Marriage Quote by Cleveland Amory

Opera, in Cleveland Amory's telling, isn’t an art form so much as a status object with a pulse. The joke lands because it treats culture the way old money often does: as a conspicuous expense you keep around partly to prove you can. “A husband with a foreign title” evokes the faintly ridiculous glamour of imported prestige - a count, a baron, something you can drop into conversation to make your life sound curated. It’s also a trap: once you marry into that kind of distinction, you’re on the hook for the upkeep.

Amory’s specific intent is to puncture opera’s reputation for lofty transcendence by describing it in the blunt language of social logistics: cost, confusion, performance. “Expensive to support” isn’t just ticket prices; it’s the whole ecosystem of patronage, gala etiquette, philanthropy-as-membership. “Hard to understand” is the slyest barb, because it implies that incomprehension is not a bug but a feature. If something is difficult, it becomes a gate. If it’s in Italian or German, even better: you can mistake bafflement for sophistication.

The subtext is that opera’s power in mid-century American social life often lived in the room more than on the stage. Amory, a historian of manners and class signals, reads opera as a test you publicly take: can you sit through it, dress for it, talk about it afterward? Calling it a “supreme social challenge” frames high culture as an endurance sport - less about being moved, more about being seen.