[contextly_auto_sidebar id=”bkv13k1YwsUOJ9oOZ89GQDYLY1wM0rF3″]
WELL, of course it’s not, but another story has gone up recently arguing that the entire art form is finished. The focus of the piece is that the opera repertoire has been stuck in the 19th century for way too long — that it doesn’t move forward, with new work, anymore. That would indeed be damning, but looking closer, we see that this post only considers the Metropolitan Opera — the most famous American company but hardly a comprehensive indicator of the genre’s health. Especially when it comes to contemporary opera.
Here’s a bit from the piece, on the Washington Post’s Wonkblog:
Opera is officially dead. Or maybe not completely dead, but at best ekeing out a zombie-like existence in a state of undeath. As proof, I submit this fascinating chart of Metropolitan Opera performances, which shows that for decades the Met has rarely performed any operas composed in the preceding 50 years.
… Back at the beginning of the 20th century, anywhere from 60 to 80 percent of Met performances were of operas composed in some time in the 50 years prior. But since 1980, the share of contemporary performances has surpassed 10 percent only once.
Opera, as a genre, is essentially frozen in amber – [composer Suby] Raman found that the median year of composition of pieces performed at the Met has always been right around 1870. In other words, the Met is essentially performing the exact same pieces now that it was 100 years ago.
Verdi
Opera companies, then, clearly deserve the trouble they’ve had. Got it?
I probably don’t have to tell readers of ArtsJournal that this argument is a bit simplified, as data-driven arguments about the arts and culture often are. Opera may not be as healthy as it was in the mid-19th century, but the amount of new work, especially from indie companies, is impressive.
So is almost all the opera being performed right now stuck in the 1800s? I’m probably not a typical opera-goer, but will point out: About a week ago I saw a very fine double bill at a mainstream company (Los Angeles Opera) that included one 17th century opera (Dido and Aeneas) and a 20th century opera (Bluebeard’s Castle.) The highlight of last season for me was Einstein on the Beach — a 1970s opera as radical in its way as anything by the Sex Pistols — and the new opera Invisible Cities, by the small LA company The Industry. I see a lot of rock music, jazz, visual art, etc and can vouch that Invisible Cities, staged at Union Station, was as imaginative and truly wild as any performance I’ve seen in ages. That’s a dead art form? Huh?
And does all the fighting over John Adams’s Death of Klinhoffer at its recent Met performance sound like it comes from an expired art form? What about companies in Santa Fe, San Francisco, Houston and Cooperstown that typically put on new work?
In Europe, especially the German-speaking world, there is considerably more opera being put on than in the States — including much contemporary and adventurous work, including new productions, being put on.
This gripe aside, the chart and data are valuable. And I don’t want to defensively dismiss this scribe’s implied challenge. So who thinks opera companies need to program more contemporary works and more new productions? And if so, how do we get there?
[This post edited slightly in response to comments about German opera.]
Scott, is there more actual new opera being put on in the German-speaking world, proportionally speaking, or simply more modernized stagings of standard rep?
(William, I’m sure you can and will answer that – but please, for this occasion, stick to either premieres or work written since 1970. (Actually, figures for both would be dandy if you’re inclined to find them.) We already know that Germany has vastly more opera performances – even in raw numbers, let alone per capita – than the U.S. does; you’ve done an excellent job convincing us on that point.)
I don’t have any data off-hand for contemporary opera performances in Germany, though I’m sure it could be found. (They keep records for everything.) My impression is that there is no more new opera performed in Germany than the USA. In fact, there might be more in the States. When John Crosby founded the Santa Fe Opera in 1957 he set a tradition of premiering a new opera every season. This gave the company a lot of profile in spite of its small season. Numerous other American companies with small seasons realized they could gain a lot of profile by doing new operas. Santa Fe, Dallas, San Francisco, and Houston, among many others, have all recently premiered new operas.
Our funding system also makes us rich in small, independent companies that necessitate smaller explorations of the genre by composers. So the USA is poor in opera in general, but fairly rich in new operas. The extreme conservatism of the Met is an anomaly in the USA and abroad, though Peter Gelb is trying to change this with a commissioning program that has fallen under the table at least once due to a lack of funding.
We should also note that of the top 20 most performed contemporary opera composers, only two are German: Wolfgang Rihm at number 7, and Aribert Reimann at number 13 even though almost half the opera performances in the world are done in Germany. In spite of our very poor support for opera, the two most performed contemporary opera composers are American, Glass and Adams, and Jake Heggie comes in at number 5. Go figure….
In late 2005, the Met initiated a commissioning program, but the Met ran into financial problems and the program seems to have been quietly shelved. Information about that initial commissioning program and the composers involved can be found here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/03/arts/music/03comm.html
The program was reinitiated a few years ago, but I think it too might have been cut back. Some articles about it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/arts/music/the-mets-commissioning-program-is-starting-to-bear-operas.html
and:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/arts/music/missing-hand-in-mets-commissions.html
William’ I’m pretty sure that the Met’s program is still in place, at least in that none of the commissions awarded (except for the notorious Rufus Wainwright case) have been cancelled.
But finishing the operas has (predictably) taken longer than one might have expected, and I think the Met has postponed actually staging any more of the new commissions (the important part, I know) since the house’s money troubles got so bad.
It’s hard to blame them for that: I’d argue that Two Boys was a success in many ways – for instance, the audience was quite a bit younger than usual – but it sure didn’t sell out the house.
On the other hand, why the Met hasn’t scheduled a hit like Heggie’s Moby-Dick is a mystery.
Unless financial problems have caused a change I don’t know about, Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin is planned for the 2015-16 season. (Anyone know if this is still planned? Maybe not.) The Met has only performed one other opera by a woman in its history, and that was 111 years ago — Ethel Smyth’s “Der Wald.” The Met has never performed an opera by an American woman, and this seems unlikely to change for the foreseeable future.
Opera News writes: “L’Amour de Loin, which is scheduled to play during the 2016-17 season, will be directed by Robert Lepage and conducted by Susanna Mälkki in her Met debut.” The article also has more info about the house’s New Works Program:
http://www.operanews.com/Opera_News_Magazine/2013/10/News/Met_New_Works.html
Not a moment too soon!
Although I think most of us who’ve been waiting for L’Amour de loin to get to NYC figured it would end up at BAM.
There’s one way in which the piece premiering at the Met worries me: perception of success due to the size of the auditorium.
That is, say opening night of L’Amour de loin at BAM sold out and people lined up out to Flatbush Avenue for returned tickets. Everyone thinks it’s a huge hit.
Put all those people, including the ones in line, in the Met, and the place is two-thirds full. The idea gets around that the piece is a flop.
As for operas composed by women, I at least have hope that if Jennifer Higdon’s upcoming Cold Mountain is a success in Houston and Philadelphia, the Met will pick it up.
Cold Mountain premieres in Santa Fe next summer. It seems like the Met doesn’t like to pickup new operas from other American houses, or at least not until they become old enough to be seen as repertoire. No Heggie because that would be too much of a hat tip to the San Francisco Opera or Houston?
In 2005, the Metropolitan Opera initiated a program of commissioning composers who ARE ALREADY ESTABLISHED IN THE FIELD, or in a related field such as Broadway musical theater. These composers .already are MAKING MONEY and have REPUTATIONS. Why on earth would these people turn back into students in order to spend vast amounts of time working on Met commissions? The Met needs urgently to establish a training program for young composers who are recent conservatory graduates (the young composers would compete for entry to the program). This program would exactly parallel existing Young Singers Programs. Assistant Conductors, Coach-Pianists, and YES, “name” conductors would then TRAIN these young composers in ANALYZING and STUDYING the masterworks of the standard repertoire (Gluck & Mozart through Verdi and Puccini; Berlioz, Bizet & Debussy; Weber, Wagner & R. Strauss; Rimsky-Korsakov, Shostakovich & Prokofiev, as well as Britten). In other words, the young composers would first do some REAL WORK before trying to compose an opera. The point would NOT be to “imitate” these masters, but to HAVE A BACKGROUND before attempting to write an opera. NO OTHER PROFESSIONAL FIELD ON THE PLANET would allow unprepared semi-amateurs to practice without first doing the HARD WORK of getting an EDUCATION. The conception of the 2005 commissioning program proves that Peter Gelb is a ninny, even without the $45,000,000 “Ring” turkey.
Thanks!
That was my sense – that contemporary opera is relatively healthy in the U.S. these days, especially when chamber opera is included.
(Even more so when one includes “music-theater works” that are really chamber operas but whose creators don’t want to call them that for fear it will turn off theater audiences.)
Newsflash: To say that opera is dead does NOT mean that it is NOT being performed, either new works or old, but that it NO LONGER HAS RELEVANCE. Its dated…kind of like the pavane but still a beneficiary of the patronage state and always desperately in need of *selling-out*.
Elite houses, at least in the US, are gaudy-elite spectacles with no voice in the contemporary art-world…or whatever is left of it. And smaller houses, regardless of their productions, are just too marginal to even get notice.
I agree with the general observation that opera is a dead art form. What little is happening in the world with opera is not enough to resuscitate it. One telling factor is the problems opera is facing in Italy. When even the Italians are abandoning opera, something has to be wrong. There’s a lot of activity with smaller forms of serious music theater, but it’s a stretch to call it opera, and as you note, it has little profile in our society.
It is self-evident that the Metropolitan Opera is a large international house with an enormous budget and a punishing schedule. The recent union contract negotiations revealed its perilous financial state. It needs to sell seats, or it will die. Seat prices are staggering. It simply can’t afford to put on many new or experimental works that will appeal to a subset of a subset of operagoers and that will fill only a fraction of its seats.
Moreover, although it’s rarely mentioned in this blog, there’s just as much snobbery among contemporary opera fans as there is among the fan base of any other art form. Just because something is new does not mean that the people who come out for Composer A will also come out for Composer B (who is, of course, a hack).
It simply makes no sense to use the Met as a proxy for opera performances in the U.S. as a whole.
The reason why more contemporary operas are performed in Europe is due to the government funding system. In return for providing orchestras and opera houses with the funding they need to present full seasons and pay a year round salary to all musicians employed in orchestras (there are some free-lance exceptions to this rule, but not many, except for the UK), orchestras and opera houses are obligated to perform the music of contemporary national composers. That’s why the 2nd Viennese School and the Darmstadt Krishnas could get away with writing c**p music for over a century now. If these composers worked in a system similar to the US’s, their “music” wouldn’t get many – if any – performances. This performance imperative applies to Scandinavia, if not most European countries.
As a result, there is little financial risk involved in premiering a new opera in Europe, which is why, on the whole, more new operas are performed there than in the US. If you want to premiere a piece as an opera company manager, you can get extra government funding for such projects, which means that you can just budget 0 EU in ticket sales for safety’s sake and go right ahead with the premiere performance(s). In the US, you have to budget income, because ticket sales are an integral part of an opera house’s financial model (usually between 30% – 40% of total income in an annual budget). There is thus inherently much greater risk in planning performances of new music in the US, because if the production bombs, you’re going to start running red bottom line numbers very quickly.
One of the contemporary opera powerhouses in Europe is Finland, especially the Savonlinna Opera Festival, where new works by Finnish composers are premiered if not each year, then every other or third. That is thanks to, in particular, Aulis Sallinen, who is an intelligent composer and hasn’t been cowed by the Darmstadt clique. His music is highly individual, and draws on varying compositional techniques. Of course, he’s not the only good contemporary composer in Finland but getting into details would make this comment too long.
I should add that most contemporary composers born after 1970 have flushed atonality, serialism, aleatory scoring etc. down the toilet, at least if they want their music to be performed instead of just serving as a thought experiment on staff paper. What is composed today is actually mostly quite tonal or at least synthesist in style, which is starting to make contemporary music listenable to. If this very sensible trend continues, I think we’ll get more contemporary opera premieres in the future because audiences will actually enjoy listening to them.
I largely agree with what Tony says about serialism, etc.
Will be writing more fully on the state of new opera over the next month or two.
These comments are in the same vein as an article currently in the New Republic about German television: it’s awful because it receives state support. Never mind the schlock that appears on American TV, the great shows produced by the BBC, and that Germans have never put much stock in television. The market is all-wise and all-knowing. Government is evil and to be drowned in a bathtub, etc., etc.
Continental Europe’s obsessive attachment to modernist aesthetics is a serious problem, but it is far too simplistic to say it is solely because of public funding – or even that public funding is the major factor. It certainly plays a role in what Germans call “Beamterkultur” (civil servant culture,) but the causes are far more varied and complex. Scandinavia, for example, has left behind modernism more than almost all other European countries, and yet it has the highest levels of public arts funding in the world.
One of the principle causes is that most anti-modernist aesthetic stances in classical music have ended in a sort of neo-Romanticism. This troubles Europeans because Romantic transcendentalism was one of the cornerstones of National Socialist ideology. Hitler was the last Romantic. Europeans thus feel a conscious or unconscious aversion to the aesthetic’s manifestations. They do not want to even remotely return most of Romanticism’s values. It’s not so much that they love modernism, but that it has become a refuge in which they hide from their past. This is also ironic, because Romantic values actually inform modernism’s social views. I’ve written a lot more about this in this article published by the M.I.T. Press:
http://www.osborne-conant.org/prophets.htm
Those interested in the American move toward postmodernism (and the implicit rejection of modernism) would do well to read John Rockwell’s 1983 book “All American Music.” He defined the trend 30 years ago, and yet people are still proclaiming the movement as some sort of novelty. In reality, it has become tired, stale, and an instrument of neo-liberalism.
Aw, William, that New Republic article isn’t mocking all of German television; really, it’s just mocking that one show, Wetten, dass …? And surely you’ll admit that that’s a rather strange program.
As for American TV, sure, there’s still plenty of schlock, but these days, except for the classics, we’re doing at least as well as the Brits. It has become a commonplace here that American television is producing far more interesting stuff than movie studios are. (Granted, little of that interesting stuff is made by or for the terrestrial broadcast networks.)
I read the article as a fairly broad attack on German TV that addresses other programs like Tatort, schlocky country doctor shows, etc. And I must say, the criticism is fully justified. German TV is generally pretty awful. Especially important were the observations about the mild forms of racism and sexism. German TV and sometimes reveal very different values, to put it politely. The big advantage is that there are two channels fully devoted to the arts and culture: 3 SAT and the French/German station Arte. Their programing is excellent and has a very high Nivea.
I’m aware of the new golden age of American TV. When I’m home for the summers I immerse myself in the DVDs of programs like Boardwalk Empire, The Wire, Deadwood, and The Bridge. Far better than the vast majority of movies.
“Continental Europe’s obsessive attachment to modernist aesthetics is a serious problem …”
Boy, that’s the truth ….
I hadn’t thought of the modern-Europeans’-aversion-to-Romanticism angle, but it makes sense; thanks for explaining it.
But I’d think that European attachment to modernism is a post-WWII hangover in a more basic sense: the post-Adorno idea – feeling, really – that, after the horrors of that conflict and the development of nuclear weapons, let alone everything that has come since, modern music and art must be ugly in order to be true to the world they’re created in.
The idea, or the sense, that, in today’s world, modern music which is (merely) pretty is false or dishonest or even immoral, or at best embarrassingly naive.
I figured that was the assumption lying underneath, for instance, a German critic’s remark about A Flowering Tree (easily John Adams’s prettiest opera) that Adams had turned away entirely from “the aesthetic category of the new”.
William, you’re there on the ground in Germany. Do these musings of mine at all reflect your experience there?
I think your observations are correct that continental Europeans (and a good number of Brits too) think music must be ugly to reflect the modern world. It also avoids (or at least disguises) narrow concepts of beauty, transcendence, and heroism that limited Romantic thought and led in part to the catastrophes of 20th century Europe. We see that there are many impossibly complex factors that account for the European adherence to modernism.
On the other hand, Britten’s War Requiem captured the horrors of the 20th century perhaps better than any other and yet speaks with what might be termed a beautiful language. The modernist view is obviously limited.
It is interesting how Scandinavian composers like Lindberg, Saariaho, and several others have tried to create a middle ground with a kind of lyrical modernism. I wonder if that is because Scandinavia leans more strongly toward the English-speaking world than any other region of Europe. Lindberg and Saariaho are feted in the States because they write a kind of “beautiful music” that still reflects the gravity for which modernism was at least once known. The best of both worlds?
It seems that at some point the modernist view in Europe will collapse as precipitously as it did in the States. I wonder what that will produce. Due to their history, it’s all so much more complex for Europeans. How do you emancipate culture from a genocidal past? How can you trust any concept of beauty? What is transcendence in the face of Auschwitz? The existentialists and absurdists laid some groundwork they thought might help solve these problems, but it’s almost as if those philosophies led to a dead end. This history is the abyss around which our culture crash revolves.
While I would definitely say that European youth is better educated about history and politics than their American counterparts, I do not agree that the ‘burden of history” somehow crashes European culture.
Yes, the 20th century was a pretty bad one in Europe, but its horrors were by no means unprecedented. The 30 Years’ War period and the Napoleonic Wars were as bad for the soldiers as WW I (in the case of the latter) and as bad for civilian populations as WW II (in the case of the former). These wars are just not in our immediate memory and therefore do not evoke the same kind of response as the massacres of the 20th century. Yet great music was written during these wars of centuries before, as well as in their wake. In fact, music bloomed after both the 30 Years’ War and the Napoleonic Wars.
There were some new elements of horror added to conflicts in the 20th century, but we tend to emphasize these because they were so widely reported on, written about and filmed. Also, European society had become sufficiently civilized by WW I to be genuinely shocked by the atrocities of that war, whereas life in Europe before, during and after the 30 Years’ War and the Napoleonic wars brutal and short, which made people more liable to shrug off what they experienced or witnessed. Was it better or worse to be broken on the wheel for most crimes than being gassed in the trenches of WW I?
It is also a generational matter. Even in Germany, most 20-30 year olds feel detachment from the country’s history from 1914 to 1945, let alone in other European countries. I have lived the greater part of my life in Europe and I don’t sense that music should be ugly to reflect the modern world. That was mostly a Germanic affliction in the immediate wakes of WW I and WW II. The Brits were happily composing music in the romantic style well into the 1940’s. The French were writing impressionist music, music influenced by jazz and neoclassical music (the latter thanks to Stravinsky) up to WW II. Soviet composers wrote tonal music for the masses until the 1960’s, as did the composers in their satellites after WW II. The need for music to be “ugly” is mostly a myth created by Boulez and the Darmstadt clique in their blind worship and rationalization of the unholy trinity of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern.
I have about as musical a background as one can have, and I never bought into the “music must be ugly to reflect the ugly realities of the world.” In the West, that was actually more of a socialist-communist ideology than anything else, and artists maturing in the ’50’s-80’s were mostly adherents of that delusion. I never was, since I knew what life was like on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain first hand. After the collapse of communism, people deluded by socialist-communist ideology suddenly realized that the USSR wasn’t quite the people’s paradise they thought it was.
It is doubtful whether creative European artists are all that weighed down by events in the 1st half of the 20th century. If they are, then it is just as plausible to write that American artists are struggling to overcome the racist legacy of Jim Crow and segregation, which lasted into the mid-60’s at least.
The Europeans will be able to “emancipate” their culture from the past as easily as American artists were able to. Europe is trailing in this trend because government funding agencies are full of people who came of age in the ’50’s-80’s, espousing the socialist-communist ideology of the West. They still ascribe to the Boulezian delusions even if Boulez himself doesn’t these days. You don’t have to care much about audiences when your funding comes through taxes, which, like death, are guaranteed. As an artist, you’re going to get paid regardless of what you compose or play and what the audience may think of it. That’s socialist-communist ideology summarized.
This state of things is starting to change in Europe, though, because as the Russian communists found out, market forces can’t be totally ignored even in socialist societies. As generous welfare programs, bloated government employment sectors combined with ageing and shrinking populations start to creak in their seams, culture is coming under pressure to become more self-sustaining. That is most easily achieved by increased ticket sales in the short run, so the market mechanisms will push European composers to get over their historical heritage quickly if they want to make a living. Once the dam breaks, European composers will find it just as easy to write in an accessible style welcomed by audiences as American composers have.
“The market” is not perfect, but it certainly works better than totalitarianism.
Of course. But I don’t think anyone here was suggesting a revival of Socialist Realism.
The reason opera is dead is not because they don’t perform new works. It’s because the new works are mostly terrible. I went to school for music composition and had to study and compose for this art form. As a rule the works highlighted by any new composer by major orchestras especially in opera are only composers with connections in the classical world and the right classical pedigree and who conform to the unlistenable standards of having to be contemporary and experimental instead of melodic and tonal which is what 99% of the listener want to hear. I was literally forced to write modern sounding music instead of what I wanted to write which is beautiful music that non classical fans would also enjoy. And my work would never get performed anyway because I don’t have connections with the old money world of conductors and donors. So after music I wrote what I consider an amazing double album rock opera instead of writing the old fashioned kind that would likely never be heard. Me and many other young talented driven composers are literally forced to either compose in outdated modern experimental styles by music schools or abandon the art form completely. As a side note opera was the pop music of centuries ago. Mozart wanted to compose primarily for opera but had to write mostly instrumental music to make a living, according to a biography I read. If he was alive today he would be writing rock operas not classical ones because that’s what speaks to current generations.
Jeez, how long ago did you go to music school?
It’s sure not like that now, at least not in the States.
I was just listening to a WNYC rebroadcast of one of their New Sounds Live Concerts in the Winter Garden of what used to be the World Financial Center. Both that concert (music for chamber orchestra by Bryce Dessner) and the one the previous night, which I attended (Julia Wolfe’s Steel Hammer) drew several hundred people, all of the enthusiastic.
These days it’s not at all uncommon for a new classical music work to be something an audience genuinely likes and wants to hear. However, that work is likely not for a symphony orchestra, since orchestras are too expensive to take many chances with.
(That said, on Monday the NY Phil is doing a whole program of new music at a venue in the East Village; John Adams is hosting.)
Scott, this is a note for you as much as anyone, since you’re investigating new classical music (IIRC): A lot of good new music is being written not for orchestra, but for choir or vocal ensemble. You probably know about the group Roomful of Teeth: they’re the group for whom Caroline Shaw wrote the piece that won the 2013 Pulitzer. But another group you should know about is The Crossing, a professional choir in Philadelphia that does only contemporary music. I make a point of traveling down there to hear them, and they’re good enough that Lincoln Center brought them up for the outdoor piece they commissioned from John Luther Adams this summer. (The piece he wrote for them last year, Canticles of the Holy Wind, is a knockout.) You should definitely investigate them. http://www.crossingchoir.org.
I have close contacts with musical academia MWnyc, and sadly, when I go to university orchestra symphonic concerts where the music of advanced student composers is performed, Adam’s contentions hold true. The poor young composers still write like the Darmstadt dinosaurs. Naturally, if they didn’t, then their teachers would suddenly look very foolish, and no composition professor will accede to that. Academia is way behind the curve on this one.
One does always have the option to specialize in film music, where tonality is definitely encouraged, instead of taking the “serious” music diploma. It’s probably the best and surest way for a composer to make a living today, and as John Williams’ case shows, it may very well lead to “serious” music commissions after you win an Oscar or two.
Writing rock operas is not a bad way to go unless the music ends up sounding like a cross between Led Zeppelin and a Walt Disney animated movie. I think there is room for an opera revival if we go back to the basics a la the Florentine Camerata or Gluck. For various strange reasons which I won’t go into, I happen to listen to quite a few scores written for Japanese anime (not the rock, pop or bad symphonic music scores). There are some quite talented composers at work there, who I could very well imagine could write an opera that would be both innovative in style and something that audiences would enjoy.
It would require the right kind of libretto, too. One of the main pitfalls of contemporary opera is – in my personal opinion – that just about all of the librettos are even worse than what is found in classical and romantic era operas. What contemporary composers don’t seem to understand is that opera is an inherently artificial and stylized art form. Personally, I don’t find that most librettos which tell modern stories are suitable for opera. The text may be interesting when read, but it distracts from the music.
There is a reason why librettists (let us not forget that librettists were once featured on the billboard in large letters while composers were in small) initially set their stage in Graeco-Roman mythology or history. This works well, because it employs either stock themes or events which would have been well-known to the audience. It allowed for more focus on the music and also made it easier for audiences to debate the merits of this composer or that and how innovatively they set an established story to music as compared to each other.
Verdi and Verismo brought contemporary literature or events into opera, but they did so judiciously. Even if La Traviata or Boheme were set in their present, the storylines were based on familiar literary archetypes like unfulfilled love, jealousy, self-sacrifice and the like. All of these the audience were quite familiar with and could relate to.
Contemporary opera often feels like Sartre set to cacophony. It is hard enough to contemplate philosophical matters like existentialism and phenomenology without having to pay attention to extremely difficult music which often strives not to express any kind of emotion at all in favor of tone row transpositions. If I’m sitting in the audience and trying to grasp the implications of Klinghoffer’s murder or Nixon’s visit to China, music becomes a distraction. If I focus on the music alone, the action becomes even more meaningless than in a bad Metastasian libretto, and redundant to the music. In an ideal world, good opera is a synthesis between good text and good music. Contemporary opera completely misses this point.
I hope that some contemporary composers come to this realization and pick good texts with which an audience can identify and set them to music which has melody, interesting harmonies (or a good blend of harmony and lack thereof) and great rhythm, whether it be in ensembles, arias or ariosos that present the composer’s interpretation of the basic human emotions underlying the libretto instead of trying to take apart the problem of world terrorism or the complexities of world politics.
Tony, are you in the States? I guess I’m not surprised that some universities even here still make students write in post-Darmstadt-ugly style, but that kind of music sure doesn’t seem to turn up much in actual new-music concerts (of which there are a lot) attended by the actual public, at least here in NYC. And I gather that post-Darmstadt-ugly never caught on on the West Coast in the first place.
And academia in the U.S. doesn’t seem to be churning out only Darmstadt-dinosaur-clones. Nico Muhly and Eric Whitacre studied composition at Juilliard, David Lang and Julia Wolfe at Yale, Jennifer Higdon at Penn; Caroline Shaw is still a grad student at Princeton. And whatever you may think of those composers’ music, it sure ain’t Darmstadt cacaphony.
Yes, I’m in the States, but I know academia in Europe as well. If anything, academia in Europe is even worse than in the States, because you can still make a living composing Darmstadt manure.
Interestingly, the most exciting developments in Europe are taking place outside academia and come from individual artists, many of them instrumental performers.
I’m glad to hear about NYC snapping out of the 2nd Viennese-Darmstadt curse. Maybe I’ll go back to a concert hall and listen to live concerts of contemporary music again. It ticked me off to no end to spend $75 a ticket for a concert of which 2/3 were wasted on totally inane “music.” I have generally strongly objected to the composers that various maestros chose to patronize for one reason or another (mostly because the composers had “connections” beneficial for the maestro).
Staying a jour through CD recordings works fine if you have an audiophile surround stereo system. If I don’t like the music on a CD, I can always sell it again or throw it out. Muhly, Whitacre and Higdon don’t particularly thrill me (though her violin concerto is tolerable), but I’ll check out the others you mentioned. Meanwhile I’ll stick to Balada, Sollima, Sallinen, Shchedrin etc. and Glass in his latest stylistic adjustment.
The repertoire so carefully served in aspic at the Met is in no way typical of the actual repertoire performed in the real world.
Outside New York, modern opera is doing very well, thank you. I think you New Yorkers need to get out a bit more, and stop assuming the rest of the world follows in your wake.
Neil, the repertoire “so carefully served in aspic at the Met” – nicely turned phrase, that, even if it’s not entirely accurate – is in no way typical of the actual repertoire performed in New York as a whole, let alone the rest of the real world.
(New York isn’t the real world? Sorry, you must be thinking of L.A.)
(I’m just teasing, Scott!)
There’s plenty of contemporary opera/music-theater around here – most of it chamber-scale, as I’ve said before – especially if you include places just a bus ride down the road, like Montclair, NJ and Philadelphia.
Not to mention works elsewhere in the U.S. – Boston, metro D.C., Houston, Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, the San Francisco Bay Area, and greater Los Angeles-Long Beach. (Scott can tell us plenty about the very impressive Long Beach Opera.)
And Neil, any New Yorker who pays any attention knows very well that the rest of the world doesn’t follow in our wake, even if we sometimes pretend to think (just for show!) that the rest of the world should.
I read through the above comments, moving from disbelief to downright astonishment. Is one of the total casualties of the “post-modernist” world COMMON SENSE?
I will spell out “common sense” for this topic in short order, but to do that, first I am forced to give some background.
I was born NOWHERE—- in Savannah, Georgia, BEFORE the town’s post-war makeover as a tourist magnet. From age 6, I was put on the pulpit of my local synagogue to sing solos, so I was well-known in the community.
When I was 9, a friend of my father’s had a ticket to some touring company’s performance of “La Boheme” at the local Municipal Auditorium. But he couldn’t attend, so he said to himself, “the Epstein kid likes music”. He asked my father if I would like to go to the opera, and I said yes. I took my seat in the balcony, and somewhere not too long after the opera started, I experienced what I can only call a RELIGIOUS CONVERSION. (Of course it must have been at “Che gelida manina”., “Mi chiamano Mimi”, and “O soave fanciulla”.).
I was STUNNED— I could not BELIEVE something so beautiful could exist on this mere earth ! This was a case of Nurture slamming like a meteor into Nature.
After that, I ran to the Public Library, which already had a healthy collection of complete operas on LP, with bilingual librettos enclosed. I checked them out obsessively, following the bilingual librettos while listening. My father, an immigrant from Russia, HATED it. Like most immigrants in those days, he wanted to be “more American than the Americans”. And here was this crazy kid blaring the VERY SOUL OF HATED EUROPE in his living room. Luckily, my mother’s common sense finally prevailed: (“The boy likes music, leave him alone”).
Unsurprisingly, by age 12 I pretty much knew the standard Italian and French opera repertoire by heart, plus “Salome” and “Boris Godunov”. Children don’t relativize; they just do what they love.
I was possessed by the idea of becoming an opera singer, but I had to make a living at 18, so I ended up in New York at the Cantors Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary . My professors were Doctor Hugo Weisgall, who had 9 operas premiered by the New York City Opera between 1959 1nd 1993 ; Siegfried Landau, then the Music Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic; and Miriam Gideon, one of the most respected composers of the time in New York, and Professor of Music at City College of New York.
So I had a very thorough musical training, though I wasn’t studying composition. I remember when Weisgall roared into class with the score of the opera he was currently working on, “Athaliah”, sat down at the piano and played through the whole score, “singing” all the parts. This pretty much “Schoenbergian” style was not for me, but this human tornado made a hell of a charismatic impression on a 20-year-old.
Also, I fell in with a group of New York kids (not necessarily music students) who loved going to the opera. We realized that if we saved our lunch money for a week, we would have $2.00 to go standing room on Saturday night to the Met (39th and Broadway). Of course I couldn’t get enough, and I heard Milanov, Bjorling, Merrill, Tucker, Peters, Warren, Tebaldi, De Los Angeles, Callas (as Norma, already in big vocal trouble but still utterly mesmerizing), George London, Del Monaco, Nilsson, Sutherland, Corelli, Steber, Kirsten, Rysanek… the list goes on and on.
In retrospect, under the influence of the Seminary faculty , I guess it’s not surprising that I burst out with a big Lied (text: Rilke’s “Der Panther”), sweating profusely at the piano for two weeks. To my astonishment, this very distinguished faculty insisted I perform this Lied as part of my Senior Recital. They told me that I MUST study composition.
But I had to make a living, so I didn’t give their admonition much thought. I started a successful career as a cantor, and got a Master’s of Music from the Yale Music School.
For my mid-life crisis I found myself composing more and more, until FINALLY the message got through to me: I wanted to compose an opera. I panicked, because I knew I didn’t have the compositional training, and I had never taken an orchestration class.
That began 12 years (1982 to 1994) of of intense study with composition professors at Carnegie-Mellon, Philadelphia University of the Arts, and U. Mass./ Amherst, composing some operatic attempts, but finally finishing (piano-vocal score and orchestration) of two three-act operas, “The Dybbuk” (adapting the libretto from the Yiddish script of the playwright S. Ansky), and “Moby-Dick: Opera-Oratorio (adapting the libretto from Melville with the help of a Melville scholar).
I started a D.M.A. in Composition/Orchestration at the Hartt Music School, Unversity of Hartford, which wa fun, but mainly because it was the only way I could get demo recordings of excerpts from my operas with orchestra and singers.
Out of the blue, in 1995, I got a call from Israel. They had heard about my “Dybbuk” opera from a friend of a friend, and a new company in Tel Aviv wanted to perform it. Of course teh new score had to be vetted, and it happened that in Summer 1996, Ronen Borshevsky, then 26 (and later, Assistant Conductor of the Israel Philharmonic, Zubin Mehta, Music Director) was a Conducting Fellow at Tanglewood, studying with Bernard Haitink.
I live an hour from Tanglewood, so Ronen and I got together several times to go over my “Dybbuk” score at the piano and discuss it. When Ronen returned to Israel, he reported on “The Dybbuk”, and it ended up that the Lerner Fund for Yiddish underwrote a small-scale production which premiered in Israel 1999 at Ben-Gurion University (Beersheba) and the Susan Dellal Centre for Dance and Theatre (Tel Aviv), an international venue. (Budget limits meant that my piano-vocal score, not my orchestra score, was used in performance this first time out).
The performances sold out, and earned prolonged standing ovations from audiences.Across the board, the Tel Aviv press (easily as sophisticated as New York) gave the opera glowing reviews. A review in the international London magazine OPERA ended: “This opera deserves to return to the stage in a full-scale production with full orchestra”. A performance DVD was made (with English subtitles) and placed with an online record merchant.
So what’s the secret here?—ANSWER: I had a BACKGROUND. In childhood, opera became part of my core IDENTITY, my DNA. Without even realizing it, in composing opera, I was drawing effortlessly on the flexibility of structure in “Otello” and the very different approach to structure in “Boris Godunov”, and many, many other operas.
I wasn’t IMITATING. I was drawing on a sure knowledge of opera acquired in childhood.
(For the next 10 years, I sent the DVD and score to every large and mid-size opera company in the U.S. The answer I got was: “We think it’s a beautiful opera, but we don’t have the production budget.” Finally I broke this code: “We think it’s a beautiful opera, so just send us a check for $500,000 and we’ll be happy to produce it.”) But that’s a different story.
My point is, of nearly every opera produced by major companies post-World War Two, the “opera composers” DON’T KNOW ANYTHING. They have no BACKGROUND. In the New York Times, John Adams actually BOASTS, “I don’t know anything about the operatic tradition, and I don’t care.” (Can you imagine Joan Sutherland screaming her way through Madame Mao)?
This monumental arrogance occurs pretty much across the board. The very experienced Andre Previn composes “Streetcar Named Desire”, and his Stanley Kowalski NEVER SINGS—- he just snarls and shouts, because there is no “music in Stanley Kowalski— he’s closer to being an animal.
Younger composers? Forget it.
Now ask yourself: the Met established its Young Singers Program not that long after World War Two. Why? Because after World Wars One and Two killed over 100,000,000 people, and much of Europe was left in rubble, it could no longer be taken for granted that children would go to the opera as a matter of course and internalize the repertoire. So the Met was FORCED to train singers, and every other opera company quickly imitated them.
Now the Met has every CONCEIVABLE form of technical equipment. SO WHY HAVEN’T THEY ESTABLISHED A PROGRAM FOR YOUNG COMPOSITION GRADUATES (in the form of a competition), and then TRAINED the young composers to STUDY and ANALYZE scores of Mozart, Rossini, Berllini, Verdi, Puccini; Berlioz, Bizet, Debussy; Weber, Wagner, R. Strauss; Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Britten? Why aren’t opera coach-pianists, assistant conductors, and YES, “big-name” conductors TEACHING these young composers, so the compsoers will ACTUALLY KNOW SOMETHING before they sit down to compose an opera.
This is not a recipe for “IMITATION”— it’s required knowledge ! NO wonder nearly every post-war opera fails after its highly hyped premiere.
I will end: I might think it would be very interesting to do brain surgery. But NOBODY is going to let me anywhere NEAR an operating room without at least 15 years of arduous training.