Science Quote by Edward Appleton

Opera, in Appleton's telling, works best when it stops pretending to be literature. The line is a scientist's deadpan joke with a serious premise: comprehension can be the enemy of enchantment. If you understand every word, you start auditing the libretto for logic, clunky rhyme, and melodrama. If you don't, the voice becomes pure instrument and the plot dissolves into texture. The “I don’t mind” sets up tolerance, then the punchline flips it into aesthetic snobbery: he wants the emotional voltage of singing without the embarrassment of overhearing the script.

The subtext is less “foreign languages are charming” than “opera’s verbal content often can’t survive daylight.” Appleton is puncturing a cultural ritual that asks modern audiences to treat florid, sometimes silly narratives as high art. By choosing ignorance, he’s also choosing permission: permission to feel without having to agree, to be moved without being coerced into believing the story makes sense.

Context matters. Appleton lived through an era when opera was a prestige form, increasingly mediated by recordings and international repertory, and when a scientifically trained elite often prized “pure” form - pattern, structure, resonance - over explicit meaning. His quip reframes opera as a physics problem: timbre, frequency, breath, reverberation. It’s not anti-intellectual; it’s an argument that some experiences are strongest when you stop translating them into prose.