you’re familiar with the Greeks at all, you know that their plays were juicy. There is so much drama just reading them, but seeing them performed live adds a whole other level of emotion.

The same goes for operas—the first opera ever created is still being performed today, and people are still moved when they hear the first chords.

When I first heard about opera, I was in my fifth-grade music class, and we were preparing to go to a recorder concert where we and other fifth graders from surrounding schools would accompany the Kansas City Symphony in performing a selection of pieces from the opera Carmen.

Carmen is in French, yet I was still able to understand the basic plot points. And that’s because the actors are the most integral part of any opera performance.

Our society undervalues the talent of live performers; we are so accustomed to sitting in front of our TVs and watching a show or a movie, where the actors are allowed multiple takes in order to get the perfect delivery of a line.

Sometimes that takes days. Stage performances do not have that luxury. They have one take per performance—that’s it. And, to add to the pressure, they’re typically performing in their non-native language.

This may be a part of why younger people don’t go to the opera anymore; we tend to have a hard time focusing on narratives that are not in a language we have achieved fluency in.

But that is why opera performers have a more difficult task—they must convey the story, as well as the emotions of their character, in order for the audience to comprehend the plot.

When my fifth-grade self listened to Carmen for the first time, I was astounded by the emotional depth and brevity the actors were able to convey in a language I couldn’t understand. At the outdoor opera, the presenters informed the audience that there was a link to the translations of their selections, but my roommate and I couldn’t find it.

Instead, we turned our attention to the stage and how the actors performed their respective parts, and it was moving.

I think one of the main reasons why our generation isn’t going to see operas anymore isn’t because of any elitist subtext but because we have lost the skill of emotional comprehension. We rely so heavily on our language to guide us in how to feel that when it is taken away, we don’t know what to do with ourselves.

It’s our fault that opera is dying, but it’s also within our capabilities to save it. I encourage everyone to go and watch a few pieces from Carmen, Maria de Buenos Aires, or even, at a more commercial level, Phantom of the Opera. We’re lucky enough to have a talented opera house, Opera Omaha, near us.

I plan on going to at least one performance this season, and I urge you to go to see a performance as well.

They have upcoming shows in October, February, and May, all with relatively inexpensive tickets as well ($20 at the cheapest!).

We have a responsibility to uphold the legacy of opera and to keep the tradition alive, but we also have a responsibility to ourselves to become more aware of the world around us.

I believe that there is still hope for us to revive our own emotional comprehension abilities and opera simultaneously.