I have a suggestion for any opera company that commissions a new opera. And I don’t mean this as a joke. Once the work starts to take shape, show it to someone at HBO. And if they say it isn’t good enough for them, pull the plug.
Why do I say this?
Because HBO, along with Netflix and other cable/streaming companies, sets the gold standard for dramatic art in our time. The Wire — one of the most powerful works of art I’ve encountered, from any age, in any medium. The Sopranos. On the Syfy channel, Battlestar Galactica. (If you haven’t seen it, haven’t read about it, don’t think it can’t be art because it’s sci-fi.) On Hulu, The Handmaid’s Tale (at least season one; season two got a little arty).
And of course many shows I haven’t seen.
This is our competition!
Yes, my friends in the opera business — this is the standard our future audience is used to. What they judge things by.
The existing opera audience, already loving opera, might give us a pass if we don’t meet this test. But the new one won’t. And we need a new audience. All of classical music does.
Why we have a problem
I’ve seen four major — well, major inside the classical music world — new operas in the past couple of years. Champion, by Terrence Blanchard, with a libretto by Michael Cristofer. The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, by Mason Bates and Mark Campbell, which I saw it its world premiere in Santa Fe. Marnie, at the Met, by Nico Muhly and Nicholas Wright. And, this past weekend, at the Washington National Opera, Silent Night, by Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell.
Would these shows — even if they weren’t opera, even if they were straight drama, without singing — made without music, structured the way they art — make it on HBO? I can’t believe they would.
Take Silent Night, for instance. Its story — about a truce improvised by enemy soldiers on Christmas Eve during World War I — tugs at the heartstrings. But that’s an easy win.Tell the story with any reasonable details, and we’ll all be moved.
But to get on HBO, they’d have to d add something individual to the story, and Campbell’s libretto never goes beyond stereotypes. Scottish, French, and German men enlist. Glory, glory, kill the foe!
And then they find out war is hell. In case we didn’t know that! All of this shown so quickly, and so much in ways we’ve seen a thousand times, that it doesn’t feel real. Or even slightly interesting.
How might they do this on HBO?
Not that I’ve ever worked there!
But even so, two suggestions. If we all know that war is hell, maybe don’t show that! Leave out the enlistments and the perfunctory battles. Start the opera in the trenches! With French, Scottish, and German soldiers cold, wet, and hungry. Louse-infested. Many of their best friends dead.
And if you must show the battles, make them ghastly. As war really is. Show soldiers with their limbs blown off, their guts blown out, screaming for their mothers while they die. Show us men in combat shitting their pants, as some do, afraid to fire their guns.
(If you want a model for that, here’s someone who does it searingly, though you might not know of him — Harry Turtledove, who writes novels about alternative history, including a searing series about a nuclear war in the 1950s. He writes detailed combat scenes, all of them harrowing, though of course some of the soldiers are heroes, just as they are in real wars. Turtledove hates war, it seems to me, but he’s convincing saying so because he also clearly knows it.
One more stereotype from Silent Night
Top officers in Britain, France, and Germany learn about the Christmas truce. They’re angry! So they sing an angry trio, of course from three different places, in which they all say the same thing.
Well, a trio! How operatic!
But also how cartoonish.Why not write a trio in which each officer is an individual, in which they each say different things? Open is perfect for that. And you don’t even have to stay in opera to find an example. Stephen Sondheim did it wonderfully in A Little Night Music.
So much less hackneyed, so much more interesting, so much more true to life if they each say something different. Which would also make something of how they’re each in a different location.
One of them could be implacable. The soldiers should be shot! Another, more reasonably, could simply say they should be disciplined. And the third could be sympathetic, to then be overruled by higher authority.
Of course, this is opera…
And so the music might bring even a dead libretto to life. But the music here is slight. That’s especially true in the biggest scene, the truce. Here the music doesn’t touch the deep humanity of what we see, and so it seems to vanish.I thought the scene would play just as strongly without it, except in moments where the music comes from characters onstage.
But they’d also make that music in a spoken play, so it doesn’t make the operatic setting any more necessary.
Enough for now
I’ll return to this, with more about the other three operas. Champion was the strongest of the four, for me, and Silent Night the slightest. Though I thought Marnie and Steve Jobs crashed most thoroughly, in part because the two composers really know how to write music.
But to what purpose?
I’m curious why you didn’t mention PBS as a possible network to approach with a new production. Are they too bureaucratic to work with? Or are their programming choices too middlebrow for what you frequently propose on your blog?
Hi, Douglas. I should clarify that I wasn’t suggesting opera companies ask HBO to produce opera! Maybe I didn’t make that clear enough. I meant that HBO should be consulted, to ask whether they’d produce any work like the new opera in question. I mean with the same approach to drama. HBO isn’t in the opera business, and their audience isn’t the opera audience.
PBS was once in the forefront of TV drama, but that was long ago. And I don’t think they ever reached the heights of what we’ve seen on HBO, Netflix, et al. As for being too bureaucratic to deal with, I was once part of an effort to produce a show about music that I and people more mainstream than I thought would have been strikingly good and original. We did approach a big PBS station, and they were impossible. Only word they seemed to know was “no.” Not that they didn’t have every right to reject the show, but they didn’t interested even in knowing about it. Which considering at least one of the people other than me proposing it, someone with a good reputation and high position, seemed unimaginative of them. Of course this might not be representative. Let’s hope not!
Well said, and amen!
Even the work of John Adams–my favorite living composer–suffers from over-long librettos that that struggle to demonstrate the basics of dramatic structure. Opera has an exciting future only if our composers and librettists invite their audiences into the mysterious and glorious world of opera with a deep and creative understanding of how to tell a story.
Greg, it’s illuminating that I had heard of none of these ‘major” four operas until you listed them. I don’t even pay for cable or streaming video, yet I’m familiar with the Wire and the Sopranos and BG, and with how these works of art have influenced a culture beyond episodic TV. (You could throw in Hamilton if you wanted an on-stage example from recent times.)
To what purpose, indeed? Writing a new opera as opera doesn’t draw an actual audience, has dubious artistic value to a possible audience, and thus can’t inspire them to “subscribe” to your next work. Subscription is the HBO/Netflix money-making model and ostensibly the classical music money-making model. Hmm.
Could you even say that classic opera works hold up in this critical light? I’m not sure. I listen on a radio program to an opera director who specializes in Verdi, essentially recapitulating the plot summary of an upcoming Verdi performance, and I’m thinking: This plot is goofy. These characters are irrelevant. Why would I be interested in going? Then to show the excitement and enchantment of Verdi, we hear a singing soloist accompanied by piano!? Just like grade school! Oh wow! Even if the music is “great,” I’ve probably heard the greatest hits — the killing parts — quoted in old movies and TV commercials throughout my life. If I want a full night of good drama, I get the idea it’s probably not going to be at the opera house.
The Met Live stuff is the strongest effort yet seen to bring classical opera to the modern audience. And yet I kind of see what you are seeing with contemporary opera in this classical presentation… The stagecraft and music require a suspension of disbelief and a willingness to engage with an art form alien to the experiences of the modern audience. And so they do require TV-level quality. But … music seems diffuse and wandering. Characters come and go. Libretto is baggy and glacially paced, marking time until arias or solos. On video, the intros and interstitials and interviews and intermission commentary are carefully scripted to hide and/or PBS-ize any struggle to make the art. In the end they ring false.
It seems for both the classical and contemporary forms of opera, no amount of invitation by composers or librettists can work to find a purpose. We have three different Jobs movies, two different Jobs biographies… why would anyone expect the Jobs opera to make a noise?
So much to think about there, Greg! Thanks so much. I’m glad you mentioned Hamilton. I’ve often said, and could have in this post, that Hamilton is a warning to the classical music world. Here we have a show that changed our culture, did new things with music, gave us a new look at our history. And it didn’t come from classical music! Classical music doesn’t right now stand much of a chance to make that impact. Until it does, the classical music crisis won’t be over. Because the crisis really isn’t about ticket sales or the aging audience. It’s about whether we give any true value to our culture.
Such a good example, you saying you don’t subscribe to the services I mentioned, but you know the shows. Which of course you could have watched in other ways, and sounds like you might have. But you don’t know these operas, and why would you? Even though the Steve Jobs opera got such an ovation at its world premiere that I thought the Santa Fe opera house might fall out of the mountains. But that was the opera audience. When I saw Champion, at intermission I talked to two people who weren’t operagoers, but came to this because it seemed new and interesting. And were they ever disappointed! Sample of two, I know, and anecdotal evidence. But from my knowledge of the culture outsiders to opera come from, I can guess that this couple wasn’t atypical.
Classic opera. Baz Lurhmann produced La boheme on Broadway, and that worked marvelously. The singer/actors looked like contemporary people, and the show or its music didn’t seem dated. This was the first production of a classic opera I think I’d seen, and the only one to date, in which every moment in the drama came across as we’d expect it to in a film or musical. One classical composer I talked to at the show had a commission from a major opera company, and said he’d so much rather it be done like this Boheme. Because then he’d get the production he’d dreamed of.
I agree that many older operas will seem dated or creaky, at least if you outline their plots, and wow, the presentation you describe sounds embarrassing. But I think those works would come alive with the kind of superpowerful singers we had in the old days, up through the 1950s or ’60s. They have to be done with 1000% belief, with full outsized emotion. There are some videos from back in those days where you can see this. Even despite some silent-movie acting!
I think another necessity is to produce these pieces like works from the past. Or else update them, which is done, but which is harder in opera than in film or theater because the music doesn’t change. But I think a double approach, where you simultaneously play the old works to the hilt as originally conceived, and at the same time bring them into our era — that, with the right singers, could be amazing. Only problem is that there are very few of the right singers.
Big, important point you’re making here! I’m glad you brought it up.