1.11.08: Fear and Moaning in Las Vegas

My cold refuses to kick the bucket for some reason, though I am feeling much better. Rehearsals for Così fan tutte don’t start until the 23rd, so I’ll postpone any major freak-out until then. I’m more than a little bothered, however, by the state of opera in the 21st century. It’s got me in a state of creative crisis, this incessant worrying over the question of opera’s cultural relevance in today’s world.

Recently, I read an Opera News article published on this very same subject. Philip Kennicott writes:

“Opera was never central to American society, and it never will be. …Even a supposed boom in internet downloads or online sales, if it happens, is unlikely to change opera’s cultural status: a peculiar entertainment that appears in the larger popular culture mostly as a subject for caricature. The only argument about its relevance is whether relevance matters. If opera matters to a few people, deeply and with transformative power, perhaps that’s relevance enough.”

Bullsh$t! Of COURSE that’s not enough! I want a freakin’ audience to sing to—I want them to laugh, cry, applaud WHENEVER they feel like it and LOVE the super-human display of vocal athleticism that is opera. But how? What about sports?

“Baseball fans can spend hours citing statistics and debating the fine points of a big game. For the casual operagoer, there is no context. If the basic structure of a piece of music isn’t known, you can’t point to a musical event. You can’t say where the pitch went astray, or an ornament was inserted or a money-note interpolated. You can’t make comparisons, or sustain much of a conversation about the evening. Opera becomes a generalized, generic experience. And people aren’t necessarily willing to invest hours at a time in something that can’t be effectively retained, analyzed, compared and argued about.”

But people are just as capable of learning the “rules” of opera as they are those of any other game. To begin with, there aren’t that many: there’s singing, occasional dancing, music and drama. Everything else—foreign language, costumes, make-up, sets, etc.—is just stylistic detail. But it’s largely the details or, rather, the chief details of foreign language and vocal style, which often confuse and test the would-be opera fan’s patience. If opera is ever going to compete with film & television (two firmly cemented staples/exponents of American pop culture) we need operas—in English!—that are more creatively free.

“With marginality comes freedom—or at least the possibility of freedom. …But look at opera. Even from the margins, it never found a new voice of freedom. If anything, it has taken upon itself ever greater creative strictures. In this country, the experimental opera director…has largely been run off the stage. New operas continue to come forth, but they have become essentially mainstream product. Composers often look to the established American literary canon for librettos. The favored music style is increasingly anodyne. The presence of big-name stars in major roles is as much about reassuring nervous audiences as it is a healthy sign of faith in new work.”

Gimme a second while I look up “anodyne.” [Anodyne: adj. 1. not likely to provoke dissent or offense; uncontentious or inoffensive, often deliberately so. Ex. "anodyne new-age music;" "I attempted to keep the conversation as anodyne as possible.] Okay, I totally agree. But I know there’s something worth stealing from film & TV and plugging into opera. Has anyone else noticed the sudden interest of opera companies in disseminating their productions into movie theatres across the nation? Well, have you? Did you even know about it?

Go here: The Met Goes to the Movies – Live Simulcasts from America’s number-one opera house.

Contemporary composers and librettists need to take a lesson from the greats. After all, what is nearly every “staple” opera based on? Anyone?

Someone else’s story. Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Handel, Puccini, Bizet, Massenet—all of them knew that plays (some bad, some really bad, others great) could be the basis for fan-TAS-tic operas. So there it is, where are all the operas based on blockbuster movies? This is SUCH a goldmine!

“What matters is not some connection between the real world and the art form but the ability of the art form to be a forum for human passion. People will remain intensely loyal to things that anger and disappoint them [like movies and TV shows] once that passion is there. …Opera has, in many ways, failed to develop this larger sense of necessity and loyalty in its audience. There’s a great deal of desire to see the established stars but very little sense of duty to hear the new crop of singers. The same is true for new operas. And even when the effort is made, so much of the public-relations process that surrounds the opera world is an effort to reassure the audience that nothing dangerous is going to happen. Classic productions. Classic works.”

Someone please write a “Harry Potter” opera. Now.

“For opera to survive as an intellectually [how about emotionally?] engaged art form, it needs to rethink it identity [yes, yes it does]. Without an enemy—whether it’s apathy or ignorance or moral callousness—opera will stagnate. That’s not the way we’re used to thinking about art, of course. It is meant to uplift, to entertain, or to tenderly coax us to catharsis.”

Hold on again, lemme look that one up, too. [Catharsis: n. 1. the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions.] Okay, yeah, I’m still with ‘ya. My job is to remind at least one person that while you may think you’ve bought a 3-hour ticket of escape from the crazy world and its crazy problems, you’ve also gained a living mirror—one that fearlessly holds up your own reflection(s). That’s great art.

“But without an enemy, there’s no fight, and if an art form has no fight in it, who really cares, in the end?”

I couldn’t agree more. Give me some music.