DON'T SAY "ACCESSIBLE": "OPERA WARS" AND THE FIGHT OVER WHAT OPERA CAN BE

Nine pages before the end of the new book Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for its Future, author Caitlin Vincent quotes a more than 40-time contemporary opera librettist about the stigma against accessibility in modern opera.

"Librettist Mark Campbell recalled being confronted by a composer collaborator after Campbell described his music as ‘accessible’ in a public forum. ‘He took me aside and said, Don’t ever use that word again. Critics will use that against me. And I said, I didn't mean it was dumbed down. I meant the audience will connect with it.’"

When I read Opera Wars, I thought of an opera aria that managed to crack this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Song, beating out eligible pop luminaries like Ed Sheeran, Brandi Carlile, Miley Cyrus, Sara Bareilles and Stephen Schwartz to the coveted nomination. It was the first classical number to win such a nomination in a decade, according to the entertainment publication The Wrap. The aria, “Sweet Dreams of Joy” from the documentary film Viva Verdi!, is quirky and melodic, strangely flitting and soaring against piano and strings. And it is performed by an operatic soprano. In some ways it is exactly what I’ve been waiting for more than a decade and a half of watching and enjoying contemporary opera: Something that is exceptionally listenable both inside and apart from the confines of the story, without the pop excesses of, say, “The Prayer” by Andrea Bocelli and Celine Dion, which many opera fans detest. The composer, Nicholas Pike, whose career has centered on film and TV music, says he is looking for commissions for operas and has ideas in the works.

Accessibility is one of Vincent’s last in a long series of potential prescriptions for the salvation of opera, the challenges to the survival of which she discusses across 235 pages. There should be room for all kinds of operas, she says, including accessible ones. That is just what I wrote a few months before in an essay on the supposed death of opera 100 years ago. Vincent’s openness to a variety of different approaches to opera is part of what makes Opera Wars an enjoyable, if not exactly groundbreaking, read.

Actually, Opera Wars is less a thesis on how to save opera than a catalogue of the art form’s challenges. It is not a new philosophy of opera, unlike the last major book on the subject, director Yuval Sharon’s appropriately titled 2024 A New Philosophy of Opera. The breezily written book, with many colloquial analogies, is perhaps best designed for newbies to the artform, particularly students of opera and singing. A former singer who later ran an opera company and worked as an opera journalist, Vincent contributes to the sizable library of state-of-the-artform books the fresh perspective of someone who ultimately quit the profession. It’s nice to add such a book to a shelf that over the years has skewed towards the critical: Opera as Drama by Joseph Kerman, Opera as Opera by Conrad Osborne, Opera’s Second Death by Slavoj Zizek and Mladen Dolar. Of this peculiar library Opera Wars is perhaps the best beginning point for a new opera observer. But opera die-hards should be prepared to see some very familiar material.

In many instances Vincent does not take strong positions on the questions it raises, preferring to alternate between statements on one side and then another. That may be why multiple reviewers of the book online read her chapter on “The Stage,” which outlines the battles between traditionalists and progressives in opera staging, as siding with what she calls the “Werktreue” camp over those in the Regietheater camp. One reader online noted her point that avant-garde productions of operas, like director Claus Guth’s La Boheme set in space, assume knowledge of the operas from previous viewings. “For many audiences especially in countries that don’t have a strong culture of opera attendance, that level of familiarity isn’t always present,” she writes.

However, Vincent follows that argument with a defense of creative adaptation in opera direction. In fact, she ends her discussion of the subject with this remark: “One also has to consider the risk-benefit ratio of perpetually digging in one’s heels for the sake of tradition, despite its leading to backlash and alienated audiences. At what point are you holding on to an opera so tightly that you inadvertently crush it to death?” Just before that she wonders aloud whether there will be a time when traditional productions of a controversial opera like Madama Butterfly are a thing of the past, and while voicing sympathy with traditionalist audiences seems okay with that outcome. “Even now, it's clear that productions that rely on kimonos, geisha wigs, and eye-liner—or alternatively saris and bindis, or dreadlocks and dark skin makeup—are increasingly a dying breed,” she writes. “But traditions change, evolve over time. Unlike Grandma's apple pie, traditional stagings of Madama Butterfly have been well preserved—I count at least a dozen DVDs of different kimono-heavy productions available to buy on Amazon.”

In fact, Vincent makes a case that the operas performed in the country are too few and too familiar. Fully fifty percent of the US’s opera performances in the last 15 years have come from a canon of about 40 operas, she writes. If one adds in what she calls “canonish” operas like Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman and Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, the number balloons to 75 percent of the 1,500 operas performed in the last 15 years by the top 11 opera companies in the United States. But she doesn’t tell us how many operas she is calling “canonish” or what they are with the exception of those two examples. So the number 75 percent is somewhat lacking in utility; it would be fascinating to see a list of what she considers canonish. Without such a list, or at least numbers, the inclusion of the canonish operas ends up undermining her point almost more than it supports it.

In any case, Vincent convincingly argues that we need new operas. While taking an un-confrontational stance towards the new ones that have been written in recent decades, she gives voice to the widely-held perception that the new ones seem never to measure up in the minds of many observers. The resistance to writing melodically from opera composers may be influenced by Wagner’s and late Verdi’s famous assault on the division of opera into recitative (sung dialogue) and aria. But it’s been more than 150 years since that development. One can make a case that the libretti of recent operas are better written than many of the old ones were, and the dramatic punch can coexist with a resurgence of melody that encourages a new direction more than 100 years after atonality was introduced to opera. This is why Viva Verdi’s theme song is so encouraging. While the rest of the score is frankly undistinguished compared to the Oscar-nominated aria, the song suggests that we have not exhausted the things an operatic voice can do with melody.