WELCOME TO THE 100TH OPERA SEASON AFTER THE ART FORM'S ALLEGED DEATH
A new opera season is upon us, one that in April will see
the celebration of the 100th anniversary of what has been
called “the death of opera.” On April 26, 1926, the great conductor Arturo
Toscanini burst into tears upon completing the first performance of Puccini’s
last opera Turandot. Since then, though many excellent new operas
have been performed, it’s been argued that popular opera has died. The New York Times opera critic
Zachary Woolfe in 2024 went so far as to say “A century on, it can be said
confidently: With Puccini died the great opera tradition. There have been
extraordinary works created since his death, but next to none have penetrated
the public consciousness, or the core repertoire.” The century of music past
“Nessun Dorma” (Turnadot’s greatest aria, which itself has been played almost to death) has been diverse and exciting,
and there are more new operas than ever to get excited about in the last few
years, with many different styles of classical music. However, if audiences
feel something is missing in the listenability of the new operas compared with
the old ones they are not entirely mistaken.
Seemingly each book and article on opera has a new expression
of this gloomy sentiment. The most sensational book of the opera season
immediately passed, opera director Yuval Sharon’s A New Philosophy of Opera, for
example, opens with the request that we imagine a world after opera’s death. Conrad L.
Osborne in his 2018 Opera as Opera proposes that the art form
is in a state of decline that began with the end of what he calls the “extended
19th Century,” or “E-19,” stretching from Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart to Richard Strauss. “The birthrate of repeatable works has
plummeted over the past century,” Osborne writes. “It is the predictable end of
an art form’s terminal stage: first the creators dry up; a generation or two
later, the interpreters lose touch; a generation or two after that, the
audience drifts away.” And in Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Zizek’s 2002 book Opera’s
Second Death, Dolar prepared us for this very anniversary:
“I share the view held by many that
the opera is emphatically finished. Several candidates for the date of its
death exist, and if the genre's grand, melodramatic finale is to match the
grandeur of its ascendancy, then the favorite of these is no doubt April 26,
1926, the first performance of Puccini's Turandot, when Toscanini's famous
gesture — interrupting the performance at the point where Puccini's work was
terminated by his death, and leaving the podium in tears — also suspended the
majestic tradition of opera and marked its demise.”
Dolar listed other potential death dates for opera (1937’s Lulu
by Berg; 1938’s Dafne by Strauss) and declined to choose one terminal
point, but other writers have picked the opening of Turnadot too. A book
called Puccini’s Turnadot: The End of the Great Tradition makes it clear
in the title where the authors think opera went wrong. A New York Times story in the 1980s
picked Turandot as the end of the prominence of Italian opera, which
from the art form’s beginnings had reigned supreme.
The autopsy results differ from author to author. Osborne
says one of the biggest problems is that “operawrights” have stopped writing
what he says is the one plot that almost every opera in “E-19” used (an
outsider falls in love with a woman who represents everything from which he has
been excluded). Dolar and Zizek muse that opera died at the very moment
psychoanalysis was born, “as if, after psychoanalysis, opera, at least in its
traditional form, was no longer possible.” Sharon says the problem is that “Few
composers today are encouraged to move in Berg’s direction—not specifically in
relation to atonality, which at this point is over 100 years old, but in the
spirit of pushing musical language forward and finding an analogous musical
expression for uncomfortable truths.”
Indeed the most common autopsy finding is the absence of what
before 1900 was considered great melody. Even the General Manager of the
Metropolitan Opera, Peter Gelb, who has done more in the last few years than
anyone else to introduce new opera to the mainstream, agrees that opera’s
problem lies in the lack of melody. “After Puccini, opera started slipping from
its creative peak,” Gelb wrote in an Opinion piece in the New York
Times in November of last year. “Geniuses like Strauss and Janáček
followed in the early decades of the 20th century, but with a few exceptions,
the second half of the 20th century produced little truly popular opera;
composers turned inward, with experimental, sometimes atonal compositions that
didn’t appeal to large audiences.”
New Yorker music critic Alex Ross took on Gelb’s
conclusions in an essay the following month, saying “the idea of emulating
Puccini is as undesirable as it is impossible.” Ross says the current rash of
new operas produced at the Met and elsewhere around the country has given opera
a chance at escaping the suffocating influence of its own greatness in the 19th century.
And he contests Gelb’s premise that 20th century opera has been
untuneful. “If you look at playbills for American opera houses between 1950 and
1990, you see dozens of non-radical, even hummable scores by the likes of Gian
Carlo Menotti, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, William Grant Still, Jack
Beeson, Carlisle Floyd, Robert Ward, Douglas Moore, Dominick Argento, and
William Bolcom,” Ross writes. But somehow the perception persists that those composers lack
something that the 19th and 18th centuries did
not. And even Ross in his 2007 defense of modern classical music The
Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century admits
“Twentieth-century classical composition, the subject of this book, sounds like
noise to many."
An exaggerated, stereotypical account of the history of opera’s departure from “melody” or “tunefulness” begins with Wagner, who sometimes wrote
arresting melodies that have lasted for almost two centuries as among society’s
favorites (“The Ride of the Valkyries,” the wedding march from Lohengrin),
but who has also been credited with liberating music drama from the tyranny of
melody. Each note serves the drama in Wagner’s conception, rather than the
desire of the audience to hear delightful tunes. Thus rather than recitative
alternating with melodic arias that don’t necessarily move the plot lyrically,
as in operas before the middle of the 19th Century, Wagner
wrote hours and hours of music that communicated abstract ideas and plot
without necessarily worrying about how hummable the tunes were. His later
operas have been called the first modern operas. This kind of writing caught on
in opera in the late 19th Century, inspiring many imitators of
Wagner, and gave way in the 20th century to the then-shocking
music of Stravinsky and atonal composition like Berg and Schoenberg.
Whether opera is stuck in an unmelodic groove remains a
hotly contested premise among opera fans. After theater director Michael
Attenborough told the London Telegraph in 2012 that “modern
opera is rubbish,” a lively group of opera fans on the discussion board “Talk
Classical” called Attenborough a “crusty blowhard” and called his conclusion
that modern music has “no melody” a “tired old canard.” “Has this dude ever listened
to Britten?” asked another commenter. “If that’s not melodic, I don’t know what
is.” Said another: “During Wagner’s lifetime, one of the most persistent
criticisms of his music was that ‘it had no melody.’ This is like saying that
chocolate cake has no calories! In fact, Wagner’s music is chock full of great
melodies.” That it is, but it is also full of challenging music that transcends
melody.
Demanding that all composers be “hummable” is cringeworthy. It is a burden that
has dogged some of our best Broadway musical composers too. Sometimes, after all, melody can be annoying, particularly on repeat listens. And subtler melodies often grow on one. Still, critics of modern opera have a point. Osborne points out that some
musicians, including Stephen Sondheim, “maintain that a hit tune is merely one
that is repeated a sufficient number of times, almost irrespective of merit.” But,
he argues, that isn’t strictly true. “‘La donna e mobile’ is not memorable
because it was sung a lot … it was sung a lot because it was memorable,
instantly and persistently,” Osborne writes. And frankly this is borne out by the evidence
at the time the opera was first rehearsed: before Rigoletto opened
Verdi banned his cast from singing the tune outside of rehearsal, because he
realized how memorable it was and feared it would be plagiarized before
opening. In any case, whether you call it “hummability” or not, something is definitely
different between the centuries prior to the 19th century and those
after.
So what the next century brings us is crucial to the survival of opera. The Metropolitan Opera’s recent strategy to boost ticket sales, excitingly, has been to bank on new operas. The tactic began after two new operas, Terrence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up In My Bones and Kevin Puts’ The Hours, sold out their runs in 2021 and 2022 respectively. In the seasons that followed, the Met, which in times past went decades without staging any new operas at all, debuted between four and six new operas per season. That strategy seems to have ended, however, after last years’ season opener Grounded by Jeanine Tesori sold only 50 percent of the seats.
This season the Met is producing only three new operas, only one of which will be in their “Live in HD” program, in which live
performances are beamed to movie theaters around the world. The first of this season’s
new operas, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (a fictionalization of the creation of Superman that has two Jewish comic book writers creating a superhero to fight Nazis) is
reportedly innovative musically, using “electronica” alongside classical
stylings. It opens the Met’s new season on September 21. I am one of millions of opera fans who wish the Met had included
it in the HD series. In fact, I liked many of the new operas Gelb introduced,
even Grounded, which was panned by the Times, and find
the new commitment to new work thrilling. Still, something is missing from the diverse new offerings. The new operas have been varied
musically, but they haven’t broken the streak of operas without a kind of
melody that would be welcomed by fans of "melody."
I love many unhummable operas but wonder why a few more melodic ones can’t co-exist with them on the opera scene, particularly, as Sharon points out, 100 years after atonality sprung on the scene. But just when one is considering the possibility that composers have run out of variations on the 12 notes we have, another original melodic film score emerges. This past summer was bookended for me by two events that had me ruminating on the change in melodic style in the last century. On June 1, I attended a concert at Chicago’s Symphony Center at which the world-renowned Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed (of all things) James Horner’s 1989 film score to Field of Dreams. It has always been one of my favorite scores, with its sweeping 20th Century American melodicism, and I was delighted to see it gaining acceptance as one of the great symphonic scores of the century. The CSO, like other symphonies around the country, recently have been recognizing the greatness of many symphonic scores, particularly those of John Williams, allowing them to be performed alongside the great composers of classical music for more or less the first time. This was the late Horner’s turn. As I listened, through teary eyes as did the conductor and many of the other audience members, I contemplated the striking difference in melodic style between this late century composition and that of the modern operas. I am loathe to suggest that the solution to opera’s travails is the admittedly somewhat sentimental stylings of a beloved but almost schlocky movie from the 1980s that deserves some kind of award for the most preposterous plot that somehow still works. After all, movie scores are beginning to move away from sweeping tunes as well. Cases in point: The Best Score Oscar two years ago went to Volker Bertelmann’s three-note main theme, otherwise drowning in discordant “danger music,” as my brother and I used to call it as young fans of film scores in the 1990s. Action movies have been moving towards the influence of the Chris Nolan Batman films' scores, which eschew melody for something more subtle and less tuneful. I like those scores, as well as, notably, Hans Zimmer’s brilliant and inventive Oscar-winning Dune score, even as they depart sonically from the model Williams popularized 50-some years ago. But film music often remains melodic, and the genre has rarely been accused of a melody draught, as opera has. When I first started attending modern operas I wondered why no one had tried retaining a composer like Rachel Portman (Cider House Rules, Emma), whom I have later learned did in fact compose one opera in 2002. Portman was not my favorite composer, but her sentimental melodic style is exactly what I’d expect many fans of opera who complain about the absence of melody would enjoy. This December Portman’s one opera, The Little Prince, fittingly a children’s story, will play at the Kennedy Center. Somehow the new regime there has not affected the opera offerings, which include several interesting selections. From listening to the recording of The Little Prince's first production, I find the level of melody both intriguing and somehow disappointing. Portman's music for me did not live up to her best film scores.
It’s not just the 19th Century that produced more melodic operas. On August 24, my summer ended with a wonderful concert performance of
Handel’s 1735 opera Alcina in Ravinia’s intimate Martin Theatre. It was a
reminder both of how beautiful early opera music was, and of the improvements
later operas made in storytelling. I don’t agree with Osborne that opera needs
to return to the repetitive stories of the “extended 19th Century,” which precedes Handel. I am
excited by the possibilities of the art form being applied to new kinds of
stories. When Grounded debuted at the Met, the Times described
it pejoratively as yet another example of opera favoring stories of the
suffering of women. I’ve long said opera’s great theme the treatment of
women, both in a sardonic way and an admiring way. But I welcome new kinds of stories that don’t revel misogynistically in
the tragedies of being female. The opportunity exists now to create new strong
heroines who actually get their way. Alcina is a 18th Century tale of
a villainous sorceress who seduces men, bores of them, and then transforms them
into rocks and trees and animals. The story is reminiscent of Circe of The
Odyssey, a sorceress who just got a more sympathetic feminist treatment in
a novel by Madeline Miller, the bestselling author of Song of
Achilles. It’s also a tale much like the similarly named Armida by Rossini, which is named for another seductress sorcerer who is given the treatment of a villain. Thus Alcina is
in a tradition of male-authored stories about women with power, who were almost
always treated negatively. The performance, staged by Chicago’s Haymarket Opera
company, which specializes in early opera, was gorgeous and fascinating. But it
did have me contemplating whether it would be possible to merge the tunefulness
of these great pre-Enlightenment operas with modern storytelling techniques. By the way, it
is still a relatively recent phenomenon that early operas have had a place at
the Met. Handel was introduced to their repertoire some 40 years ago, and
sparked a revival nationwide of early music. But Monteverdi has still never
been performed there, and many worry that the push for new operas will push out
the beautiful early music. There should be a place for both.
Sharon, who will bring his provocative, highly unusual style
of directing to the Met this season with a new production of Wagner’s important
opera Tristan and Isolde, says it’s unfortunate that producers feel
the necessity to stage operas with Puccini-esque melody. “Even as producers put
a lot of resources into the development of new work, they encourage creators to
strike a chord in the pleasing direction of Puccini," he writes. “The more a new
opera is meant to sound like an old one (read: from the nineteenth century),
the more it’s likely to please the people who are paying for it to happen.
Social critique remains in the realm of the written word, to be read in the supertitles
but not viscerally felt in the music.” In a wonderful series of lectures at the
University of Chicago in May, Sharon explored how such a change might come
about. He took a typically provocative approach, proposing that opera would be
best guided by principles of “anarchy.” He presented multiple charts showing
hierarchies of how opera can be produced, including one (the typical model
these days) that gives the power at the top of the chart first to an impresario
and then to a creatively controlling union of conductor and director, and
another chart (the one he favors) in which the singers, designers, director,
impresario and all the other jobs are in one circle, with no creator
elevated over another. How that radical style will be executed at the Met when
he directs Wagner's full four-opera "Ring Cycle" there later this decade is yet to be seen even
by Sharon: He says he has been asked already what he’s going to do on a
specific rehearsal day years into the future, and has said he has no idea.
I’ve had mixed feelings about Sharon’s sometimes brilliant
conceptual style (see the
post I wrote after seeing his Cosi Fan Tutte at Detroit
Opera this April). But it’s clear opera can benefit from fresh ideas. Osborne
looks entirely to the past – before even supertitles, which he despises in part
because they tip the audience off to jokes before they are sung by the performers
– for the way forward. This seems to me folly. As much as I’d like to see a
creative return to melody, I don’t wish to go backwards. When Christpher Arden,
a veteran opera director, tried some intellectually interesting production
choices in Chicago a few years back his approach was booed, and he ended up
declaring in a European publication that Chicago is a conservative town where opera is concerned. There
are in fact critics who reject even the smallest of creative choices by
directors, implying each opera should be performed exactly as it was originally. Perhaps for that reason, this season at the Lyric Opera of Chicago is too full of operas its
fans have seen before (Pagliacci, Salome, Madama Butterfly, Cosi Fan Tutte, and opening the season on October 11 a Met production of Medea that many caught in movie theaters a couple years ago). The one promising new opera, El Ultimo Sueno
de Frida and Diego, by Gabriela Lena Frank and librettist Nilo Cruz, is
also being done this season at the Met. Frustratingly, it is in the HD series
and the highly promising Kavalier and Clay is not, meaning Chicagoans can see Frida twice but Kavalier not at all. Thus Chicago-based opera fans this season are being treated to almost a full slate of operas
they can see elsewhere.
Still, like Cubs fans each season over the more than 100 years between world series victories in 1908 and 2016, Chicagoans and opera fans everywhere can hope that the new season presents a life after a cursed death a century ago. Even one of Chicago’s most curmudgeonly tradition-oriented critics has observed that hope springs eternal for success in new opera both artistically and at the box office. Encouragingly, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Michael Chabon, appears to be selling well throughout its run in September and October at the Met. That company has had to withdraw tens of millions of dollars from its emergency reserves since the pandemic, and is now beginning a controversial program in Saudi Arabia to bring in new cash and avoid doing so again. But the more composers are hired to write new operas, the more likely it is that one of them will hit on a melodic style that satisfies Sharon’s desire for originality in composition. After that century of atonality it’s a question for a genius what the next great sound is. But perhaps it’s time for a new kind of melodic approach, and not merely one that apes Puccini. It will be an interesting season to watch for such signs of life.
Books discussed in this article
A New Philosophy of Opera by Yuval Sharon, 2024. Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Opera as Opera: The State of the Art by Conrad L. Osborne, 2018. Proposito Press.
The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross, 2007. Picador.
Opera's Second Death by Slavoj Zizek and Mladen Dolar, 2002. Routledge.
Puccini's Turandot: The End of the Great Tradition by William Ashbrook and Harold Powers, 1991. Princeton University Press.
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