Table of Contents

Title
Contents
Overture: An Art Form Without a Future
1. “Don’t You Get It?”: A First Time at the Opera
Time-Curve: Histories of Opera
2. The Future in Our Past
3. “The Power Plant of Feelings”: Singing Actors and Their Emotions
4. A Strange Form of Storytelling: Narrative, Ambiguity, and Directorial
Authorship
5. Case Study: The Magic Flute in Berlin
Time-Curve: Histories of Opera (continued)
6. The Use-less Art: The Economics of Opera
7. Toward an Anti-Elite Opera
8. Breaking the Frame: Opera Beyond the Opera House
9. Case Study: Hopscotch in Los Angeles
Time-Curve: Histories of Opera (continued)
10. Unresolved Paradoxes: Where Opera Speaks Spiritually
Illustrations Insert
Gratitude
Works Cited
Credits
Index
Copyright
We are not so rich that we can do without tradition. Let one with
new ears listen to it in a new way.
—WALTER KAUFMANN, introduction to his English translation of Martin
Buber’s I and Thou
 CONTENTS

Overture: An Art Form Without a Future

1“Don’t You Get It?”
A First Time at the Opera
TIME-CURVE: HISTORIES OF OPERA
2The Future in Our Past
3“The Power Plant of Feelings”
Singing Actors and Their Emotions
4A Strange Form of Storytelling
Narrative, Ambiguity, and Directorial Authorship
5Case Study: The Magic Flute in Berlin
TIME-CURVE: HISTORIES OF OPERA (continued)
6The Use-less Art
The Economics of Opera
7Toward an Anti-Elite Opera
8Breaking the Frame
Opera Beyond the Opera House
9Case Study: Hopscotch in Los Angeles
TIME-CURVE: HISTORIES OF OPERA (continued)
10Unresolved Paradoxes
Where Opera Speaks Spiritually
Gratitude
Works Cited
Credits
Index
The PLAYLIST referenced throughout A New Philosophy of Opera can
be accessed at the book’s webpage:

https://www.yuvalsharon.com/author
 A NEW
PHILOSOPHY
OF OPERA
 OVERTURE

AN ART FORM WITHOUT A FUTURE

Let’s imagine a near future—forty, maybe fifty years from now—in
which the art form of opera ceases to exist.
In that future, our opulent opera houses would be transformed into
experiential shopping malls, or perhaps expensive condominiums.
Better yet: innovative live-shop combinations. Opera recordings
don’t necessary vanish; they just don’t make the cut for an upgrade
to however people consume music in the future. Music scores
survive, but without performance opportunities they become dusty
documents buried deep in academic libraries. The notes now seem
more like hieroglyphic symbols than the language of music.
On the surface, little might seem to distinguish that future from our
present. But I imagine that artists in an opera-free future would
start feeling restless in their isolation from each other. Without
opera, the most ingenious composers would probably turn less to
symphony orchestras (assuming that symphonic works somehow
managed to survive) and get involved in the latest forms of media,
all of which need music. The other artists who make up opera—the
poet, the director, the singers, the dancers, the instrumentalists, and
the conductor—would all likely follow lonelier pursuits. Without
opera, there would be no mechanism in place for artists to
undertake ludicrously large-scale collaborations.
Yet I also like to imagine these future artists coming together to
dream about a new art form that transcends each of their limited
spheres of influence. Maybe they will have heard about a lost art
form that defied all categorization but its own, and be inspired to re-
create it on their own terms. What they create may not look or
sound or feel like what we would call opera today . . . and yet, opera
would be reborn.
Preoccupation with opera as a dying art never feels entirely
unjustified, because this art form actually demands death in order to
fulfill its true imperative: to be reborn.
Rebirth is opera’s true power, manifested through the act of
performance. Every time an opera appears on the stage, it’s not
simply replayed but resuscitated, renewed, reshaped. The dead-or-
dying attitude results in historical reenactment, as if opera were a
statue embalming an ideology. But an opera of rebirth is a shape-
shifter: protean, not predictable. It resists getting pinned down and
instead demands re-view and revision. Opera creates a circle where
others see a line, with the past and the future inseparable and
articulating each other. It’s easy to claim opera is dying in the linear
experience of time. It’s much more difficult to recognize opera’s
cyclical identity as an art of resurrection.
In that future, where opera houses are converted into shopping
malls, what would a reborn opera look like? What would emerge
from the unruly and barely explicable impulse to collectively create?
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
A PHILOSOPHY OF OPERA—A FAITH in what it is and a vision for what it
can be—animates everything I do as an opera director. This book
attempts to articulate that vision in both practical and theoretical
ways.
Mine is a philosophy without a system—because opera is an art
form that is most exciting when it is unpredictable and
unsystematic. While systems of philosophy attempt to classify, I
think a philosophy of opera should constantly de-classify. Any
definition of opera is a tricky and ultimately unsatisfying
proposition that quickly produces its own exception:
An opera is a story told in music ➔ Yes, but then what about Philip
Glass’s Einstein on the Beach and other operas without a narrative?
An opera is through-composed with singing from beginning to end. ➔
Yes, but then what about The Magic Flute, the original versions of
Carmen or Faust, and other operas with quite a bit of spoken
dialogue? What, then, about a work like Perfect Lives by Robert
Ashley, which has no singing at all? And what are mega-musicals like
Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera, which are also
through-composed?
All operas feature unamplified voices. ➔ Yes, but then what about
operas from the last thirty years or so, composed specifically for
amplified voices? And would this mean opera must be eternally
stuck in a time before microphones?
Opera’s essential condition dodges any attempt to reduce it to a
singularity—whether one singular voice or one singular meaning. So
I will resist hard-and-fast definitions; they will ultimately keep
opera trapped as what it currently is instead of making room for
what may yet come.
The lack of definition doesn’t scare an ideal opera lover. And I do
have an ideal audience in mind, both for this book and for my
productions. These spectators come to the theater in search of
imagination. They realize that each performance is a new
opportunity for venturing somewhere new and for expanding their
minds. They relish the opportunity to view the world from a
different perspective and to hear new voices that bring out
something unique even from the oldest scores. Confronted by the
unexpected, they don’t fall into confusion or fight against it
furiously; they lean in, curious, eager to know what will transpire
over the course of the performance. They may eventually decide that
they disagreed with what they saw. But the consideration of another
perspective and the opportunity to think differently are ultimately
the primary reason they bought a ticket in the first place. The risk is
its own reward.
The casual reader should not feel embarrassed if this sounds
foreign. Imagination can often be a luxurious extra rather than a
given in an art form that for many is solely about re-creation. Yet
there is no shortage of historical evidence for an audience’s desire
for novelty, at least according to the Oxford Handbook of the Operatic
Canon. While that title may imply a love of everything rigid and
classifiable in opera, the editors suggest instead that “for the
majority of its 400-year history, opera was brought into the public
domain through a lively marketplace in which novelty was the
immediate, and often the only measure of value.” When opera was
most popular, the emphasis was always on the new. Seventeenth-
century commercial theaters in Venice offered seasons in which
only 15 percent of the repertoire consisted of repeated works, and
“the score itself rarely survived the season for which it had been
written.” Until the nineteenth century and the appearance of
Gioachino Rossini, Italy’s musical culture was “commercial,
craftsman-like, collaborative, and ephemeral . . . centered on the
here and now of production.” Opera differed from city to city, rather
than fitting a national concept, and the differences are more drastic
when you compare countries.
But no matter where opera was produced, the emphasis was
resolutely on either new works or existing works (no more than
forty years old) that were given a fresh approach. London in the
eighteenth century, for example, saw an overwhelming public
demand for work “recently written on the continent and shipped
over; newly written for London by the Opera House composer; older
works newly dressed up with additions and alterations; or more
elaborate structures, with old and new arias used in an established
text, usually referred to as pasticcios.” By the end of the century, the
demand for novelty waned as a collection of masterpieces took
shape.
The final development of the “canon”—a group of works whose
“greatness” was agreed on and from which a season’s offerings
might be drawn—was a disaster for the writing and staging of
London opera. The audience, which had previously wanted drama
and music in the latest styles by the newest composers, was given an
“artistic” excuse to become gradually more and more conservative, a
shift of taste and attitude that on one hand permanently stultified
the repertory and on the other narrowed the horizons of the
audience’s ambition.
This snapshot of conservative audiences in late eighteenth-century
London should sound familiar to twenty-first century audiences of
opera in America.
Thinking cyclically rather than cynically, believing in opera as the
art form of rebirth, we might prepare the ground for something
more imaginative to emerge.
That process could begin right now.
Let’s start thinking of opera as evolutionary rather than decaying.
Let’s consider the experience of going to the opera as a way of
thinking and feeling that will benefit us outside the theater. Let’s
start viewing opera as an engine for empathy and awe, and decide to
attend a performance with an explorer’s mindset. That means
opening ourselves up to the unfamiliar. What would happen if we
approached opera on those terms, actively developing our curiosity
about things we can’t fathom but long to know?
Let’s stop thinking about opera as a classification and instead
identify both its field of possibilities and its repertoire of clichéd
postures:
Opera wants to seem a sovereign, but it’s actually a wanderer.
It behaves like a sage, when it’s actually a rascal.
It fancies itself a fortress, although it’s nothing but an organization
of air.
All diamantine, frozen views of opera, widely on display most
anywhere you look, are what need to stop “dying” and actually die—
Die, so that opera can be reborn.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
FOR AN ART FORM OF rebirth, the most potent path forward into the
future lies in its origins.
It was in a comfortable room that the Florentine gentlemen first
met, at the court of Count Giovanni de’ Bardi in 1573. They were
humanists from different fields of study who shared a passion for
exploring ancient and new forms of music and drama. Music, they
believed, had become corrupt and extravagant in their society. The
fashion for polyphony—where two or more equally prominent
melodies are performed simultaneously—rendered poetic texts
inaudible and ineffective. To truly evoke emotions and psychological
truth, a leaner, more spare musical style would be needed—perhaps
taking on the clarity and directness that distinguished the great
comedies and tragedies of ancient Athens.
They looked back to antiquity to forge something new.
This group provoked rivalry and inspiration around Italy, and some
thirty years later earned the name “Camerata,” for the comfortable
“chamber” that served as their meeting place.
Whenever I read about the aspirations of those Florentine
gentlemen of the Camerata, I can’t help but wonder what they would
make of the peculiar art form that survived them by over 400 years.
How would they regard the institutions and professionalism that
have made its preservation a matter of routine? Would they
consider that a “dialogue between ancient and modern” was still
taking place, or would they see a stalemate of predictability?
I hark back to this original meeting of minds any time I encourage
people to give opera a chance. Try imagining the motley group of
artists: a composer, a poet, a group of musicians, some talented
singers, and craftspeople capable of creating elaborate visions
(carpenters and painters to build sets, a talented tailor with a flair
for fantasy to make the costumes, and so on). Their gatherings were
likely a glorious chaos, with no real designation for what it was they
were founding. And rather than a faithful reproduction of classical
antiquity, their Frankenstein monster—cobbled together from the
talents of various and sometimes competing artisans—became a
new art form, resisting any effort to catalogue it.
When this background is taken into account, the first operas always
end up sounding less like the prototype for the highly systematized
genre we know today and more like the sixteenth-century
forerunner of happenings and performance art. Over the course of
four centuries, this bizarre species morphed and adapted to the
contemporaneous moment, evolving through geography, politics,
fashion, and technology. If future artists do one day collaborate to
revive the dead art form of what was once opera, everything they
need to know can be found at its beginning.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
THE OLDEST SURVIVING OPERA SCORE that’s still frequently performed
today is a collaboration between the composer Claudio Monteverdi
and the poet Alessandro Striggio. L’Orfeo, their setting of the
Orpheus myth, premiered during the 1607 Carnival season in
Mantua. It was not called an opera, since the genre’s name wasn’t
yet fixed. It was described as a favola in musica, or a fable told
through music.
The first person we meet in this sung drama is the living
embodiment of music (“La musica”), who introduces herself: “I am
Music, who can calm each troubled heart and kindle the most frigid
minds—sometimes with anger, sometimes with love” (SEE PLAYLIST ).
Even if La musica only appears in the brief Prologue, music itself is
central to the depictions of celebration (the raucous wedding dances
of shepherds and nymphs, Orpheus’s joy at the prospect of a happy
marriage to Eurydice) and mourning (the sad narration of Silvia, or
“the Messenger,” who describes Eurydice’s death by snakebite, and
the moving lament of two anonymous shepherds). In descending to
the underworld to vie for his lost love, Orpheus uses his captivating
singing voice to charm and lull to sleep the stone-cold ferryman who
keeps watch over the river of the dead. And when Orpheus fails at
the unprecedented task of releasing his fiancée from death (by
breaking the one restriction placed on him, looking back at her),
music becomes a final, lonely lament that moves the god Apollo to
descend from his divine perch in the sky. As the god of music, Apollo
makes a fitting father for the singer Orpheus, and his appearance
acts as a bookend to a work that began with music’s embodiment.
Historians speculate that early opera needed to justify the strange
reality of characters singing rather than speaking. Contemporary
audiences, who have grown accustomed to naturalism in most
narrative art, can certainly relate to this concern; the idea of
dialogue conveyed through song still strikes many as ridiculous. For
the creators of early opera, the master singer Orpheus validated the
new form of storytelling: he is always performing, praying, praising,
or lamenting in ways that ground music in an understandable
narrative reality. We know of two settings of the Orpheus story
prior to Monteverdi, and there have been over seventy others since
1607. So the mythological Orpheus is not just a character in a
drama: he became the father of a genre where song serves as the
necessary expression of individuality.
The overall character of Monteverdi’s music is declamatory, with the
contour of the sung line closely following the text. Polyphony is
mostly avoided so the poetry can come through clearly. The effect
can feel like a play with music as the engine. Later operas would
designate this type of dramatic setting recitative, or dramatic
recitation, separate from musical set pieces that became known as
arias. Arias are still what most audiences look forward to the most
when attending an opera; they are the “big moments” for a solo
performer, and may have become familiar from recordings,
commercials, or performances at weddings. An aria can be an oasis
within a narrative. You can fall in love with one without knowing the
broader context of the opera it’s part of—the plot or the language
it’s written in—as the melody carries so much of the emotional
content. Recitative, on the other hand, is harder to appreciate if you
can’t follow the text, since the twists and turns, the rhymes and
rhythms, of the language are precisely what the music and the
performer are charged to articulate. Next to an aria, an
accompanying recitative can usually feel like a dry offset, the
“necessary evil” of contextualization—ideally, something quickly
dispatched.
When Monteverdi wrote Orfeo, no such division between recitative
and aria existed. Though the work features a few self-conscious
songs in strophic patterns, only one moment in the opera could be
considered a precursor of the aria: Orpheus’s plea to the ferryman,
known by his first words, “Possente spirito.” Far from dry text-
setting, Monteverdi’s score is full of micro-melodies within the
resonant language of the poetry. Even if they rarely blossom into
aria-like musical moments, those fleeting melodies create a
moment-by-moment fascination that can make for stirring drama. In
Monteverdi’s recitative-like style, enormous license is given to the
performers. It becomes their responsibility to bring out the
emotions and interiority of a character. Orfeo may be short on arias,
but it teems with soliloquies that can feel Shakespearean. (Hamlet
predates Orfeo by only seven years.)
Of the many theatrical works Monteverdi composed, only two
besides L’Orfeo survive, both written for commercial theaters in
Venice: The Return of Ulysses to His Homeland (1640) and The
Coronation of Poppea (1643). Part of what makes these works
fascinating is how little we know about how they were performed.
Even the printed score leaves out such vital information as precise
instrumentation, and no designs for the original production remain.
Crucial instructions were not written down but transmitted verbally
in rehearsal, built directly on the voices of the performers.
So at the dawn of opera, a composer’s score was more of an
instruction manual for particular performers, barely more than
suggestion, and not created for posterity or future interpreters. And
just as Monteverdi’s performers were charged to bring the music
and the characters to life, contemporary interpreters are offered
that same sense of freedom and possibility. The singer who
embodies Orpheus today is allowed to make choices suited to his
instrument and his temperament, rather than repeating the
discoveries of his predecessors. Ideally, the results feel
extemporaneous and fresh, born in the moment rather than fixed
through routine. Because the individual personality of the
interpreter infuses the piece with soul, no two performances are
ever alike.
Our current operatic landscape is vastly different from those heady
early days: the spontaneity at the heart of Monteverdi’s work has
become calcified, and the institutions administering opera seem
driven mostly by a desire for efficient, predictable reproductions.
But each time Monteverdi is performed, necessitating the agency of
performers and audience alike, contemporary audiences can reset
their expectations. Reimagining opera as it used to be can constantly
remind us of what opera may still become.
The future is always already there, in our past.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
LET ’S BEGIN BY IMAGINING THATopera was born from the same spirit of
inquiry that fuels speculative scientists—the posture I imagine the
Camerata took, and the one that will motivate those imagined future
artists who inherit an opera-less world. In both cases, opera is not a
thing but a mechanism for a meeting of minds, spilling beyond every
convention. Opera becomes the co-articulation of a singular
expression, containing multitudes of messiness and mania. Not the
confirmation or the illustration of accepted values, but an
ambiguous search for what is unclassifiable and unspeakable. An
unruly and unstable genre that unifies many personalities and
embraces an encyclopedia of idiosyncrasies. Not a statement but a
poem, one that might begin like this:
What art form could adequately
mirror in miniature
humanity
in its peripatetic absurdity
fugitive destiny
and extravagant illusion?
 1

“DON’T YOU GET IT?”

A FIRST TIME AT THE OPERA
The crucial moment in Richard Wagner’s last opera, Parsifal (1882),
is an anticipatory one: an elderly, long-winded knight brings a young
boy without a name into a secret gathering. It’s the sacred
convocation of the knights of the Holy Grail. Their king, a wounded,
tormented man, is forced to undergo a painful ritual of uncovering
the relic. The knights feast on the sight of the chalice, gathering
strength and summoning inspiration just from the sight of the holy
object. Then they shuffle off to await the next unveiling.
The elderly knight believes the nameless boy possesses some special
quality that may benefit the knights’ community. Perhaps this boy,
granted access to the mysterious ritual, will recognize a higher
calling and bring forth some healing through the promise of
continuity. The world around the boy seems to melt around him in a
way he doesn’t understand: “I’m hardly moving at all, and yet I’ve
gone so far.” The knight responds with a riddle: “Here time becomes
space.” Along with the boy, the audience is taken into the ritual
space, accompanied by hallucinatory sounds that collapse all
conventional dimensions (SEE PLAYLIST ).
Some thirty minutes later, the ritual is over and the boy is left
behind, dumbfounded. The elderly knight scolds him: “Don’t you
know what you just saw?” The boy tries to replicate what he
experienced with a gesture, but it’s a mimicry without feeling and
without knowledge. Imagine the knight’s disappointment, realizing
that this boy who seemed special didn’t understand a thing.
Anyone who has attended the opera as a young person intuitively
understands this scene.
If we replace the mysterious ritual of the unveiling of the Grail with
a night at the opera house, we have one of the best evocations of
what it feels like to see your first opera. There you were, living your
best childhood, which probably didn’t involve sitting in a dark
theater for hours at a time (like the young boy in Parsifal, who is a
carefree hunter before stumbling upon the knight). An older and
usually grouchier person consents to do something that will be
“good for you.” They take you to the opera—and what could be more
of a holy grail in our culture than opera?
What transpires is a barely decipherable ceremony that makes you
feel like the only one who never received instructions. Everyone else
seems to know exactly what to do: when to clap and, more
important, when not to clap; what to look for and what to
appreciate; which aspects, strange as they seem, are not to be
questioned. If at the end you didn’t understand a thing, then you are
nothing but a fool—although, of course, the failed visit invites other
admonishments, such as “Do you have any idea how much these
tickets cost?” Or “Do you know how lucky you are to be able to enjoy
something like this?” (And if your first opera coincidentally happens
to be Parsifal, then you’re really out of luck, because Act I runs two
hours with two more acts to go.)
The boy (whose name happens to be Parsifal) is made to feel at fault
—just as first-time audience members must be when failing to
respond to the pageantry unfolding before them. But who is truly
responsible for this lack of connection? Could something be wrong
with the ritual itself? Is it the opera or the way it’s presented that
fails to elicit so little stirring in newcomers? Maybe, like in Parsifal,
neither the young person’s ignorance nor the inherent power of the
ritual is to blame, but rather the way the ritual unfolds: the knights’
blind obedience to habit dimming the light of the ideals they claim to
uphold, to the point of snuffing it out entirely.
Samuel Beckett called habit “the great deadener,” and nowhere is
that more palpable than in the opera house, where responsible
clockwork is prioritized over inspiration. It’s all too common to
enter an opera house and see a work born of intense inspiration
that’s been lobotomized by routine. That routine offers safety to
people who have learned to limit their imaginative scope; it
becomes a form of protection from the very holiness we claim to
have desired when we bought a ticket. That holiness is the sacred
convocation of artist and spectator sharing common time, common
space, and that common realm where time becomes space. But most
nights at the opera suffer the dull edge of routine in unimaginative
and woefully under-rehearsed productions, offering an experience
not dissimilar from the mumbled participation and general
distraction of so many religious communities.
A first-time operagoer, surrounded with the promise of a religious
experience, may find themselves left cold, forced to concede, “It
must be me; I must not be ___ (A) ___ enough to understand this.” It
would take a lightning bolt of enlightenment for them to voluntarily
return to a space that made them feel so ___ (B) ___.
A B
smart stupid
➔
privileged disadvantaged
➔
sophisticated illiterate
➔
rich poor
➔
old immature
➔
awake sleepy
➔
Just as Parsifal is chastised for “not getting” what he was so
fortunate to witness, everything about the ritual of opera can make
an initiate feel deeply unsettled about their participation. It’s no
small discomfort; in the wrong circumstances, the experience can
awaken an existential uneasiness, striking at the heart of your
identity—how you view yourself and your position in society.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
IN THE 1990 FILM PRETTY WOMAN , a rich gentleman (Richard Gere) takes
his escort (Julia Roberts) to a night at the opera—Giuseppe Verdi’s
La traviata (1853), the story of a nineteenth-century prostitute who
dies just as she finds true love. Before the opera begins, the
gentleman gives her the kind of pompous advice you would expect
the elder knight to offer Parsifal: “People’s reactions to opera the
first time they see it is very dramatic; they either love it or they hate
it. If they love it, they will always love it. If they don’t, they may learn
to appreciate it, but it will never become part of their soul.”
Sure enough, as La traviata comes to a close, the escort is moved to
tears by the death of her operatic double. Unlike Parsifal, who
stands speechless and uncomprehending, the uninitiated “pretty
woman” sheds tears for the heroine; she is revealed to intuitively
understand the ritual unfolding before her. “She must have a heart
of gold,” the film implies, “and is worthy of transcending her station.
Praise be to the rich man who did this for her!”
I hate this scene for so many reasons, not only because most opera
companies’ marketing departments reference it to try and hook new
operagoers (“See the opera that made Julia Roberts cry!”). I hate it
mostly because opera functions in this film as a symbol for luxury
and refinement—like the fine dining and the pearls Richard Gere
offered her in previous scenes. Opera becomes a trial of
domestication, deployed to tame a fiercely independent character
into the rich man’s Pygmalion model of a respectable woman. I wish
the scene conveyed what a more charitable viewer of the film might
claim: that opera requires no education or “social conditioning” for
it to speak powerfully and directly to anyone with an open mind and
open heart. But the transactional context of the two characters’
relationship reduces opera to a stand-in for expensive excellence in
the film’s capitalist love story.
As it turns out, La traviata was also my first opera: my dad took the
twelve-year-old me to a production in Germany while he was
working there. Unfortunately, no tears came to my eyes to prove I
was a deep-feeling human. I was more like Parsifal watching the
Grail ritual, mostly oscillating between boredom and
incomprehension. At the time, no supertitles over the stage
presented simultaneous translations of what was being sung; you
were expected to already know everything about the work, as well as
understand Italian. Nothing onstage captured my imagination or
engagement. Singers came and went with a minimum of movement
or true dramatic connection. Whoever coined the term “park and
bark” for the standard operatic performance style—where singers
enter, take one fixed position, and shout-sing until they exit—might
have cited this performance as an example. In short, the evening
sputtered along, with each scene unfolding exactly as everyone
(except me) seemed to expect.
If the gentleman’s platitude from Pretty Woman is to be taken as a
truism, then loving opera is beyond me and I can only hope to
appreciate it. But what if I had witnessed a truly invigorating and
extraordinary production, instead of the tried-and-tired Traviata
that happened to be my first experience? If that occasion had been
my last encounter with opera, I would surely have never given opera
another thought. Instead, I had the great fortune of having
additional opportunities to experience works quite different from
that production of Traviata. My second opera, at the Lyric Opera of
Chicago, was Wagner’s Siegfried (1871). With an extended scene
featuring the title character forging a sword (to music that I would
call “proto-metal” if that weren’t such a bad pun) and the slaying of a
dragon, this work was much easier for the thirteen-year-old me to
digest. The opera also demanded a certain amount of theatricality to
realize its creator’s fantastical universe, and although I may not
remember many details, I certainly remember feeling much more
curious about the art form afterward.
Not too many years later, at the same theater, the world premiere of
Anthony and Thulani Davis’s Amistad (1997) dumbfounded me with
the shocking fact that operas were still being written—a revelation
for a young person who had understood the opera house primarily
as a museum for old works. Now what appeared to be a
contemporary art form began to fascinate me. In college, I elected to
take an opera class to learn if dissecting these works like literature
would help me appreciate them. When my professor, Mary Ann
Smart, played a transcendent moment from Meredith Monk’s ATLAS
(1991), I experienced the intense flash of revelation that Parsifal
experiences later in Wagner’s opera. Suddenly, hearing Monk’s voice
—a singular musical imagination that felt both futuristic and ancient
—I completely understood opera and its extraordinary potential.
My connection to opera as a genre was anything but instant or
intuitive; far from “love at first sight,” it took false starts and
unexpected byways—not to mention a fair amount of privilege—
that led me to discover that opera was indeed in my soul.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
BUT BACK TO PARSIFAL: The young boy turns out to be the hero of the
story, but not before undergoing arduous trials and endless self-
flagellation for his initial lack of understanding. The discovery of his
name and a cosmic kiss in Act II awaken a sudden and deep
understanding of what he had witnessed among the Grail knights in
Act I. In the third act, he must find his way back to them after years
of senseless wandering. But when he returns, he is not only a fully
enlightened participant in their ritual, he has come to take the place
of their ailing king.
How many opera lovers wish this could be the story of everyone
who first encounters opera: that any initial alienness nevertheless
leaves a lasting—even if primarily unconscious—trace that begins a
process of self-discovery and ultimately acceptance into the fold.
And that a restless teenager who doesn’t understand a thing of
what’s happening onstage becomes, one day, the chairperson of that
same opera company’s board of directors.
Such a transformation is beautifully illustrated by Wagner in
Parsifal’s vocal line. At the start of the evening, he crashes into the
opera with short and jumpy phrases. During the ritual, he is forced
to stay silent as the knights of the Grail do their inexplicable thing. In
Act II, the sudden flash of illumination sends him into propulsive,
open-hearted wailing. In his final aria, Parsifal’s voice is magisterial,
staying in a controlled range that gives him the appearance of
authority, centered and steady. His voice is practically subsumed
into the sonic dominance of the orchestra, which carries the melodic
lines. You could say that Wagner shows how his character has
grown through the way his vocal lines develop; or, you could just as
easily argue, Wagner reveals how Parsifal has become indoctrinated
into the ways of this religious cult, as his character-full music in Acts
I and II flattens out into character-less anonymity. The ambiguity of
music, which can’t be reduced to a single meaning, allows Parsifal’s
identity to simultaneously mature and deaden.
If you wanted to read this opera—Wagner’s last—as the story of
Parsifal’s domestication to a preexisting ideology, you would have
the opposite of the kind of hero populating his earlier operas. Senta,
Tannhäuser, Elsa, Siegmund, Brünnhilde, and Walther all resist
social norms to stake a claim for their independence and an
alternative way of living. Why, at the end of his life, did Wagner shift
away from stories about nonconformists and revolutionaries,
rejected by their shortsighted communities, toward stories of wild
spirits who learn obedience and subservience? (The wildest
character in Parsifal, Kundry, sings only one line in Act III: “I
serve . . . I serve . . .”) What happened? Is it the fate of all radical
artists to become conservative as they grow old and settle into the
familiarity of their celebrity? In the case of opera, it certainly seems
the fate of the most radical works, which may have burst onto the
scene as rebels, but which have become tamed through years of
domestication at the opera house.
I think this is why I’ve come to really dislike the ending of Parsifal.
The vision of the “wild child” assimilating into a rule-bound
brotherhood feels less like the restoring of order and more like the
loss of individuality, the promise of continuity at the expense of the
revolutionary. Opera’s problems can’t be as easily solved as Wagner
envisions in Parsifal, by replacing an ailing king and restoring
“business as usual.” Instead, we should shake off the dead layers
suffocating the spirit and question everything that has settled into
routine. The Grail may have contained holiness once, but now it’s a
poor substitute for true spirit. The next leaders must find the right
way to smash it to pieces while keeping their community intact—
not as an act of destruction but as an act of liberation. The true heirs
to the throne would remind the community that the worship of an
object has resulted in an empty ossification of something truly
meaningful.
What the knights in Parsifal hold as holy has calcified into history—
the Grail and a missing spear have become fetishized objects,
capable of replacing food and water as sustenance for a closed-off
community. This commodification is part of what makes Parsifal
such an apt metaphor for the problems of the opera house, where
the spirits of works are preserved in antiquated images and
unexamined iconography. With the almost Dadaistic subtitle “ein
Bühnenweihfestspiel” (“a festival to consecrate the stage”), Parsifal
remains the only opera Wagner wrote specifically for the one-of-a-
kind acoustics of the Bayreuther Festspielhaus, a theater custom-
built as a home for his sprawling, epic cycle The Ring of the Nibelung
(Der Ring des Nibelungen, 1876). In every way, Parsifal serves as a
summation of the composer’s extraordinary artistry—but enshrined
within it is a deep-seated impulse toward conservation and
objectification. Bayreuth began as an independent escape from the
decadent demands of the opera industrial complex of the day; but by
the time Wagner completed Parsifal, the theater had become a
monument to his own heroic achievements.
No wonder Parsifal’s narrative centers on relics that become
substitutes for real experience; that’s the attitude toward opera the
piece itself and the Festspielhaus sanctify. Imagine if a jazz lover
started displacing his feelings for John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme
onto the actual vinyl it was embedded in. The Coltrane fan passes
the album on lovingly to the next generation—but if they don’t own
a record player, they might see merely a round, black, shiny thing.
The object becomes the new endpoint. Fast forward a few
generations, to an increasingly dispirited relationship with the
unplayed object, the music itself completely silenced. This is the
direction opera is currently taking: the music is a fixed entity, the
result of slavish repetitions of past practice.
But music is the ultimate resistance to reification. It rejects
becoming objectified, no matter how desperately recordings try to
convince us otherwise. Recordings encourage the subconscious
substitution of a sound object for the music itself, and while I
treasure them as testaments of great artistry, they have cultivated a
kind of listening that easily leads to conservatism. For the last
century, we have possessed the ability to sever the voice from the
body: we can play and replay and replay a piece of vocal music until
we’ve learned to anticipate what will happen rather than actually
listen. Now there are standards and exemplars that singers are
judged against, and what was once an interpretation has become a
reference point. Singers and conductors in particular face the
impossible task of living up to the recordings of great artists of the
past. Do they try to replicate the stylistic conventions and
interpretations of past masters? Or do they risk the displeasure of
the expectant audience by bringing their own individuality to bear?
This is the choice facing any interpreter of a classic work, be it
director, conductor, or singer. We can choose to either reinforce a
studied and traditionalist view of the piece—as preservation—or
we can attempt to liberate the spirit of the music, to present it in a
way that’s completely of the moment. We either display our mastery
of past performance practice to the acceptance of an audience who
have come to understand the work on those terms, or we can
illuminate something about the work that has never been perceived
before. The traditional view is reinforced by the recording
catalogue; the other way gets at the heart of music’s true nature.
Music exists in the air only as long as the vibrations hang. It belongs
to the present moment even as it slips through our fingers; nothing
about a live performance can be a rote repetition of how it was done
before. Music doesn’t demand we sing along to a predictable melody
or anticipate a well-studied path. Instead, it provokes the listener to
be fully embodied in the present—an idea that is at least
challenging, if not antithetical, to classical music’s notion of studied
grail-keeping.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
HOW DO WE BREAK THE conditioning that inevitably leads to the
stultifying ritual Parsifal finds so alien? The German philosopher
Theodor Adorno offered a solution, involving the radio: he
encouraged producers not to play uninterrupted performances of
symphonies on the air but to broadcast live rehearsals instead,
complete with mistakes and the conductor’s interruptions. As
unsatisfying as this may sound to the listener, the proposal is an
ingenious way to open up the process of music-making, defy the
sense of a hermetic and predictable musical structure, and preserve
the primacy of a live performance. The listener couldn’t just float
along with an inevitable flow but would confront the provisional
and the potential inherent to any iteration of that piece. Each aspect
of the performance becomes a choice rather than a foregone
conclusion.
Years after I first read Adorno’s idea, I worked in the notion of
interruption to my concept for Giacomo Puccini’s La bohème for
Detroit Opera. Bohème (1896) is frequently cited as a “perfect first
opera” for its irresistible music, lovable characters, and relatable
story of young love. (It’s also often considered a “perfect date night,”
which probably follows the questionable Pretty Woman logic of
opera serving as a litmus test for emotional life and refinement.) For
the casual operagoer, opera is almost synonymous with Puccini’s
name, which may have something to do with his emergence at the
same time as recordings. When phonographic records were first
being produced, the tenor Enrico Caruso, a famous interpreter of
Puccini’s music, engaged audiences with operatic music within the
comfort of their own homes. Some have even argued that Puccini’s
relatively short arias, most lasting between two and four minutes,
were written in response to the length of time allowed on one
phonographic side. Even if that’s untrue, Puccini’s works seem
purpose-built for operatic fetishization. To disrupt that thinking, I
imagined turning Puccini on his head: starting with Act IV and
ending with Act I.
Reordering the traditional arc of Bohème was actually an idea that
had emerged a decade earlier, from a conversation with the great set
designer John Conklin. John liked to provoke his students with
thought experiments that often seemed impossible to achieve in the
theater. In the case of Bohème, with his characteristically devilish
smile, he would ask his students, “Why not start with the end?” His
primary justification was musical, as Act IV and Act I are sonic
analogues of each other: beginning with a nearly identical gesture
and opening onto the same dramatic situation of two artists
struggling with blocks to their creativity. As the acts continue, their
dramatic structure unfolds in identical ways. Both hinge on a key
sequence in which Mimì, Rodolfo’s downstairs neighbor, comes
upstairs to light her candle. She loses her key in the darkness, which
Rodolfo finds but withholds to allow him to make a romantic
overture. The same action effectively “repeats” at the center of both
acts—in Act I’s present tense and as a memory in Act IV, with the
music, naturally, creating a bridge between these two discrete
moments in time. The apotheosis of both acts—the ecstatic unison
of their voices in love and Rodolfo’s anguished cries of Mimì’s name
upon her death—also form the two climactic moments of the score.
The piece itself suggests a circularity, and the episodic and
impressionistic nature of the opera as a whole lends itself to a
nonlinear approach—what Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern
would explore as musical “retrograde,” or the type of narrative
strategy that may have formerly been reserved for experimental
fiction, like Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, but has become an
increasingly popular way of telling stories in the era of episodic
television.
I left my conversation with John with the retrograde possibility of
Bohème working through my thoughts. Here is where the potential
of operatic recordings really came to my aid: I made a playlist of the
opera in that reverse order and gave it a try. Listening through the
piece out of sequence made me instantly fall in love with the
possibilities of performing the opera in this way. Suddenly the
modernity of the score—its breathless pace, its brevity, its almost
quantum vision of time in the chaotically overlapping scenes in Act
II—came to the fore. I found myself moved to tears, not like Julia
Roberts’s character at a sick woman’s demise but by the purity and
fearlessness of the hope of new love emerging, despite the looming
catastrophe.
Pulling this off would necessitate some kind of guide for the
audience. At first I imagined supertitles could help: a headline over
the stage after Mimì’s death that would read, “Three months earlier.”
But then, mulling over Adorno’s notion of interruption, I imagined
an ambiguous character who would appear and speak in the
language of the audience. This character, whom we eventually called
the Wanderer (originally played by the legendary tenor George
Shirley), did more than narrate or explain the concept. At key
moments the music stopped cold, and the Wanderer asked the
audience to consider another direction the story could have taken.
This happened at crucial and uncanny moments in the score where
Puccini’s music comes to a stop: decisive fermatas, strangely
unnatural “joints” that seem uncharacteristic of his effortless
musical flow. These strange and unsettling dramatic moments are
usually rushed past and barely register to an audience. They feel like
an uncomfortable silence in a big auditorium, as if the orchestra
needed a moment for a page turn. It was at such moments that the
Wanderer paused the action and posed a question: “What would
have happened if Rodolfo had gone back inside?” Or “What would
have happened if Musetta had stayed silent?” These Adorno-ian
interruptions would not just jolt an audience out of autopilot
listening habits; they would serve dramatically to emphasize choice
and agency at crucial times in the narrative.
When I pitched this concept for Bohème to artistic directors at
various companies, not surprisingly, I experienced different
iterations of a door slamming in my face. (The politest rejection: “It’s
a brilliant idea, but not for us.”) Bohème, for most houses, was not a
site for experimentation; audiences wanted their romantic idea of
the work served back to them. Producers would readily admit that
Puccini’s classic was an anchor for their programming, one that
reliably sold tickets and was simple enough to be performed with
little to no rehearsal time. Presenting Bohème in a season offsets the
risks of more challenging fare. This has become the way almost
every opera company operates: leave the classics (or, as they are
often questionably labeled, “war horses”) alone. It may make for
sensible business, but what about Puccini’s opera? (Or Carmen, or La
traviata?) Is Bohème doomed to inadequately rehearsed and
uninvestigated performances? And if a routinized performance
serves as a person’s first experience of opera, won’t they be justified
in reacting like Parsifal to the rote reproduction of ritual?
But upon my appointment as Artistic Director of Detroit Opera in
2020, I had the opportunity to realize the concept two years later—
and the timing was perfect. Because Covid-19 had shut down the
theater for two years, its reopening offered a critical moment of
both return and progress. We had to “come back” to something that
had been missing during the pandemic, but we also had to show that
the “normal” most people were hoping to experience would never
return. For me, the perfect performance analogy for this
circumstance was the reverse-chronology approach.
As word started to spread about this production, several critics
(without having seen it) derided the idea as giving the opera an
audience-friendly “happy end.” Surely the more successful way of
pandering to the audience would be to leave the piece alone, as all
the producers who rejected the concept would attest. Instead, as the
world was emerging from a time of death and destruction, the time
was right to foreground (or start with) death, move against the
stream of time, and remember what it was that makes life worth
living. A singer in the Detroit Opera chorus told me with a quiver in
her voice that the reverse chronology resembled the process of
reconstructing a narrative in trauma therapy. In the wake of the
global trauma of Covid, our Bohème invited the audience to meditate
on memory and the different routes life might take.
Given this new way of experiencing the work, I wanted the rest of
the production not to seem too unfamiliar. From a picture or video
of this Bohème, you might be fooled into thinking it was a
straightforward telling of the opera. The costumes by Jessica Jahn
evoked the story’s original epoch, and John Conklin’s set was simple,
facilitating the opportunity to perform the entire piece without a
break. (Most performances of Bohème run close to three hours
owing to lengthy and elaborate changes of scenery; without those,
the time can be reduced to about 100 minutes.) Naturally, the idea
of transplanting the story to some other time period or place,
making the production visually unique and distancing ourselves
even more radically from Puccini’s original, was seductive. But I
wanted to say that this, too, is Bohème—even in reverse order, this
version has always existed in the opera itself.
“But did it work?” you might ask. Every audience member will
respond differently, yet the numbers at least tell a success story:
over half of the audience members were attending Detroit Opera for
the first time. Opera Philadelphia saw the same statistic when the
production played there a year later.
An aficionado’s familiarity with Puccini was not a privilege in this
case but often a disadvantage; without fail, the attendees who liked
it the least were the ones clinging most to their own preconceptions
and expectations. But opera lovers with an open mind relished the
rare opportunity to feel like they were at Bohème’s world premiere.
In either case, everyone in the audience was on the same level.
There was no privileged perspective; you simply had to be present
with this version as it unfolded.
Every opera performance should strive to achieve a similar kind of
unveiling—not of a grail-like object, but rather of the naked power of
the moment. Opera becomes an embodiment of pure presence, with
artists and audiences partaking in the miracle of a momentary
coordination, an instant that can never be repeated. Or, as composer
John Cage perfectly put it, “Each now is the time, the space.”
If opera can reclaim the spirit of intuition and momentary grace that
music captures, it will be able to dust off its deadening layers of
object-worship and reignite the essence and importance of true
ritual. Then it won’t matter if audiences are young or old, first-
timers or seasoned fans; they will enter a charged space. And
consciously or subconsciously, they will understand.
 2

THE FUTURE IN OUR PAST

The past is an appeal; it is an appeal toward the future which
sometimes can save it only by destroying it.
—SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR ,
Ethics of Ambiguity
If a time-curve lets us visualize opera’s constant rebirth, perhaps a
fitting analogue for its opposite is the childhood game of a domino
rally. This happened to be my favorite activity as a kid: laboriously
setting up a labyrinth of domino after domino in perilous proximity
to each other, forming a daredevil pattern that would spread
throughout our kitchen. After the build-up of excitement, there was
such satisfaction in knocking down the first domino and following
the chain reaction along its serpentine course—hours and hours of
work for a brief moment of ephemeral beauty and the joy of perfect
functioning.
In many ways, directing opera resembles that painstaking
preparation for a fleeting moment of transcendence, when all the
planning functions like clockwork. The curtain going up is the
equivalent of the first domino falling: the production is off and
running and unstoppable, even if any slight miscalculation might
derail it. The most accurate description I’ve ever heard about opera
remains Terry Pratchett’s perspicacious observation that “opera
happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go
wrong.”
The domino rally appears to be a harmless explication of Newton’s
first law of motion, but that long line of dominoes also resembles the
conventional myth of history most of us learned in school.
Textbooks want to portray our past as a linear path where cause-
and-effect moves in one unstoppable motion toward the more
enlightened present. No matter how many philosophers since Hegel
have repudiated this idea of unidirectional progress, guided not by
people with a vested interest in their own dominance but by an
invisible hand, most schools still stand by it: one domino toppling
another, that one another, and that one another, in an elegant, linear
pattern. But once they’ve fallen, you’re left with a dispirited mess,
the ruins of a once beautiful architecture that, like Humpty Dumpty,
can never be put together again. The past becomes a rubble still
bearing the traces of its inevitable, doom-laden design.
The ruins of causality are what the Greek playwright Aeschylus
shows us in beautiful miniature in his trilogy Oresteia—the most
operatic of the ancient tragedies. Its three-part structure, telling a
story of vengeance from one generation to another, illustrates the
bitter truth that violence only begets more violence. The chain
reaction of harm—from Agamemnon’s murder of his daughter
Iphigenia to his wife Clytemnestra’s revenge-murder of Agamemnon
and their son Orestes’s revenge-murder of his mother—is a kind of
domino rally, but the stacking up of actions justified by a past act of
violence never reaches a final blow. Each act takes on more and
more weight from the past, like an ever-lengthening fetter. Only
divine intervention—in the form of Athena, who descends from the
heavens as the classic example of the Greek theatrical concept of
deus ex machina—can stop the violence. The furies of vengeance
become, through a goddess’s command, visions of benevolent
justice.
From the Greeks to the dominoes, nothing would seem more natural
than thinking of our own pasts as enormous burdens of dead
activity that propel us inexorably forward. The most ingenious
equivalent to this experience in opera is the final installment in
Wagner’s four-opera Ring of the Nibelung. In the beginning, Wagner
depicts a world that’s still innocent. Each character or object or idea
is represented by a clear, identifiable musical motif that rings out
like an individual stone in a mosaic. But as murder, incest, rape, acts
of greed, and other heinous events pile onto one another, the motifs
begin to overlap, conflate, conflict, splinter, and reconfigure—the
musical equivalent of a new generation overburdened by its
cataclysmic history and murky memory.
Like the Greeks witnessing Aeschylus’s multipart tragedy, Wagner’s
audience witnesses a compounding corruption that merges with
their own experience of many hours in the theater. Is the music
becoming denser and harder to parse, or is your head just pounding
from listening to so much Wagner night after night? By the final act
of Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), the last opera in the
cycle, the only way out of this dreadful accumulation is complete
destruction, brought about by Brünnhilde, the Athena-like Valkyrie
and favorite daughter of the creator god Wotan. The corruption is so
bad in Wagner’s vision of the world that it’s not enough for
Brünnhilde to simply announce a fresh start of forgiveness: she
needs to immolate herself and the entire world with her. (To solidify
the confusion between fantasy and real life, Wagner originally
suggested that the Ring cycle should conclude with the theater itself
burning down.)
Why, then, should we resist this vision of history, as Wagner and
Aeschylus depict it? Aren’t there ample instances of seemingly
intractable problems—racism, colonialism, partisanship, the climate
crisis—to offer us evidence of how past wrongdoings only
accumulate until we reach a breaking point, until we must worry
that only a violent act of destruction and/or a complete reset can
save us?
I think there are plenty of reasons to fight this narrative—or at least
to weaken the appearance of its inevitability. For one, the illusion of
the deus ex machina has outlasted its metaphoric value to human
culture. Employing a “hard cut” in a cycle of violence is now naïve
and misleading; in the absence of helpful gods and left to our own
devices, we have known traumas to last for centuries. And we see
that forgiveness and reconciliation create a painful, ongoing cycle all
their own. Athena’s appearance becomes the dream of a “quick
fix”—a salvation not only quixotic but potentially harmful, because
the miraculous appearance minimizes the need for individual
human agency. We can no longer leave grace and forgiveness in the
hands of saviors who come to the rescue right when all hope runs
out.
That doesn’t mean we should stop performing the Oresteia,
Götterdämmerung, or any other work enacting last-minute
deliverance. But how we depict those acts of salvation is critical in
creating a bridge of proximity between ancient humanity and our
own. And for every performance of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, where
Apollo descends to put an end to Orpheus’s sad stalemate, I hope a
new opera is performed, which offers audiences another way to
think about individual responsibility in the face of overwhelming
consequences.
But there’s a bigger issue worth challenging, and that is the
assumption that the past is an objective, fixed entity—a burden and
a mess, like the floor of fallen dominoes. History, in this view, is a
massive iceberg, and we are running in place on its slippery peak.
Why does our culture default to this view? In her recent study
Ancient Bones, the German paleontologist Madeleine Böhme claims
that the assumed theory of human life beginning in Africa has been
discredited by the discovery of more ancient human remains in
China and elsewhere. With this new information, the story we have
told about ourselves needs to be rewritten, and our perception of
human history must broaden. In his sprawling 1913 novel In Search
of Lost Time, Marcel Proust’s narrator comments on Baron de
Charlus’s inexplicably strange behavior around him and other young
men. Much later in the story, the narrator peers over a wall to
witness Charlus having sex with another man. His past behavior is
illuminated, and all the narrator’s recollections need to be revised
with present understanding. “My eyes had been opened by a
transformation in Charlus as complete and as immediate as if he had
been touched by a magician’s wand,” he concludes. “Everything that
hitherto had seemed to my mind incoherent became intelligible,
appeared self-evident.” In seismic ways, such as with Böhme’s
discoveries, or in personal ways, like Proust’s reformation of
memories, the constant shaping and reshaping of the past is an
essential part of our growth.
History is not a dead continent—a heap of dominoes—but a living
conversation partner changing alongside us. The past is just as
multidirectional as the paths into the future, and art’s greatest and
most secret power is its ability to make that abstract idea something
sensual and shareable.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
NOT EVERYONE WILL AGREE WITH this understanding of history . . . and
especially not opera lovers.
The art we experience and the narratives we share ultimately
cultivate opposing views on the past: as either open and changeable,
or as closed and observable. Zooming out, we could apply the same
characterizations to conservative worldviews—which idolize
origins as perfect and consider change a degradation; or to
progressive ones—which emphasize mutability, becoming, and the
possibility of a better future by actively transforming the past. In
one case, paradise is irrevocably lost; in the other, paradise is yet to
come.
Opera companies are inclined to consider the works on display as
representatives of a stable view of history. So many self-described
opera lovers tend toward an obsession with bygone composers
whose genius has not been rivaled; the towering singers of some
long-ago “golden age” who (alas!) possessed a greatness we will
never again witness; the glory of a civilization reflected in the
harmoniously ordered gatherings inside a glittering hall, come to
appreciate an unsustainable high point of human achievement.
The progressive view implies that there has never yet been a perfect
opera, nor will there ever be a definitive realization of any single
work. We interpret a work, whether it’s one year or two hundred
years old, and as we respond with our imaginations, we are all the
while modeling what change and revision look like in action. Far
from repudiating the past, we actively tangle with it in the act of
inquiring who we are and where we’ve come from. If we engage
with it in this way, opera can offer immediate proof of how deeply
we need a sense of a past. If opera truly disappeared for good, we
would lose not only cultural memory but an ideal mechanism (along
with live theater) for its constant reinvestigation. Our ability to
consider the past as representation, as a costume that we can don
and remove, allows us to view history from a new perspective.
Today opera is primarily an act of re-creation rather than creation.
Theater has its Shakespeares and ballet its Swan Lakes, but perhaps
no other art form presents so many works distanced from its
audience by well over a century. And every time we re-create, we
make a choice. Those choices can either obliterate considerations of
potential; or, with imagination, they can remind us of memory’s
essential malleability. Just as ideas passed down from previous
generations never stop transforming as society, technology, and
values change, the ideas within an opera never stop changing.
John Adams and Alice Goodman’s Nixon in China offers a perfect
model. What might have been a closed-door view of history in a
ripped-from-the-headlines reenactment instead becomes something
living and ever-changing—and, through the driving repetitions of
the score or the just-irrational-enough imagery in the language,
history becomes a field of parallel paths. (Nixon’s unforgettable
opening aria states it plainly: “News has a kind of mystery.”) Our
attitudes toward its central characters continue to evolve, and
because the authors chose a decidedly poetic and nonnaturalistic
approach to these real personalities, we experience the shifting
relationships to our own history whenever a new baritone and
soprano represent Richard and Pat Nixon. The same can be said of
other historical characters as they are depicted in great operas—
Queen Elizabeth, Malcolm X, Saint Francis of Assisi, Nero, or
Federico García Lorca.
The living art of opera, as long as it’s constantly reinvented, never
stays still. We need to start considering the art form less as a
bulwark and more as a blueprint, suggestions for a realization based
on the inspiration of the interpreters and the exegesis of the
moment. That means it is an entirely open form—open to the flux of
time. And therefore opera, when it reimagines the past, reveals the
past’s reality as incomplete and evolving. Every opera production
should strive toward being this incomplete, this temporary, this
provisional.
There is urgency underlying the restaging of classic works: to keep
an opera fixed in time is to confine it within the narrow cell of what
we already know. We must follow the imperative to truly interpret
these works from our contemporary perspective or risk the cultural
stagnation that accompanies an iceberg view of the past. Historical
accuracy has its place in academia and conservatories, but it should
only function as research for contemporary operatic practice.
Getting the past right is not what matters when we stage an opera;
getting our present moment right as we replay and reinterpret
works is of critical importance. We may be without Athenas and
other descending gods, but art can be the force that makes it
possible to imagine breaking the chain.
“There is only one way to dominate the past, the realm of things that
have perished,” according to the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y
Gasset: “to open our veins and inject some of our blood into the
empty veins of the dead. This is what the reactionary cannot do:
treat the past as a form of life.”
 ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
OPERA IS STILL AN UNEASY fit in America. Like the Pilgrims, opera
started here as a European import imposed upon the land. Centuries
later, it remains a repository for the feelings of inferiority the
upstart colonies needed to jettison like so much English tea. I still
smell a whiff of desperation when I see a regional company perform
an Italian “masterwork” and strain for a sense of authenticity. There
is always a sense of checking one’s reflection in the storefront
window: “Am I doing this well? Do I look the part? Am I emulating
the ethos of this piece convincingly?” Opera became a holdover of
nostalgia for the Old World, and even today, as new art forms
emerge bearing the imprint of our own country’s ethos, new operas
are usually charged with looking and sounding like old ones.
The story of opera in America is far from over, but its future
depends on an evolutionary attitude toward both the art form and
the country’s colonialist origins.
America was founded on genocide and slavery, and ingeniously
indoctrinated generations to believe the country was conceived on
the moral high ground of democracy and human equality. When we
read about Abraham Lincoln signing the Emancipation
Proclamation, a profound moment in the country’s ability to self-
govern, who doesn’t want to shout: “Yes, but how could enslaving
another human on these shores have been accepted for so long?”
And as much as history would like to make that proclamation a
marker of America’s ultimate moral victory over racial inequality,
we know from the subsequent 160 years that the victory was
anything but decisive. That the proclamation preceded by a mere
five days Lincoln’s authorization of the largest mass execution in U.S.
history, of thirty-eight Sioux warriors, betrays this country’s cruel
hypocrisy. Throughout our history, examples of an evolved nature
run neck and neck with continued acts of aggression and delusions
of grandeur, the ever-renewed manifestations of foundational sins.
All Americans are born with blood in our bathwater.
But as pernicious as our past is, does that mean our future has no
chance? Does humanity really have no hope of changing? As in the
Oresteia, we could keep going further and further back, before
national borders existed, to realize there’s always another “original
sin” that we can point to—primal acts of violence, aggression, and
dominance—demanding restitution. There is power in the metaphor
of America as a house built on a rotten foundation, therefore
doomed to collapse. But there’s a rigidity in that line of thinking
that’s a perfect mirror of the rigidity more conservative thinkers
bring to their concept of the past. On both sides of the spectrum, the
past is unchanging—and an unchanging, dead past that our present
moment can’t shape implies no possibility for movement or
improvement.
The year 2020 was one of painful and intense reckoning with how
our past makes present-day living impossible. Confederate statues
began to fall in an effort to open the eyes of every citizen to the
insidious mythologies attempting to control the American narrative.
We heard calls for “W.A.T.” (White American Theater) to listen up;
demands that museums, publishers, and film executives drastically
change their attitude toward inclusion and representation; and a
small but growing resistance to how opportunities are apportioned
in the classical live arts. Some companies opted for a tough-
sounding slogan: “There is no room for racism in opera.” But the
hard truth is: There is so much room for racism in opera! Not to
mention the casual misogyny and cultural xenophobia at the heart of
so many of its plots. By presenting those plots uncritically, without
questioning, addressing, and then revising how complex elements
function within the universe of the work, opera companies have—
wittingly or no—perpetuated a sense that the art form speaks for
and represents an elite class of Americans, the very same people
who have benefited from the cruelty of colonialism, capitalism, and
patriarchy. Here, opera faces exactly the same dilemma as our
country: until that unjust past is truly confronted, and its insidious
tentacles into our present are amputated, we can’t look forward to a
more hopeful future.
But this is where opera has an advantage over something like a
statue. A monument is a cold artifact, embodying the desire of a
particular class to lionize an image of the past. This is what makes
the public markers of Confederate soldiers so disturbing and why
they should be relegated at least to a museum providing context—if
not to a junk heap or, as in Moscow’s Art Park, strewn in a
disturbing and disorganized field of Soviet flotsam. A statue can’t
change, and even the addition of a bronze plaque at the base is a
wimpy apologia for the trauma awoken by the spectral sight,
unmistakable even at a distance, of a person responsible for the
death of your kin.
Operas are not statues, and we must treat them as malleable. Let’s
consider Monostatos’s Act II aria from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s
The Magic Flute (1791). Monostatos, an enslaved Moorish man, lusts
after the sleeping princess Pamina and bemoans the fact that love
will always be denied him “because black is so ugly.” In contrast,
Pamina’s whiteness makes her a paragon of beauty, which drives
him delirious to the point of nearly raping her. Yikes! Don’t touch
this toxic opera with a ten-foot pole! Except that Magic Flute
remains one of the most popular operas of all time. If the other
racist and misogynist slurs in its text can be minimized, this aria’s
offensiveness is impossible to ignore. A contemporary producer
might simply excise it (Mozart is no longer around to complain!).
But if the aria is retained—for fidelity to the original or any such
reason—with nothing done to express a critical viewpoint, its
presence will end up saying much more about the company, the
director, the conductor, and the singer than it does about Mozart.
Integrating a critical standpoint into a production while maintaining
the ambiguous contours of a work of art is an extraordinary
challenge. It takes imagination, insight, and empathy into how a
contemporary audience might grapple with the constellation of
words, music, and image placed before them. Yet nothing less than
that is opera’s charge now. When it is met with enough imagination,
opera can be the most exciting art form in the world; maybe even
the best art form for exploring ideas of our shared humanity.
Here we can identify another of opera’s paradoxes. Because so many
of the “standard repertoire” works are rooted in the past, they could
easily shed more light on our contemporary circumstances than
brand-new works. But only if they are given the chance to do so
through stagings that actively interrogate in both directions, into the
past and toward the future. Otherwise, every time La traviata is
presented uncritically, a misogynist gets his wings. Every time
Monostatos sings his aria in a production that presents it with a kind
of historicist shrug, a white supremacist in the audience feels seen.
It’s shocking how recently it was still deemed acceptable to perform
Verdi’s Otello or Aida in blackface in this country—and productions
of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly still traffic in yellowface and other
stereotypes of Japanese culture that would not be tolerated in any
other art form. Opera has tried to rationalize these gaffes with calls
for understanding the operatic context—and then usually
proceeding with an uninvestigated and out-of-touch production,
setting the case for opera back a century or more in the imagination
of that community.
People suspicious of what I’m saying may think I’m advocating for
revisionist history in the form of radical stagings of classic operas.
Indeed, I do reject “originalism” as it relates both to our national
politics and to the interpretation of classic works, as this may be the
only way to salvage questionable documents (in the case of the U.S.
Constitution) or to make sure the humanist impulse at the heart of
many great operas finds its voice for contemporary society.
Mine is not an outlier position in other cultural fields. In her new
translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Stephanie McCarter advocates
for rethinking the mythic tales in light of contemporary concerns:
If we do not rethink these texts through the lens of the present, they
will cease to have meaning for the present. The inclusion of so many
stories of rape in the epic suggests, in fact, that Ovid felt such
violence was worthy of critical interrogation, just as he shines a light
on the negative repercussions of masculine heroics or divine power
precisely in order to question, not celebrate, them. Not to focus our
reading on the theme of sexual violence, or to quickly explain it
away, is in many ways to miss the point. It is also to miss the
opportunity to trace the legacies of such abusive power in our own
world so as to understand and combat them. To read Ovid with an
eye toward his full complexity—his beauty and his brutality—allows
us to scrutinize our own thorny relationship with the past and with
the ambivalent inheritance we have received from it. To wrestle
with the unsavory aspects of ancient literature is to do the hard
work of self-examination. It is simply easier to talk about love rather
than rape or to focus on ennobling values rather than try to grasp
our own human failings. Yet it is precisely this hard work that Ovid
invites us to do.
The journey of self-examination that McCarter proposes is perhaps
even more accessible to opera than it is to classical literature.
McCarter’s translation will sit on a shelf, exactly as it is, next to many
other translations. Her ideas and choices may ultimately be
superseded by the imperatives of new translators. But in book
format, her work will live on as a reference for as long as books are
read, a product of its time as earlier translations are of theirs. In
contrast, although video documentation is beginning to change the
dynamic around live performance, performances of an opera are
still ultimately ephemeral articulations of a work at a particular
cultural moment. They are not meant to last eternally on a library
shelf—and that, I believe, gives them even more license to be bold.
Just as translators make choices based on their contemporary
standpoint as a way to ensure a connection to the present, every
new production automatically “translates” past ideas for modern
times. In McCarter’s case, her unromanticized view of the many
sexual assaults in Ovid’s stories is essential to forging a link between
our current climate and the inherited psyche of the past.
Imagine if we thought of La traviata that way. We might discover the
aspects of Verdi’s work that were quite the opposite of misogynist.
The opera is ultimately vicious in its attack of bourgeois hypocrisy
and remains as close as Verdi ever came to wearing the badge of
feminism. Great “translations” of these operas prove this to be true,
while unimaginative productions reinforce a patriarchy that Verdi
himself despised.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
WE COME BACK AGAIN TO imagination and what is lost when we
undervalue its function in contemporary opera practice. Without
imagination, the past is a cold landscape of toppled dominoes, and
operas become frozen in time. Rather than enacting a dialogue with
the past, opera becomes a rehashed repetition of what was rather
than what could be, and implicates its audience in an embalming
ritual.
“Past history is fluid, labile, suspended, its sense yet to be fully
determined,” the philosopher Terry Eagleton writes in his book
Hope Without Optimism. “It is we who can endow it retrospectively
with a definitive form, not simply by choosing to read it in a certain
way but by virtue of our actions. . . . We must strive, then, to keep the
past unfinished, refusing to accept its appearance of closure as the
final word, springing it open once again by rewriting its apparent
fatality under the sign of freedom.”
It takes imagination to do what Eagleton suggests: to envision the
past as an open field, and to consider its reenactment onstage as one
of the most powerful exercises of that form of creativity. A
transfigured view of our own past: that is the promise and
possibility contained in any single performance of an opera.
 3

“THE POWER PLANT OF FEELINGS”

SINGING ACTORS AND THEIR EMOTIONS
One of the best opera sightings on the big screen must be the
climactic ending of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1990 film The Godfather
Part III. The ruthless Corleone family gathers in Sicily to attend a
performance of Pietro Mascagni’s opera Cavalleria rusticana (1890).
Mafia godfather Michael Corleone, having first spurned his son
Anthony’s desire to devote his life to music, now revels in his
performance of the opera’s main role, Turiddu. The performance
turns out to be a decisive and definitive finale for an entire saga.
Coppola’s choice of opera couldn’t be more fitting: Mascagni’s work
began a school of thought known as verismo, which strove to capture
reality in the larger-than-life dramas played out in small villages
among everyday people. Likewise, Coppola uses the staged
performance within the film to hold up an operatic mirror to the
lush, bucolic Sicilian landscape he’s shown us earlier in the film. The
sets onstage may be more two-dimensional, but the audience revels
in an authentic-looking reenactment of their social lives just outside
the theater.
Throughout the opera’s performance, Michael is stalked by an
assassin in the lobby. A dramatic polyphony emerges, connecting
Cavalleria rusticana, the assassin’s plot against Michael, and another
assassination attempt by his sister Connie against a traitorous old
family friend sitting in another box (via poisonous cannoli, no less!).
The tension mounts between those narrative strands, and
Mascagni’s music provides the soundtrack.
In the opera, Turiddu is killed offstage in a duel, and his murder is
announced by peasant women screaming—not singing—the
bloodcurdling line “Hanno ammazzato compare Turiddu!” (“They
have killed our neighbor Turiddu!”). For Mascagni’s first audience, a
spoken-screamed line at the climax was a shock, and it still is: it
contributes to the dramatic effectiveness of the moment and creates
a sense of verisimilitude (SEE PLAYLIST ). Coppola cuts between these
lines in the opera and scenes of the family’s ruthless assassinations
beyond the opera house. All remaining traitors to the family are cut
down one by one in scenes that constitute an important
contrapuntal line in Coppola’s final fugue. Ordering killings from
afar keeps Michael’s hands clean of blood—just as the offstage death
of Turiddu spares him the agonizing sight of watching an enactment
of his son’s death.
After the opera finishes, as the family is leaving the theater, the
poised assassin finally opens fire. But instead of hitting Michael, his
bullet strikes Michael’s beloved daughter Maria. Spared witnessing
one child’s make-believe death onstage, Michael is now confronted
with another child’s real death on the steps outside the opera house.
The scene’s parallels to the opera border on the farcical: as Maria
lies dying, we hear someone scream off in the distance, “Hanno
ammazzato Signora Maria!” And Connie covers her head in a black
veil, the exact same gesture the soprano made on the operatic stage
on hearing of Turiddu’s death. Underpinning the scene, the
sweeping, cinematic music of Mascagni’s “Intermezzo” pulls at our
heartstrings.
What is Coppola trying to say at the end of his masterful family saga
by drawing these parallels with Cavalleria rusticana? Is the operatic
scale of Corleone family life a cause for critique? Or is the final scene
a gesture toward myth? Could a proper epic sweep of the Italian
American experience really be complete without opera? Could
Coppola be highlighting the artifice of his own film? (In addition to
the operatic parallel, a massacre staged on theater steps offers a
clear nod to the “Odessa Steps” sequence in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925
film Battleship Potemkin—a scene referenced even more obviously
in the climactic scene of The Godfather Part I.)
Yet the crucial moment is yet to come.
One by one, with the suspense mounting, the various characters
look toward Michael, expectant and astonished at his reaction. When
Coppola finally turns the camera to him, we see Michael Corleone as
we have never seen him before: mouth gaping open, in a complete
state of shock. Al Pacino’s performance at this moment provides an
iconic expression of unbearable agony. At first there’s no sound
other than Mascagni’s music—until finally, without his face or
mouth changing at all, a scream emerges. A primal vocal wail,
singular in the entire trilogy, that rightly deserves to be called
operatic. The film ends minutes later, with a silent, broken Michael
dying alone, his only companion a small, confused dog.
The ending can feel unsatisfying and abrupt. How can Coppola end
his family saga here, with so many narrative strands left
unresolved? Yet even if the rest of Part III is less consistently
spectacular than the first two parts, ending the trilogy with
Michael’s heartrending cry was an ingenious, devastating choice.
Throughout the films, we’ve watched a character unable to express
emotions other than violent anger—he frequently and literally shuts
doors on all his feelings. Now, facing the devastating loss of his
daughter, he opens his heart for a true howl to pour out. It’s not only
shattering, it’s definitive. His cry releases everything that has been
pent up since the first film. The totality is overwhelming and
transcends the moment: he bewails the devastating consequences of
all his life’s actions. What could Coppola show after that? There’s
truly nothing more we need to know.
Naturally, it’s possible that watching an opera moments before his
emotional outburst is exactly what put Michael in touch with his
feelings—his scream replicating the more musical final cry of the
soprano at the end of Cavalleria. That possibility likely smacks of the
kind of elite self-importance that turns so many people off about
opera (the subject of Chapter Seven). Opera doesn’t have a
monopoly on the passions, and yet there’s something true about the
juxtaposition of these two fictional circumstances. Emotions are
confusing, and language’s ability to communicate them is
notoriously incomplete. Still: the biggest emotions call us to share
them despite that disadvantage. If spoken language alone can’t
convey what we’re feeling, maybe opera’s mix of languages—
musical, textual, visual—can give a more multidimensional picture
of our interior lives.
The German philosopher Alexander Kluge famously called opera
“the power plant of feelings,” and perhaps no other art form offers
the same opportunity of releasing and sharing emotions—complex,
powerful, and elemental ones. Certainly no other art form allows
them to appear as confusing as they are.
But talking about emotions in opera is tricky. There’s the danger of
explaining away the experience that every operagoer longs for: the
moment a performance grips you, overwhelming you with an
emotional connection. Words will never be able to capture that
magical moment.
We also know how easily emotions can be manipulated by other
media. A less inspired director than Coppola will use music to tell
the audience what to feel. And outside the cinema, there’s hardly a
moment in our day when some commercial or political force isn’t
trying to grab our attention and trigger feelings, through social
network posts, news outlets, or advertisements—which are
impossible without music. Controlling our emotions becomes the
easiest way to start controlling our minds and, invariably, nudging
us to open our wallets. Surrounded by ceaseless attempts at
emotional exploitation, opera can exist in our contemporary media
landscape as resistance to all of that. Although the stereotypical
depiction of opera revels in one-note, over-the-top emotions, the
best operas honor and hone our emotional intelligence. We come
back to them again and again for the subtle and complex
expressions that change and evolve as we ourselves change and
evolve.
But the main reason it’s difficult to talk about how emotions work in
opera is because, contrary to popular opinion, the emotions don’t
actually live in the music. Although this may sound surprising, think
about it: the music is ultimately only notes on a page, a set of
guidelines whose only validity is in performance. The score is a
suggestion—and the genius of great composers is not their ability to
“capture emotions” or “convey deep ideas.” Instead, musical
geniuses astonish us through their prowess at setting up the
(sometimes unexpected) rules for performers to bring emotions and
ideas to life.
Music only exists when it is performed and activated—and so the
emotional life of an opera only lives through its interpreters, first
and foremost the singers. There are obviously more interpreters
involved—instrumentalists, dancers, conductors, and of course
directors. But it’s ultimately up to the singers to realize the promise
of words and music on paper. And when an emotional connection is
forged, it’s carried and realized by the singing human onstage.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
“THERE IS SOMETHING VERY FREEING about hearing a song sung in a
language that you don’t understand,” Bob Dylan observes in his
book The Philosophy of Modern Song. “Go and see an opera and the
drama leaps off the stage even if you don’t understand a word.”
When the language is obscure, feeling becomes the mode of
connection: “Sometimes you can hear a song so full of emotion that
you feel your heart ready to burst and when you ask someone to
translate it the lyrics are as mundane as ‘I cannot find my hat.’ ”
When I first read this, I instantly thought of Mozart’s The Marriage of
Figaro (1786), whose final act begins with a minor character singing
about a lost pin. On the page, the text by Lorenzo Da Ponte looks
innocuous and forgettable: “I have lost it, unhappy me! / Who knows
where it can be? / I cannot find it, I have lost it! / And my cousin, and
my Lord . . . / What will he say?” Judging purely from the libretto,
you might expect music that comedically mimics the character’s
hectic search for the lost item. But what Mozart wrote to these
words is a heartbreaking and mournful melody, the saddest music in
an otherwise sunny opera (SEE PLAYLIST ). If you heard the aria out of
context (without knowing the words), you might think it was from
Mozart’s Requiem rather than from his most famous comedy. The
music’s deep feeling catches an audience by surprise every time the
opera is performed.
An excess of feeling beyond the libretto is something that happens
over and over in Marriage of Figaro. In a duet from Act III, for
example, two sopranos are composing a letter: one is the wife of a
cheating count, and the other a young servant girl, Susanna, who is
the object of the count’s affection. Their joint letter is a plot, part of
an elaborate scheme to ensnare the count and expose his unseemly
behavior. Like the text of the song to the lost pin, the words here are
simple, even perfunctory: “ ‘A gentle breeze will blow through the
pines this evening’—he’ll understand what this means!” Mozart
could have set them in a way that underlined the comedy,
exaggerating the phony seduction and playing for laughs. He could
also have chosen to simply dispatch these lines in dry recitative. Or
he might have highlighted the difference between the noble
countess and the lower-class Susanna, setting their voices apart
with an unmistakable dividing line. Instead, Mozart wrote a
cascading melody that sounds deeply heartfelt (SEE PLAYLIST ). The
two vocal lines circle around each other, creating an enduring image
of friendship and equality between two women of different social
experience. It’s the music that transforms this simple moment into
something complex and magical, much larger than the words or the
dramatic situation they imply.
This duet has its own cinematic cameo, in a famous scene from the
1994 film The Shawshank Redemption. An inmate in a soul-crushing
prison broadcasts a recording of the duet, which makes every
prisoner stop and take notice. Then a voice-over takes a page
straight out of Bob Dylan: “I have no idea to this day what those two
Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know.
Some things are best left unsaid. I’d like to think they were singing
about something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words and
makes your heart ache because of it.” (I’m glad I’m not the guy trying
to explain to these inmates what they are actually singing about!)
But in some urban settings, broadcasting opera has had a very
different effect. At 7-Eleven convenience stores around the country,
opera blares loudly through speakers to keep unhoused people from
loitering outside. The owner of a 7-Eleven in Austin, Texas, told a
local television reporter that he’d selected the music because
“studies have shown that opera is annoying.” The reporter also got a
reaction from an unhoused woman, who called the music
“absolutely obnoxious” and “a total nightmare.”
These two examples offer us a mechanism for distinguishing two
visions of opera’s emotional impact: either expressing a feeling that
can stop hardened prisoners in their tracks, beyond any literal
comprehension; or making sounds that can be weaponized for
maximum irritation.
I stumbled on a 7-Eleven in downtown Chicago deploying operatic
selections in this antagonistic way—and it should come as no
surprise that Mozart’s sweet-sounding duet was not one of them.
Instead, the “repertoire” featured arias depicting rage, despair,
agony, or death, all sung at maximum volume by big-voiced tenors.
Even I was repelled by the excess noise, since the music represented
opera’s most simplistic displays of emotions. I couldn’t recognize
which pieces were being played, but I certainly recognized the type:
athletic showcases of a singer’s power and volume, portraying a
basic, primary color of emotional life. Excessive scale superseded
any subtlety or complexity. No wonder there was no one loitering
around the store—I couldn’t wait to get away myself.
This, too, is opera: the over-the-top emotions and one-dimensional
characters with a paint-by-numbers approach to inner life. It’s a
commonplace cliché that is sadly corroborated by plenty of
examples in the operatic literature.
It may seem strange to blame music for anything, but with the
advent of arias, opera took a turn toward a codification of emotions.
In his essay Metaphysical Song, musicologist Gary Tomlinson argues
that the aria—as an emotive moment that halts the drama—
encouraged audiences to narrow their focus down to a single
emotion at a time. Before then, in the early operas of Monteverdi’s
time, the less melodically fixed style of recitative contained a
spectrum of emotions within a few lines. But as arias developed as
an operatic convention in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries, they created what Tomlinson calls “a lexicon of stable
patterns” that mirrored the broader philosophical trends of the
time. “Such codes answered the need, in the new representative
order, for predictable patterns of signification. They are a musico-
dramatic exercise in Cartesian habituation.”
This development followed the Baroque-era aesthetic theory known
as the “doctrine of passions,” which maintained that an artwork’s
emotional composition could be coded in visual and aural signs. In
his 1649 treatise The Passions of the Soul, the philosopher René
Descartes categorized the six basic “passions” as wonder, love,
hatred, desire, joy, and sorrow—offering opera composers a kind of
checklist for what a well-rounded work must include. Even before
the first words of an aria were sung, an orchestral introduction
signaled to the audience which passion was in the spotlight. For a
while, the unruly art form of opera became much easier to decipher
and categorize, with set-piece arias conforming to recognizable
tropes.
Take the example of the “rage aria”: a furious orchestral
introduction at a fast clip was often the only sign the audience
would need to expect a character to unleash a torrent of wrath.
Listen to the Act I aria “Non tremar, vassallo indegno” from Venetian
composer Antonio Caldara’s last opera, Temistocle (1736) (SEE
PLAYLIST ). Although little known today, Caldara was fiendishly
prolific in his lifetime, with an astonishing eighty-five stage works to
his credit and a rich catalogue of cantatas and sacred music. Some
claim that his death at age sixty-six was due in part to sheer
exhaustion: in the last twenty years of his life, he served as Vice-
Kapellmeister to the Imperial Court in Vienna, a demanding position
that required the constant creation of new compositions for the
music-hungry emperor Charles VI. The operas written in that period
betray a composer working under a serious time crunch; the more
intricate musical textures of his early works started thinning out, as
inspiration gave way to a craftsmanship that favored just getting it
done. To churn out so many new works quickly, Caldara let a cookie-
cutter approach to emotional development suffice.
The rage aria from Temistocle, sung by the Persian king Xerxes as he
admonishes a disloyal confidant, offers a perfect example. With
ample opportunities for dazzling vocal fireworks, a riveting
performance (like the one in this recording by countertenor Philippe
Jaroussky and conductor Emmanuelle Haim) can make Caldara’s
well-crafted music an exciting listen. But it’s hard to imagine the aria
doing much more than checking the “rage” box in the opera recipe.
The scene may work well on a recording, but as part of a drama, isn’t
the reduction to a single color bound to make this character feel
stagnant onstage? What is there for a singer to portray beyond the
roulades of straight-up anger?
Compare Caldara’s with the most famous rage aria of all time: the
Queen of the Night’s Act II showstopper from The Magic Flute,
known as “Der Hölle Rache” (SEE PLAYLIST ). In its first section, the
aria, which depicts a hell-raising mother trying to convince her
abducted daughter to murder her captor, seems as emotionally
straightforward as Caldara’s. Its perilous, almost freakish vocal
acrobatics require machine-like precision, and it never fails to make
an audience hold their collective breath. But the queen continues in
unexpected ways. From four furious high F’s, her next lines drop to a
middle register, and leaving behind the wild leaps of the opening,
she steadily sings about what will happen if her daughter fails to
listen: “You’ll be forever disowned and abandoned, and all the bonds
of nature will be destroyed if the villain does not perish by your
hand.” The music briefly becomes more predictable, with the same
vocal pattern repeating in ways that convey a character in absolute
control. This cool-headed development can seem inconsistent with
the nightmarish vision that arrested our attention just seconds
earlier—but that’s precisely why the audience continues to listen
with fascination. Where a lesser composer would have stayed in the
heat of the moment, Mozart shifts to complicate the emotional
temperature.
But the aria isn’t done shifting, and my favorite part comes next: the
queen repeats the phrase “all the bonds of nature” in a covered,
mysterious voice, once again sliding up and down her vocal range to
trace an elliptical shape. Something has changed for her at the start
of this run, but Mozart doesn’t explicitly state what that is. Is she
trying a new tactic with her daughter—say, maybe, hypnosis? Is she
perhaps experiencing a brief moment of remorse? Or is she trying to
scare her daughter with the vivid portrayal of a future vision, one
haunted by her desolation and dejection? Whatever is happening in
this section, the queen is clearly undergoing a change. She repeats
her earlier “freakish” line but in a darker, more measured way,
several steps lower and in a much quieter tone. She closes the aria
with a final gaze to the heavens: “Hear me, hear me, hear me, you
gods of vengeance! Hear this mother’s oath!” Even here, in what
could have been a straightforward conclusion, Mozart throws in a
surprise. The three calls of “hear me” trick the listener into
anticipating a stepwise ratcheting up of her intensity, but the last
iteration jumps unexpectedly into a kind of hyper-drive. In his book
Opera and the Enlightenment, musicologist Thomas Bauman
describes this moment as Mozart’s “masterstroke of
transformation,” since the listener “is led by musical logic to expect,
after D and F, A. But the Queen sings a terrifying B♭ instead.” What
some might have considered a mistake against the mathematical
conventions of composition becomes an unforgettable expression of
a character’s emotional truth.
Within three minutes and without ever straying from the
recognizable contours of the rage aria, Mozart offers the singer
depicting the Queen of the Night at least four major color shifts to
explore. And the most gifted singers can bring out even more (on my
playlist, the excellent singing actor Diana Damrau shapes each line
with a fresh idea). While Caldara contented himself with the
depiction of one stable emotion in his rage aria, Mozart
demonstrates the real emotional potential of opera as something
unpredictable, messy, and complex. Above all, Mozart shows his
characters changing.
Opera does poorly when it presents the world as unambiguous and
explicit—especially in the turbulent world of “the passions.” The art
form at its best constantly reveals human nature to be what it is:
complicated, sometimes contradictory, and anything but
straightforward. That’s why “primary color” arias blaring through 7-
Eleven speakers seem so absurd (and, for the uninitiated, “a total
nightmare”). They paint our feelings as easy and one-dimensional,
when any human knows first-hand that the opposite is true. Our
emotions are never as clear-cut as Caldara; they’re always as
mercurial as Mozart.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
WHATEVER INTERIORITY THE COMPOSER or librettist or director may
have imagined for a particular moment, if the singers can’t
adequately communicate the idea, it will be as if the score itself
doesn’t work. Composers, librettists, directors, and conductors can
only ever point at the truth of a moment; the singers put themselves
out there to channel and embody that truth.
Consider the farewell soliloquy for the character Ottavia in
Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea (1643), a brief monologue
that begins, “Addio Roma” (SEE PLAYLIST ). Queen Ottavia is married
to the cruel and unfaithful emperor Nero, who openly flaunts his
love of Poppea and wishes to make her his new queen. Over the
course of the opera, Ottavia attempts to outwit her husband, his
lover, and a whole court of “yes men” who uphold the status quo.
She even goes so far as to order a hit on Poppea’s life. When that plot
fails, Nero gets the “out” from his marriage that he’s been looking
for; he now has recourse for banishing Ottavia and marrying his true
love.
As the heartbroken queen prepares to leave her beloved homeland,
she sings, “Farewell, Rome . . . farewell, country. . . . My friends . . . my
friends, farewell!” The opening of this aria is unforgettable, as
Ottavia struggles to articulate her first word. “Addio” begins to
fragment, as the first syllable repeats: “A . . . A . . . A . . .” Language is
opened up and almost abandoned as pure sound is mined for its
expressive possibility. But nothing in the score indicates how this
moment should be played. Rather than informing us what the
character is thinking, the orchestra simply plays in unison with
Ottavia’s singing, creating a disturbed silence before and after each
fragment of sound. If you compare recordings, you’ll notice that
some singers stretch these “A”s out almost like groans, while others
perform it staccato in a series of sharp, painful jabs. Whether her
stuttering represents Ottavia’s last burst of futile rage, or the shock
of realizing that she is leaving her home forever, or the mournful
pangs of a heart already feeling nostalgia, the singer brings the true
emotional character to this scene—and Monteverdi wrote a score
that allows the music to bend in response to the choices she makes.
Such humility on Monteverdi’s part indicates an unusual recognition
that his music is primarily there to be interpreted. If you judged the
role of Ottavia based purely on the written score, she may not seem
a particularly exciting character to sing: the vocal range is limited,
and the music seems closer to the dialogue of a play rather than the
big melodies that show off what a voice can do. But Monteverdi
wrote the role for the soprano Anna Renzi, arguably the most
famous operatic performer of her time and renowned for her acting
ability. The minimal intrusiveness of the score must have emerged
from the trust Monteverdi placed in Renzi; spareness of instruction,
ornamentation, and orchestral flourishes indicate how well he knew
that his music would benefit from giving her license. When a
performer recognizes the dramatic potential of this role and realizes
how much interpretive responsibility she carries, she will quickly
discover a liberating sense of possibility. She can make Ottavia her
own in a way that’s not afforded to other operatic characters, where
the composer’s score dictates every nuance.
Ottavia’s aria features another ingenious meta-insight into the
emotional potential of opera. As her farewell continues, she
concedes, “Ah, blasphemous sorrow: you forbid my tears as I leave
my country! I must not shed a tear while bidding kin and city
farewell.” The queen can’t cry. And neither can the singer, mostly
because she is required to keep singing. Unlike Al Pacino as Michael
Corleone wailing at the loss of his daughter, opera singers can’t
abandon themselves to their emotions; they must transmute their
emotions into the music. Even with the maximally flexible emotional
life Monteverdi allows Ottavia, she must sing on—and so the
performer must strike a seemingly impossible balance between
restraint and freedom to bring a character convincingly to life.
Another scene of exiled farewell illustrates this point perfectly. In
Verdi’s Aida (1871), the title character is an enslaved princess from
Ethiopia who, despite herself, is in love with her Egyptian captor. In
Act III, she sits by the Nile River and imagines drowning herself,
even if suicide means the death of her dream of returning home.
Like Ottavia, Aida repeats a phrase obsessively throughout the aria:
“Mai più,” or “never again”—as in “Oh, my country, I will never see
you again” (SEE PLAYLIST ). In an opera otherwise characterized by
bombast and excess, the subtlety of this aria is affecting; it’s often
the first moment in an Aida performance of authentic emotion.
You could hardly imagine a performance that captures this moment
more profoundly than the American soprano Leontyne Price’s final
Aida at the Metropolitan Opera in 1985. One of the greatest Verdian
sopranos of her time, Price considered Aida her operatic legacy; she
brought soulfulness and interiority to a character often portrayed
with the two-dimensionality of an Egyptian hieroglyph. “My skin
was my costume,” she avowed in an interview she gave in 2008 on
receiving the National Endowment for the Arts’ Opera Honor for
lifetime achievement. “I was allowed freedoms with her, because she
was—and still is very much—me.” Price found deep satisfaction in
“finally being able to express—not just vocally—that she is a
princess, never a slave.” A video capturing her farewell performance
is most affecting during Aida’s Act III aria. After singing with
exquisite beauty, she finishes the final phrase and looks up to the
rafters. The audience showers her with adulation while she stands
stoically—everyone present, including the singer, knows they will
never experience a moment like this again.
The applause, naturally, goes on for quite a while, and the camera
lingers on an intense, almost intrusive close-up of Price’s face. The
expectation of an emotional dam bursting and overcoming her is
palpable. Yet her stare is resolute; she will not break character or
cave to the pressure of acknowledging the thunderous applause. She
remains committed to her role. She must also be thinking about how
much more singing lies ahead: before she leaves the stage, she still
has two demanding duets to perform. She can’t abandon herself to
what she is feeling without sacrificing her best possible
performance. But as the applause shows no sign of letting up, her
face begins to quiver as she fights to stay in control, and it’s hard not
to think of this moment as a real-life version of Ottavia’s “A . . . A . . .
A . . . Addio”; she must not cry. Ultimately, Price prevails over her
emotions.
Try watching this excerpt, available on YouTube; if the performance
itself doesn’t bring you to tears, witnessing a master’s self-command
pushed to the limit surely will. No wonder the Metropolitan Opera
considers it, according to their website, “one of the most emotional
evenings in the Met’s history.”
Describing Leontyne Price’s voice as beautiful is easy. But what
makes her voice beautiful for me is that it carries the imprint of her
inner world. She trained her instrument to speak to a vast range of
human experience. When she is portraying a character, Price uses
every note and every word to deliver an intense interiority. Only
when a singer shows that level of dedication to her own inner life—
and the inner life of the music and her character—can a voice be
considered beautiful. That beauty is where the emotional life of a
character, a music score, or an opera ultimately resides.
It’s a very special type of performer who can first master the
techniques of classical singing and then successfully communicate
the inner life of a theatrical character. On one hand, musical
interpreters must “stick to the script,” adhering to instructions with
an exactitude that always threatens to turn music-making into a
tyrannical experience; and on the other hand, their expression must
never feel rehearsed, flowing as naturally and as truthfully to them
as possible. But only after becoming adept at musical execution can
a personal, subjective honesty in singers or instrumentalists emerge.
Too much subjectivity and the performance devolves into vanity;
but too much obedience and all you get is lifelessness. The
excitement in theater comes from the paradoxical tension between
discipline and individuality that gives a performance its soul.
That’s why calling these extraordinary beings merely singers can’t
convey the full breadth required of them. The designation prioritizes
the initial and ongoing process of musical training over all the other
interpretive techniques they will also have to master to be
successful. It’s like continuing to call a scientist a researcher after
they’ve won the Nobel Prize. If you are performing in an opera, it’s a
given that you are a well-trained singer; it’s that next level of
artistry, including but transcending the singing, that makes a great
performer. For those who want to remain singers but consider
acting, dancing, literary analysis, and a collaborative process with
other artists somehow secondary, there are more than enough
opportunities in concert halls.
If singer feels too narrowly focused, artist surely isn’t specific
enough, since the art form involves numerous different types of
artists.
I like the designation singing actor. It may be the best way to
understand the singular talent required to truly make an opera
work. And it also recognizes acting as a fundamental aspect of the
performer’s responsibility, not always a given in the field of opera. A
2015 post on the blog TalkClassical.com poses the question “Should
we expect opera singers to act?” One commentator drew virtual
cheers from readers for responding, “Put on a costume, sing your
heart out. That’s my ideal opera performance.”
For many people, acting implies the same naturalism we find in
most plays and films. Performances influenced by the teachings of
Konstantin Stanislavski and Lee Strasberg aim to reflect a reality the
spectator can recognize. This is becoming an expectation of opera
singers as well. But operas create their own universes with unique,
not necessarily recognizable logic for sound, space, and time. Opera
is unnatural but, paradoxically, emotionally authentic. Performers
are called to discover a singular way to convey something essential
and true in an environment that’s essentially untrue. And since the
singing actor moves in a transfigured space, where everything is
magnified to an awe-inspiring scale, acting means something quite
different for them than it does for Al Pacino playing Michael
Corleone.
When audiences complain about “bad acting” in an opera, they will
often cite the cliché of the singing actor’s gestures. But no gesture in
opera is inherently outdated. The issue is not the way a performer
manipulates his hands in a gesture that has been disparagingly
called the “baritone claw” (a wrathful, demonic, Shakespearean
cupping of his hand), but rather the fact that the baritone may be
leaning on a well-established gesture as a shortcut to his own
authentic internalization. The same gesture, when emerging from a
grounded performer, can be a riveting expression of his inner
experience. The clichéd gesture is not the problem; it’s the all-too-
often occurrence of that externalization standing in for “acting” that
makes for an unsatisfying performance. Whether in gesture,
presence, or facial expression, the acting part of the singing actor’s
craft is fundamentally about internalization. Everything else is
contingent on the universe the opera is trying to conjure.
We can find a powerful analogue in a non-Western performance
style: the ritualistic theater from Japan known as Noh. Invented
more than 200 years before Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, Noh began from
an entertainment known as sarugaku, a form of musical
performance involving dancing, acrobatics, and other tricks.
Troupes adept at sarugaku began to integrate narrative elements
into their performances, and a new kind of musical theater emerged
as its own genre. Zeami Motokiyo, the playwright and actor who’s
considered the “father” of Noh theater, defined an actor as a
performer who could show internalization. Zeami considered this
ability both a spiritual and natural process, akin to a flower budding,
blossoming, and then withering. In his treatise “Mirror Held to the
Flower,” he gives actors a famous instruction: “When you feel ten in
your heart, express seven in your movements.” It’s quite a different
approach from naturalism, which demands that ten in your heart
finds an expression of ten in your movements. But for Zeami, “A
truly great artist has for many years succeeded in training both his
body and his spirit; he can hold back much of his potential in reserve
and perform in an easy fashion, so that only seven-tenths of his art is
visible.”
Zeami’s approach to acting is perfect for opera, as Leontyne Price
proves in her final Aida: it’s undeniable that her heart is swelling at
the maximum level (ten), but her ability to hold back not only
allowed her to perform with total control; it also allowed us, the
spectators, to perceive the character Aida and reflect on a deeper
meaning. The same phenomenon makes someone holding back tears
much more emotional than if they were actually crying. As a well-
known acting adage has it, “If the actor cries, the audience won’t.”
The “singing actor” label also conveys an ethos of collaboration.
Singers may stand alone on a concert stage, with a piano or
accompanying instrument, and call all the shots. But the singing
actor never stands alone, and even in a solo aria they never perform
in isolation. The cliché of singers as divas who demand that
everything adapt to them has become an outdated phenomenon.
Singing actors, like every other artist involved in opera, must
navigate a space between what they offer as individuals and what
the work as a whole needs. (I’ll talk more about opera’s ludicrous-
seeming spirit of collaboration in the final chapter.) Every aspect of
their performance must harmonize with the work of their fellow
singing actors and the two primary leaders of the performance, the
director and the conductor. This situation must sometimes feel like
Odysseus navigating Charybdis and Scylla, trying to locate an
impossible middle passage between a whirlpool and a monster.
Surely the different imperatives of the director and the conductor
can make for a very narrow needle’s eye for a singer to thread, as
the leaders’ instructions may sometimes conflict. When directors
and conductors fail to model a mutual respect for each other’s ideas,
the singing actors are the ones caught in the crossfire. It is they, after
all, who must appear onstage to carry the interpretations of both
alongside their own.
An essential part of a singing actor’s training is the practice of
accessing and expressing their emotions. Most singers just starting
out play the emotion (“I’m sad”), which will almost certainly result
in a purely external performance. Although some remarkable
performers can pull this off, especially when coupled with an
amazing voice, the result is unlikely to transcend the superficial.
Directors can help these young novices by asking them to play an
activity rather than an emotion. Singers engaged in an activity (“I’m
digging my beloved’s grave”) will have something to do, which can
often keep them from focusing on the emotion; and even if this may
bring the danger of “telegraphing” an emotion rather than properly
communicating it, such a focus can help guide them to what’s really
demanded of them.
The most skilled singing actors do not play the emotion and do not
need activity, because they can find action in every moment. Action
may or may not have an activity related to it (“I’m seeing before my
eyes the memory of my lost love”), but it will trigger a
communicability that keeps the relevant idea alive. Within one aria,
the more that internal action changes, the more alive the
performance will be. The most effective singing actors have long left
behind emotions in favor of action-oriented interiority.
Expert singing actors also know how to harness the excitement of
emotional contrast, even contradiction. A novice singing actor will
no doubt want to begin with the straightforward emotional idea of
an aria: in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Masetto and Zerlina are joyous
when they sing their first duet, and Donna Elvira is indignant when
she warns Zerlina of Don Giovanni’s roving eye. Sticking with the
one idea of joy or indignation takes us back to the paint-by-numbers
approach of Temistocle, where the human psyche is portrayed
simplistically.
Musicologists have dubbed such direct illustration of music “Mickey
Mousing,” a perfect pejorative for the unambiguous merging of sight
and sound. When singing actors embrace in a passionate kiss exactly
at the moment of a huge orchestral climax, the result is almost
laughably one-dimensional. Although avoiding Mickey Mousing is a
large part of a director’s responsibility, the task also falls to the
individual singing actor. The great ones understand how to add
complexity to even the most straightforward musical moments,
injecting dramatic heft into a scene. In his joy at being with Zerlina,
an excellent Masetto can also find moments in his first duet with her
to portray the jealousy and hot-headedness that characterize him
throughout the opera. And even as she is indignant, a great Donna
Elvira will know exactly where she can struggle with her ongoing
love for Don Giovanni.
(We can look once again to the Noh theater of Zeami, who wrote in
his acting treatise “Style and the Flower”: “When an actor plans to
express the emotion of anger, he must not fail to retain a tender
heart. On the other hand, in a performance requiring Grace, an actor
must not forget to remain strong.”)
The real beauty of opera is that there can be no single correct
interpretation; there should be as many different characterizations
of Donna Elvira as there are humans alive to sing them. The
emotional life of the music will only speak when the singing actor
finds their unique internalized expression. I hesitated to discuss
Leontyne Price in this chapter because I didn’t want to fuel the
familiar wail of opera fans who love to lament the loss of an
imagined golden age of singing: “No one sings like that anymore!”
Not only is that kind of moaning tedious, it’s also unhelpful in
forging a path toward a more vibrant future for opera. I don’t want
performers in Price’s wake singing like her; they should sing and
perform only as themselves. The greatest performers today will
continually open up the field of the possible rather than aspire to
past standards. And while some claim that an increased attention to
theatrical aspects minimizes the primacy of the singing voice, I see
instead a wealth of new expressive possibilities as we set new
benchmarks for today’s and tomorrow’s singing actors.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT roles I play as a director is as an
inspiration and support for the singing actor on their process of self-
discovery. I would therefore feel remiss in only talking about singers
without creating space for them to speak for themselves.
Of the many amazing artists I’ve been lucky enough to work with,
I’ve selected three who embody what it means to be a singing actor.
I asked them about their process, how they handle the big emotions
of their characters, and how they were able to unlock their unique
voice. Each one has carved or is carving out a singular path that
matches her particular qualities (you will never see these three
women competing for the same role!). Opera is no doubt richer for
being able to sustain individuals with such distinct forms of artistry.
Paula Murrihy is a mezzo-soprano with whom I worked at the Santa
Fe Opera for my 2023 production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. Paula
played the Messenger, who brings Orpheus the news that Eurydice
has died. In what is certainly the emotional high point of the opera,
the Messenger sets the scene in loving detail, in a way that shows
how much the death of her friend affects her.
“Words are always so central to me—sometimes to my vocal
detriment,” Murrihy humbly admitted to me during a rehearsal
break. I had to ask why she thought that way, since I’d never seen
her musical skill suffer from the intense emotional life she brought
to the Messenger’s heartbreaking words. “Sometimes I feel in bigger,
grander opera, or on a larger scale, I’m thinking too much about the
clarity of the word. But actually, I don’t regret it—because the
power of the word brings you to the heart of the matter. I always
start with the text—sitting down, writing out the text, and working
with a language coach before I go to the music. I put words ahead of
the tone, so the thought goes first. The thought, of course, is also the
emotion. So from the words, I can start to consider: What causes the
character to say this? Where is she right now? Where are the color
changes? Before the collaborative aspects start shaping my view, I
get to form my own scena in my head—developing the background,
with lots of images, engaging my own imagination. I start by
becoming a director in my own head.”

Radical empathy: Paula Murrihy as La Messaggera in L’Orfeo at Santa Fe Opera

(2023).
Paula’s care for the words explains why she creates such an
indelible presence in the work of Monteverdi, where the flow of the
music closely follows the natural cadences of the Italian poetry. “I
like to think of the orchestra as the river of my thoughts,” she said,
“and I look to articulate that ebb and flow.”
I wondered whether the music might demand a specific kind of
acting style, perhaps different from other operas, where the big
sweeping melody takes precedence over the language. Paula didn’t
think so, although she acknowledged that “if you are inherently
open to how a musical style is realized, your body, your gesture,
your gaze all react in a different way.” She lets the director in her
head take a backseat as the style develops collaboratively with the
director and her fellow artists onstage. “In a very strange way, I
don’t enjoy being a soloist; I love the team element and how many
people it takes to make an opera happen. From the porter who
greets you on your way in to the building to the gentleman at the
cafeteria, who has likely forgotten more opera than I’ll ever learn.
We singers do not exist in a vacuum; we are informed by the team
around us.
“I feel fortunate when I think about how I came into acting in the
first place: I started in folk theater as a member of the National Folk
Theatre of Ireland from the age of eight. Looking back now, I think
that folk theater at its heart is about telling the story of people and
re-creating the story of our heritage—and I think that little seed has
somehow informed me throughout. Especially when I consider the
link between folk music and Baroque music: there is a directness, a
vulnerability, and a truth when you are telling these stories.
“Finding the balance between the structure of the music and the
directness of the emotions is always a journey,” she said. “But I think
you have to be honest above everything. My teacher Patricia Mislan
always talked about the search for truth in the music. Patricia was
about ‘the inner rhythm’—not an accurate rhythm but a vitality, the
life of the note, the life of the word, the life of the music. I think that
aspect is too crucial. Whether they know it or not, people react to
honesty; they sense when someone is in the moment, giving
something that is them . . . in all their imperfection.”
The second singer I want to introduce is the soprano Whitney
Morrison. I had the chance to work with Whitney at the Lyric Opera
of Chicago on an unusual project called Proximity, a trio of new
American operas that premiered in 2023. One of the three works
dealt with gun violence on Chicago streets, with music by the
eclectic and energetic Daniel Bernard Roumain and words by the
renowned actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith. In her iconic
style, Smith created a libretto from interviews with real Chicagoans,
forming a mosaic of perspectives that provokes the audience to an
empathetic investigation of her subject. Roumain responded with
inimitable music, weaving Bach chorales, R&B, hip-hop, and trap
music together to form a nervy and galvanizing sound world for a
city on edge.
Whitney closed the evening with a heart-wrenching final scene
taken from the words of a young woman named Yasmine Miller.
Miller lost her six-month-old son Sincere on her way to the
laundromat, when an unknown assailant shot up her car—a
shocking crime that remains unsolved. The scene is daunting,
beginning with Yasmine’s joy in becoming a mother and leading to a
report on the shooting. In her interview, Yasmine simply said, “He
didn’t make it,” with a crushing lucidity. Roumain made this one of
the most emotionally charged moments in the score, as the
orchestra quiets down to a solo synthesizer, which supports her as
she comes around to uttering the full sentence: “He didn’t . . . he
didn’t . . . he didn’t make—he didn’t . . . make—he didn’t . . . make—
he didn’t . . . he didn’t. He didn’t make it. He didn’t make it. He didn’t
make it.”
As the scene goes on, Miller’s journey is an emotional rollercoaster:
we hear about her depression and sleepless nights; her outrage at
the police’s complete lack of action and urgency; the pain of
knowing her son is never coming back; and finally the bittersweet
joy of announcing the arrival of a second child. “Her name is going to
be Serenity,” she tells us. Roumain sets her final line with another
stutter, a hesitation to reach the final word: “It won’t fully mend a
broken heart, but it will be some kind of . . . It won’t fully mend a
broken heart, but it will be some kind of . . . It won’t fully mend a
broken heart, but it will be some kind of . . . peace.” Whether or not
Roumain was consciously invoking the emotional power of Ottavia’s
broken singing in Poppea, he created a similarly unforgettable effect
and gave the singer an enormous interpretive opportunity to bring
herself to this role.
The emotional maturity and range required by this aria makes it a
formidable assignment for a singer of any age. That Morrison could
bring so much honesty and natural poise to the scene was nothing
short of astonishing. She never held back in a single rehearsal and
used every repetition as a chance to try something new or go
deeper. She was always remarkably present—what actors call “in
the moment”—in a way that never betrayed self-awareness; and she
was always able to channel Miller’s emotions rather than choke up
on her own. All of that—while also singing with rich beauty and
freshness.
“I’ve been trying to think if I had to dissociate to perform this role,”
Whitney told me six months after the performances of Proximity.
“And I don’t think I did. But my passion was in my resolve to tell the
truth. Whereas other people may have needed truth to show up with
tears, the intensity of my presence and my resolve was more
important than needing to be a first-hand experiencer of Yasmine’s
pain. There’s no way I can do that—I don’t have children, you know;
I can only imagine, really, so my entire performance is a function of
imagination anyway. But the resolve to see and use my social skills
to say, ‘Okay, how do I empathize and show sympathy for this
person?’ And if I can use my imagination to feel her sadness, I can
use my imagination to tell the truth.
 Bearing witness: Whitney Morrison as Yasmine Miller in Proximity (2023) at
Lyric Opera of Chicago.
“I err on the side of service and truth-telling,” she continued. “And
when it comes to emotions, my approach is very integrated. I don’t
think about emotion as separate from truth-telling and is-ness—
meaning to embody something as fully as I can.” Whitney frequently
calls upon her spiritual background and her upbringing in church,
and for her the fear of “bearing false witness” urges her to dig as
deep as she can into the language and the history of a character.
She’s not bothered by showing up truthfully in the highly artificial
world of opera: “Acting is a series of tools for you to use so you can
let go of your inhibitions and find the truth.”
When it comes to Yasmine, Whitney claims that a sense of
responsibility helped her grapple with the emotional demands of
the role. “Growing up in the south suburbs of Chicago, one
generation out of the projects on both sides, I’ve been navigating a
complex social landscape for a long time. And when I see people
from other areas of Chicago who have a very different experience
from mine, I have a lot of sympathy. I know their story could have
been mine. So especially as a Chicagoan, who has the most contact
and context for Yasmine Miller, I felt a responsibility that was
singular. When it was hard, I kept thinking, ‘That woman lost her
baby, and she’s going to be in that opera house, and I want to tell the
truth.’ Nothing else was more important.
“I don’t think we have vastly different experiences,” she said. “If I dig
all the way to the bedrock of humanity, socially and emotionally, I
can find common ground with anyone—with people from all sides of
the city, or with Mimì from La bohème.”
I have only rarely witnessed a performance like Whitney’s—and
rarely witnessed a singer with a process so deeply rooted. Yasmine
Miller was present on opening night, a fact that would have thrown
a less anchored singing actor into an unnatural self-consciousness.
Not Whitney: her musical, psychological, and spiritual preparation
all paid off. The truth of the character’s emotions communicated at
the overwhelming scale that is, ultimately, opera at its best.
The final singing actor I spoke with was the great German soprano
Waltraud Meier. Her career is full of legendary performances of
searing intensity, especially the demanding roles in Wagner’s operas
—Isolde, Kundry, Sieglinde, Waltraute, and Ortrud—that have
become her signature. Before I worked with her, as Ortrud in
Lohengrin at Bayreuth in 2018, I considered her such an astonishing
performer that I would go out of my way to see her onstage. After
working with her, my esteem of her enormous gifts only increased.
Among the many unforgettable performances in Waltraud’s legacy,
one of them stands out for me as an exemplar of her extraordinary
gifts. In Berlin in 2002, she jumped in at the last minute for a sick
colleague to perform Fricka in Wagner’s Die Walküre, a role she had
not sung in years. The problem was, she was already singing the
much larger and more demanding role of Sieglinde in the same
production. Waltraud, at a moment’s notice, simply performed both,
and ended up delivering two completely different vocal and
dramatic characterizations in the same show. Although Fricka and
Sieglinde never appear together onstage, Waltraud’s astonishing
feat that night would have had anyone believe that she was capable
of somehow splitting herself in two.
Complete mastery: Waltraud Meier as Ortrud, with Georg Zeppenfeld as König
Heinrich and Tomasz Konieczny as Telramund, in Lohengrin at the Bayreuther
Festspiele (2018).
Our conversation took place as she was preparing her own farewell
to the stage, in a final performance of the haunted mother
Klytämnestra in Richard Strauss’s Elektra (1909) at the Staatsoper
Berlin.
YUVAL: If anyone can consider herself a singing actor, I think it’s you.
WALTRAUD: I do consider myself a singing actor. When I was inducted
as a member of the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste
[Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts], I was not categorized in their
music department. Instead, I am a member of their Darstellende
Kunst [Performing Arts] department, alongside directors,
playwrights, designers, and theater actors. And that’s a bigger honor
for me than if I was considered just a singer.
Y: When you begin approaching a role, how is your work on the text
different from your work on the music? Do you have a preferred
way “in” to a role—through text or through music?
W: The music and text are two different things, but they belong
together; the composer thought of them as a combined thing. So to
analyze it, I have first to . . . start with one and then with the other,
before considering them together. When I started looking at the role
of Klytämnestra in Elektra, I didn’t know the opera very well. So I
started by listening to it once, only to get an impression of the sound
of it—the general impact. And then I read the text, and I read it out
loud. That is important: to hear the sound of the words. As we know,
words are already music. The vowels, whether they are light vowels
or dark vowels, are very important. Or the consonants: there are
singing consonants, sounding consonants like V, like L, or rhyming
consonants. That’s why I read the text out loud; I get the sound into
my ear.
Then I read it as a story. For that, it’s important not to read it from
the score. Because as a singer, you can’t help but also read the
music; you can’t help but see there’s a quarter note, or a pause, and
so on. It’s important to read it as a story and to read it in your own
words. That way, it creates a movie in my mind. I start seeing
pictures—and I keep these pictures for later on when I go to the
stage.
Finally, of course, I bring that together with the music. But very
often, even in between productions, I’ll go back and I will read the
pure text again. I remember after years and years of singing the role,
I sang Kundry in Parsifal at the Paris Opera in 2010. I sat in my
dressing room during an intermission and I read the text again.
Despite all my work on the role, I still came to new understandings.
“Ah, I’ve never thought about that word—what does that mean?” Or
“Oh, he’s saying this line to them and not to me.” And it’s always very
important not to read only my lines; I read the whole thing,
everybody else’s lines as well.
Y: I remember that so well from Lohengrin. You knew everyone else’s
lines by memory.
W: I think you need that kind of knowledge. Otherwise you cannot
react; you don’t know what’s really going on.
Y: Isn’t that a lot to keep in your head? Don’t you have enough to
keep track of just for your own role?
W: Not at all—it actually helps me remember what I have to say, how
I have to react, or what I should play. It always helps, and I cannot
understand why the others don’t do it.
Y: It’s true that you can sometimes find yourself with singers who
behave like members of an orchestra. In a way, the act of learning a
piece musically rather than dramatically habituates that mentality.
W: True, but for me, staying in the energy of a performance is so
much easier. It’s much more difficult stepping in and out of a role.
When I go onstage, I’m in—all the way until I exit. And then it’s a
flow.
Y: You’ve already said a few things about text and where you look for
insight into the character from the sound of the words . . .
W: Yes—that’s the technical point of view. But now we are getting to
the emotional and the incarnation of it. For this, I have to recall
something very important I learned from the director Klaus-Michael
Grüber. He told me, “Never take what you say as a comment; never
take it ironically or sarcastically. You have to identify with what you
are saying, without commentary.” A comment would be something
like “I’m the happy one now!” Or “I’m the bad one now! I’ll show you
how bad I am.” Or “I’ll show you how intriguing I am.” Then you are
distanced. That doesn’t mean it should be about your own private
emotion; you have to enter into the emotions of the person that you
are showing onstage. Take it seriously; don’t mock them. That’s why,
when I’m playing Ortrud, I must feel like I’m completely right in
what I’m doing. I must leave it up to the audience to judge. It’s up to
the audience to cry, to be furious, to love, whatever. Instead of
judging, when you are onstage, you have to enter into your
character’s skin with all that you have.
Y: But how do you go from that technical analysis—of the language,
the music, and the space where they come together—into the
incarnation?
W: Klaus-Michael also told me, “Onstage, you must be as honest as
you can. If you want to communicate something, imagine you are
telling it to an eleven-year-old child.” I was surprised and asked him,
“Why an eleven-year-old?” And he said, “Eleven is an age where a
human being already knows about love, hatred, betrayal—all those
big emotions. But in that age, you don’t have cynicism, sarcasm, or
irony. You must never do these three things onstage.” And when I
see singers today performing ironically or cynically, all I can see is
their pretending. There’s nothing honest.
Y: But opera is such an artificial medium—how do you find that
honesty in it?
W: Yes, opera has many artificial layers, but at its core, it’s all about
love, hatred, betrayal—all those things that will always be with us.
We can wear lots of costumes, but the essence of it surpasses all
time. Generations after us will experience the same problems we do.
And if you concentrate on that essence, then you have something to
say. You’re onstage, looking out to see Mrs. Smith in Row 15, and
you tell her how you were betrayed by your lover; you tell her how
it hurts. And then you have truth!
Y: So, for you, the artifice is more of a costume—the rules of the game
—that enables something true?
W: Depending on the possibilities that a director gives me, with
costumes and lighting and everything else. It’s true that I sometimes
walk onto a set quite different from what I’m imagining, and then I
have to wonder, “How can I play in this situation?” And then I play
with it. All the many elements that make up opera are so important
for the performer; costumes, for instance, are terribly important for
me, because they funnel how I feel and how I move. I love costume
designers who are at the rehearsals from the very beginning; they
watch what we have to do and how we move as a person. Because
everybody has their own unique body language. I think the director
and the costume designer must support that.
Y: It’s true—and it gets to the heart of what the rehearsal process is
about. Rehearsals are not the place to simply enact what you’ve
already discovered but rather the place to undergo a discovery
process. Which means staying open for things to adapt to the
specific performers. Are there other rehearsal methods you use to
develop an internalized response to a character?
W: Yes, although the director Patrice Chéreau always laughed at me
when I did this. After every rehearsal, when everybody goes away, I
stay back and I walk it through on my own.
Y: Yes, I’ve seen you do this in Bayreuth!
W: And I use my own words—not the character’s lines. I’m walking
the character of Ortrud but with Waltraud’s words. That way I can
discover the emotions as they live within me—not the poetry but
more direct, personal language. That awakens my imagination for
the scene, and for the emotions I need. With my own words, I can be
furious, or mean, or jealous, or anything.
Y: And beyond your words—what aspect of yourself appears in your
characterizations?
W: I’d say every aspect! I’m convinced that the more you live
normally (not as a star or a diva) and you live everything in life—
mourning, joy, surprise, all the emotions—then you know how
things feel, and you remember how you reacted. And you know how
your body reacted. Those are tools that you must remember when
you are portraying a character.
Y: It makes me think of the Japanese Noh theater, where some
troupes insisted that to play a teenage character, the actor must be
at least fifty years old. Because you can’t possibly understand what
it means to be an eighteen-year-old in love until you’re past that. It’s
a bit extreme and very different from the expectation that a singer
should look the part. But as a fifty- or sixty-year-old actor, you can
reflect on what it means to be young and can show it better, rather
than simply living it.
W: Except by then, the bones don’t work anymore!
Y: Isn’t that what costumes and lighting are for?
W: It’s awful walking onstage and thinking, “Oh shit—don’t build any
more stairs!” Or, “Don’t make me kneel down!”
Y: But it doesn’t matter about the creaky knees and the inflexible hips
when the spirit is right. That’s what I think the Noh masters were
getting at: your ability to communicate a spirit increases with age.
The bones may not work the way they used to, but the experience
and the memory inside those bones can radiate.
W: But that’s why it’s also important that performers practice
exercises in awareness. What can your body do, and what does it
express? What is your hand, just your hand, able to do? It can be a
fist; it can hold; it can be cramped; it can invite; feel; caress. Just one
hand can do a thousand things. And then the head, just the way you
hold your head: when it’s straight, you appear strict; if it’s tilted to
one side, you seem doubtful; and when tilted to the other side, it
makes you look flirtatious. Just your head can show so many things.
So I spend a lot of time in front of the mirror just watching and
discovering what my body is communicating even without saying a
word. You are never just standing and singing. Everything you do is
already telling a story. That’s why I always say that as soon as you
go out onstage, you are telling something. And it’s up to you if what
you are telling is the story you’re actually trying to tell!
Y: It always amazes me how performers are so completely
transparent when they are onstage. I’m not sure all singers are
aware of how much an audience sees inside them.
W: Yes. You can read everything.
Y: Everything. There’s actually no place to hide, no matter how many
layers of makeup or costumes or wigs . . .
W: Performing in opera takes a great deal of awareness.
Y: Absolutely. Although that’s really hard to come by when there’s so
much external stuff surrounding the conventional operatic
performer.
W: Yes, of course.
Y: Whether it’s the constant insecurity around your voice, which you
can never adequately hear because you are literally inside it; or the
fear of the wrath of an autocratic director or conductor, which may
cost you future jobs; or the feeling that you need to be a brand and
constantly promote yourself on social media—our field makes it
very hard to tune all that out and focus on craftsmanship.
W: Yes, it’s difficult. One way to escape that while you are onstage is
to stay communicating—and ideally to someone else onstage. It
helps you connect to emotions when you have somebody you send
the emotions to. You must have a recipient for what you say.
Y: Absolutely.
W: In Paris, I worked with Patrice Chéreau on a play at the Louvre
Museum. I sang Wagner’s song cycle Wesendonck Lieder, and with
each song, I took the audience from room to room. There were only
about 250 audience members, and they didn’t have seats. Instead, I
would sing among them and I would approach them very closely—
sometimes only one meter away. The reactions were fascinating;
some people were totally shocked at how close I was, while others
were crying. The emotions were suddenly so direct.
Y: Yes, the intimacy must have been overwhelming. I always wish
audiences could experience what I get to experience in the rehearsal
room, when I’m so close to you and other singers. I’m sure that if
more people experienced opera like that, everyone would be fighting
to get tickets. The humanity of what we do would just be immediate,
instead of the huge distances of traditional opera houses.
W: Distance never makes emotions. Total distance in opera is not
possible, because the music overwhelms you. Instead, I always look
to express things as strongly and directly as I can.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
KLUGE ’S CONCEPT OF OPERA AS “a power plant of feelings”—an image I
initially considered generative—now strikes me differently after
working with singing actors like Paula Murrihy, Whitney Morrison,
and Waltraud Meier. For these artists, the purpose of their craft is
not self-indulgence or an emotional manipulation of the audience—
both of which can easily arise when we focus on “feeling.” Instead,
the best singing actors provoke their audience to connect with their
own interiority—or, as Waltraud put it, to make up their own minds.
And as different as these three performers are, each emphasizes
imagination as one of her most important tools. Whether it’s Paula
becoming a director in her head, or Whitney respecting her position
as witness, or Waltraud using her own words to inhabit a scene, the
creative act of imagination is an essential animator of her musical
skill. And for all three, the result is something they call truthfulness
and emotional honesty.
There’s much more to performing, then, than simply “feeling.”
Singing actors must forge a bridge connecting the music to what’s
inside them and to the audience. The potential for a direct empathic
connection between humans from different times and
circumstances—at the heart of Whitney’s imaginative
characterization—is one of the most profound reasons for pursuing
opera in the first place. The igniting of that empathy at operatic scale
has the power to overwhelm our hearts, to open our minds, and to
manufacture a sense of astonishment.
So if we are to talk about opera in industrial terms, let’s consider
another metaphor: opera as an engine of empathy and awe. Because
every production and every artist within that production has the
potential to engender both. And the conduit for that electricity is the
singing actor.
 4

A STRANGE FORM OF STORYTELLING

NARRATIVE, AMBIGUITY, AND DIRECTORIAL
AUTHORSHIP
The comedian Adam Sandler entered the annals of opera history in
1992 when he introduced the character of “Opera Man” on the TV
show Saturday Night Live. Donning a tuxedo and cape, Opera Man
became a regular guest correspondent on the show’s satirical news
segment “Weekend Update.” He relayed the week’s news in song,
waving a white handkerchief as if conducting an invisible orchestra.
Delivering brief digests of the latest headlines in a half-English, half-
Italian mash-up, Opera Man deployed a virtuosic parade of operatic
clichés while parodying current events. Lamenting the Buffalo Bills’
Super Bowl loss in 1993, for example, he sang: “Buffalo destroyedo /
el choko third year-o / Opera Man devastateo / Lose-oh mucho
dinero! / Ah ah ah ah ah!”
A year after he was introduced, Opera Man left the news desk to
open an episode of Saturday Night Live as the star of his own
tragedy: “Opera Man Comes Within One Number of Winning the
New Hampshire Lucky Five Scratch-Off Lottery.” A tuxedoed Phil
Hartman sets the scene: Opera Man, having just filled up his car at a
gas station, purchases a lottery ticket. Each number he scratches off
brings him closer to the million-dollar prize, and even though the
title of the “opera” gives away the ending, Sandler plays the
suspense so brilliantly that the audience can’t help rooting for him
to win anyway. But once he scratches off the final box and realizes
he didn’t win the jackpot, the music becomes tragic. “No
millionaro, / back to jobo, / securito guardo / Montgomery Ward-
o!!!”
The absurdity of Opera Man—the incongruity between his text and
his grandiose delivery—relies on the absurdity of opera itself and its
strange way of telling stories. By lavishing a full-throated delivery
better suited for eternal tragedy on trivial, forgettable events, the
excesses of operatic delivery come across as preposterous (and
hilarious).
Unlike its sister arts, opera can only tell stories in an arcane manner
—often in foreign languages, with curious dramatic pacing out of
step with modern storytelling techniques and surrounded by
alienating conventions. Comprehension is anything but a given, even
when the story being told is as well known as Romeo and Juliet.
While most other narrative art forms can usually satisfy an
audience’s longing for recognizable elements to connect with, opera
as a genre is always on the verge of incomprehensibility.
Take, for example, the fact that when listening to an opera sung in
Italian or German or even English, an audience is not expected to
understand the lines directly from the mouths of the singers; even
Opera Man’s language relied on subtitles for comprehension.
Operatic language is primarily understood through reading rather
than listening, originally by way of printed libretti but now mostly
through titles projected over the stage (or in some cases on the seat
in front of you). I’m grateful for supertitles, remembering the off-
putting experience of seeing my first opera without them. Still, they
have obscured the fact that comprehension in opera is only achieved
through distance. You start to understand the difference between a
Broadway audience, hanging on every word emanating from the live
performers, and the detachment of an opera audience, relying on the
mediation of a projected translation to follow along. Titles at a
commercial musical would likely signal a failure on the performers’
parts, as if they couldn’t deliver their lines with clear enough diction
to be understood.
Then consider how opera doesn’t seem to value a sense of suspense
as to what will happen next. Other storytelling media, like episodic
television, hold an audience by keeping them guessing how the story
will unfold. Opera, on the other hand, shows no need for spoiler
alerts: the entire story is given to you in advance in the printed
synopses of your program book. Most companies encourage
audiences to get to know the story before you arrive. I couldn’t
fathom this practice as a teenager: if I already know how the opera
ends, why should I sit through the whole thing?
I’ve come to realize that opera’s strange way of storytelling is not a
design flaw. Yes, the interplay of word, music, and production rarely
results in the kind of unambiguous clarity we have come to expect
from other narrative arts. But as popular culture and mass media
maintain a staunch resistance to ambiguity, opera’s inherent
complexity and layers of signification give the art form a singular
and vital fascination: as a space for a multiplicity of meaning, for
indeterminacy and ultimately enchantment. The creation of that
space, and the director’s role in holding that space, is the focus of
this chapter.
READING OPERA POETICALLY
Ambiguity, appropriately enough, has many definitions and might
best be thought of as an image. Let’s use a telescope as an analogy.
Its multiple lenses need to be calibrated just right to create a sharp
image. When the image is perfectly clear, there’s no ambiguity about
what you are seeing. The shape is crisp, and the object gives the
illusion of nearness. But shift the focus and the lines become
blurred. Now the eyes must interpret what they are seeing. Rather
than one identity or one conclusion emerging, multiple possibilities
encircle your vision. The image becomes mysterious.
Ambiguity in opera implies this kind of blurred view, a resistance to
complete legibility. It’s a telescope kindred to a kaleidoscope,
created not for the purpose of seeing clearly but for seeing
differently. I like to think of ambiguity as referring to a work’s
purposeful inconclusiveness, always resisting a perfect focus. An
ambiguous work involves a complex of possible meanings rather
than the resolute pursuit of just one.
Popular culture remains averse to ambiguity in all its forms: enigma,
paradox, and indeterminate meaning. The clear-eyed telescope, with
its singularity of meaning, is prized higher than the kaleidoscope,
with its shifting, unstable signification. This must surely be due to a
desire for legibility and understandability—the antitheses of
ambiguity—among the general public, and even among many art
lovers. An audience’s satisfaction with legibility is a constant
struggle for artists who gravitate toward the unknown. Pablo
Picasso, for example, famously lamented the fact that “everyone
wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the songs of a
bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one,
without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting,
people have to understand.” In the intervening century, and
unquestionably in part because of the pioneering work of artists like
Picasso, painting and sculpture have largely overcome expectations
for comprehensibility. Mood, color, and composition are prized
higher than legibility, and ambiguity has become a treasured quality
of paintings. Great works of the past in pursuit of enigmatic realities,
like Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), emerged from a long
period of neglect to become exemplars of art’s powerful mystery.
In his novel Starbook, the Nigerian writer Ben Okri best articulates
the shortsightedness of a spectator’s wish for comprehension. In
depicting a mythic community of master artists, Okri characterizes
their appreciation of art as auspicious:
The masters knew that works of art could not be understood. And
that the desire to understand was not only a fatal presumption, and
an arrogance, but that it also got in the way of seeing or hearing or
being inspired by the work of art at all. For (so they believed) once a
work is thought to be understood, its magic is dimmed, not in the
work, but in the person seeking to understand. And so such people
become closed to its light, its power for continual inspiration and
regeneration. The world is thus diminished; for a light, a source of
light, has then been hidden by false understanding.
As hard as it may be to deny Okri’s praise of art that passes all
understanding, his perspective remains in the minority. (And we’ll
come back to the “arrogance” of false understanding that Okri
describes here in a later chapter.)
Ambiguity as an agent of indeterminacy has a long history of
offering both frustration and fascination. In a 1962 article for the
Journal of Personality, Dr. Stanley Budner created a scale to gauge an
individual’s threshold for uncertainty, a measure he called
“ambiguity tolerance,” or AT. After responding to sixteen different
confusing situations, participants in Budner’s experiment either
scored as intolerant, tending to interpret “ambiguous situations as
sources of threat,” or registered enough tolerance or pleasure in
uncertain situations to consider them “desirable.” Budner was
building off the work of Else Frenkel-Brunswik, an Austrian
psychologist who first introduced the concept of ambiguity
intolerance while exploring the qualities of the authoritarian
personality just after World War II. Her findings are not surprising:
the more individuals reacted negatively to ambiguity, the more they
responded to the pleasing order of totalitarian leadership.
Developing a tolerance for ambiguity offered a potent tactic in the
effort to rewire a population brainwashed by the era’s fascist
governments. Psychologists began turning to art as a therapeutic
medium for building AT in patients, under the assumption that art
has an inherently ambiguous character.
But that assumption is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain, as
all aspects of life are moving toward more uniformity at the expense
of complexity, variety, and multiplicity. The German professor
Thomas Bauer, best known for his descriptions of Islamic cultures as
innately tolerant of ambiguity, views AT in Western culture at an all-
time low. Bauer connects this occurrence to both a rising tide of
religious fundamentalism (which insists on a singular, black-and-
white approach to truth) and the triumph of capitalism (the populist
demands of the marketplace defining tastes and trends): all are
succumbing to the same social impulses. The move away from
ambiguity in art, for Bauer, is what accounts for the inundation of
realism and reality-based entertainment in a culture that prizes
understandability. And in his essay “The Disambiguation of the
World,” Bauer uses the history of opera to illustrate his point,
contrasting extravagant Baroque superficiality with the popular
naturalism of later verismo operas. “Melodies became gradually
more ‘realistic,’ ” he writes, “with coloratura accused of
unnaturalness. The sung line got closer and closer to speech, as can
be found in Puccini and operettas.”
To understand what Bauer means, let’s compare two scenes
depicting the same dramatic situation: defiant men on the brink of
their execution. In George Frideric Handel’s Baroque opera Arminio
(1737), the title character is the chieftain of a Germanic tribe
defending his country against a Roman invasion. Arminio is
captured, sentenced to death, and at the beginning of Act III brought
to the scaffold before a crowd gathered to watch him die.
Unflinching in the face of this dreadful scene, Arminio bravely
prepares to meet his death . . . when a sudden attack on the Romans
forces the execution to be postponed. As the chieftain is rushed back
to his prison cell, he sings a proud aria: “I return to my chains, but
what is it you want from me, oh my Fate? This strange alternation
between prison and death only strengthens my faith” (SEE PLAYLIST ).
His music is a straightforward example of a da capo aria, the format
Handel loved best. An initial musical theme, sometimes known as
the A section, is introduced with the first line of the text—in this
case, “Ritorno alle ritorte” (I return to my chains). The music then
develops and morphs in the B section, before the A section is
repeated (da capo means “from the top”). The return of music and
text the audience has already heard allows the singer an
opportunity to riff freely. Part of what makes moments like this feel
“artificial” in Baroque opera is the pausing of dramatic time, even
when the stakes are high (the Romans may be under attack and
Arminio hurried off, but how much urgency can there be if he has
enough time to repeat himself with flourishes and
embellishments?). Unnatural, too, is the elongation of words: the
image of “ritorte” (chains) is constantly opened up with each pass,
giving the singer ample opportunity to both express a defiance of his
imprisonment and show off his coloratura skills.
“Ritorno alla ritorte” is not one of Handel’s most original arias, but it
makes a useful comparison with a different pre-execution
meditation—the haunting Act III aria for Puccini’s rebellious tenor
Cavaradossi in Tosca (1900) (SEE PLAYLIST ). The politically radical
painter has run afoul of the lecherous police chief Baron Scarpia and
faces a shooting squad at Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo at dawn. In the
last hour of his life, he tries to write a letter to his lover Tosca but
finds himself choked up:
And the stars were shining . . . and the soil smelled fragrant . . . when I
heard the creak of the garden gate and a furtive footstep. I recognized
her by her scent as she fell into my arms. What sweet kisses and
caresses we shared! I found myself trembling as I undressed her. But
that dream of love is now vanished forever: the moment is gone, and I
die in despair! And never have I loved life so much!
This charged scene is famous for an emotional verisimilitude and
directness that could easily make Handel’s scene feel arcane and
distanced. Puccini, taking a cue from his idol Verdi, gives the melody
to the orchestra while the singer declaims his first words in a
monotonous and haunted half-voice. The sobering effect is of
emotional shock, a numbness that gradually gives way as the erotic
charge of his memory ignites a new lust for life. Cavaradossi’s
melodic line strictly follows the syllabic contour of the words—no
elongations or mutations like Handel’s—and only the last two lines
are half-repeated, either for emphasis or to hammer home the
impression of a man wailing against his destiny. Without losing
musical expression, the moment feels more like a confession than an
aria.
Before we arrive at this showstopping moment, Puccini sets the
scene with a picturesque tone poem evoking the quiet Roman
streets at dawn: a shepherd boy sings in the distance (offstage) in a
Romanesque dialect, while church bells toll indeterminately.
According to legend, Puccini was so dedicated to an accurate
depiction of his setting that he notated the exact pitches and
rhythms of the bells surrounding the fortress. Everything points to a
you-are-there naturalism, the ultimate dream of Puccini and his
verismo colleagues (like Mascagni, composer of Cavalleria
rusticana). Opera’s artifice and ambiguous reality are vehemently
denied in the pursuit of an authentic reenactment of a recognizable
real world.
In the recording on my playlist, the extraordinary tenor Giuseppe di
Stefano adds an emotive cry to his delivery of the final lines, “mai
tanto la vita!” This naturalistic touch is something you could never
get away with in the formal constraints of a Handel aria, where all
the emotions must be expressed purely within the words and the
melody. Puccini’s more realistic musical setting lends itself to this
kind of emotional outburst, part of why the aria ranks among the
most beloved moments in all of opera. While di Stefano always
managed to convincingly sell such emotive gestures, lesser artists
have used the trick so often as a shortcut to an audience’s emotional
engagement that it has devolved into an example of opera’s over-
the-top artificiality. (And frequently deployed by Adam Sandler’s
Opera Man.)
For Bauer, Puccini’s obsessive pursuit of realism poses “an
existential threat to opera, because opera is in its nature a highly
artificial art form and can never truly become realistic.” The
situation is actually more nuanced, especially when one considers
the alternatives to realism that composers explored throughout the
twentieth century. American composer Robert Ashley achieves a
bewildering effect from the everyday language and familiar
situations of American society. His most famous opera, Perfect Lives
(1983), premiered on television rather than in a conventional
theater; the story, according to Ashley, includes such commonplace
Americana as “bank robbery, cocktail lounges, geriatric love,
adolescent elopement, et al., in the American Midwest.” The natural
ebb and flow of spoken American English makes up the majority of
the score’s music, which eschews conventional operatic singing
entirely. And yet the effect is anything but naturalistic. The ultimate
strangeness of Perfect Lives and the rest of Ashley’s body of work
has nothing in common with what Bauer describes as opera’s
tendency toward a reflection of reality. The Los Angeles Times called
his operas “so unconventional that they tend to be received as either
profoundly revolutionary or incomprehensibly peculiar.”
Bauer is surely not considering Ashley or other prominent
experimentalists when talking about opera with a capital “O.” Even
the most perspicacious critics and musicologists today turn a blind
eye to the essential work of composers actively expanding the
definition of opera. How much more vibrant and provocative would
opera be if we considered Puccini and Robert Ashley as equally
important contributors to its development? As Ashley told the New
York Times in 1983: “The actual word [“opera”] means far more than
our narrow usage of it.” Still, Bauer is absolutely right that a cultural
predilection for realism is life-threatening for opera—but only so
long as we succumb to that pressure to disambiguate, to present the
world in sharp focus in operas that behave like reality television and
are devoid of Ashley’s strangeness. If we wanted to cultivate the
opposite of realism instead—an ambiguous view of reality—opera
would be a natural place to start.
To a modern spectator, opera’s inherent ambiguity is a
confrontation. Do we listen as we would at a concert? Do we gaze as
though at a painting or sculpture? Are we following a drama, as we
would at the theater? With its numerous overlapping voices, opera
is a chaos of interpretive modes presented in a dizzying
simultaneity. All the various layers that make up a work unfold at
the same time, like a clown car stuffed full of arts. Opera’s
proliferation of meaning can seem like a heap of confusion.
In the face of so much ambiguity, a clear narrative might seem able
to come to the rescue, offering the audience something to hold on to
against the competing elements and alien rituals unfolding—the
way a dreamer may try to decode the chaotic images that
confronted her at night by consulting a “dream dictionary.” But I’m
struck by another paradox that opera faces, as an art form
buttressed by two complementary ideas of narrative: the rising-
falling action in the dramatic structure of the “well-made play,”
which audiences have come to expect; and the abstract dimension of
music. Music is easily cheapened when made subservient to
narrative. But much musical education in this country still insists
that audiences listen to symphonies as “dramas,” with the principal
theme as a kind of protagonist struggling toward resolution. It’s
easy to give in to the mind’s insatiable urge to create a narrative. All
the same, music’s dramatic logic doesn’t easily fuse with narrative
logic; in opera, musical form must come to grips with the messy
imperatives of storytelling, like dramatic pacing and character
development.
Maybe there’s something about opera taking place in a theater, with
its clear separation of artist and audience, that implies a kind of
spectatorship more connected to plays. As if the architecture tells us
what to anticipate when the curtain goes up: the expectation of a
dramatic representation we can recognize from traditional theater.
Theater, after all, originated from a culture’s urge to examine itself
through the telling of stories. In ancient Greece, the entire populace
would attend a representative narrative, which offered each
spectator an opportunity to reflect simultaneously on the
microcosm of themselves as individuals (by identifying with the
characters onstage) and on the macrocosm of a community made up
of many individuals (the chorus). Theater unified the personal and
the political in the imagination of the spectator and posited a vision
for the continuity of their worldview. Holding it all together was the
story. Opera originated as a resurrection of that antiquity,
employing the same mythological narratives (Orpheus, Daphne, and
the like) that populated the ancient amphitheaters.
As opera developed, the story started becoming a flimsy pretext for
impressive displays of a singer’s virtuosity. Centuries later,
narrative deficiency remains one of the most common critiques of
opera—as embodied in Opera Man’s overly dramatic reaction to
losing the lottery or Bob Dylan’s remark that the text of highly
emotional music in another language may mean something as
simple as “I’ve lost my hat.” Even an acknowledged masterpiece like
The Magic Flute frequently elicits the judgment that “the music is
sublime, but the story is stupid.” In an article for Slate, Jan Swafford
describes his experience of learning to love the opera despite
initially assessing “the story of Prince Tamino and his journey to
love and wisdom” as “unmitigated flapdoodle.” And “even if you love
it,” Swafford argues, it’s hard to deny that the piece has “a creaking
assemblage of a plot.”
A prime example of an opera with a story so stupid that even Verdi’s
great music can’t save it is Il trovatore (1853). The librettist
Salvadore Cammarano took a convoluted play by the Spanish
playwright Antonio García Gutiérrez and somehow made it even
more difficult to follow. The opera begins with a lengthy recap of
what happened to the Count of Luna. When his brother fell ill, their
father blamed it on an innocent Romani woman. As she is burned at
the stake, she commands her daughter, Azucena, to avenge her.
Azucena grabs the count’s sick brother and throws him on the same
stake as her mother. The father dies of a broken heart, and the count
is charged to seek revenge. A complicated love triangle ensues
between the count, a lady-in-waiting named Leonora, and Azucena’s
“son” Manrico—whom we later discover is actually the count’s
brother (it turns out that Azucena had accidentally thrown her own
child in the fire). The count eventually executes Manrico, and the
opera ends with Azucena exclaiming, “He was your brother! Mother,
you are avenged!” The audience is somehow supposed to take all
this seriously. You can almost hear Verdi and Cammarano shrugging
through the piece, as if to say, “I don’t really understand it either, so
let’s try and dispatch all this nonsense as quickly as possible and get
to some ravishing music.”
Trovatore remains one of Verdi’s most frequently performed operas,
but even Adam Sandler couldn’t sell the plot. Watching a
performance, you can’t help but wonder: can it be that opera’s
storytelling, far from making the genre more engaging, is actually
one of the reasons it feels so arcane today?
If that’s the case, then contemporary opera is in trouble. For the
most part, new operas try carving out a place for themselves in an
oversaturated media environment by leading with story. What an
opera is about is now more important than what it actually is. This
can sometimes yield provocative and remarkable results, as when
the life of Malcolm X or Nixon’s landmark visit to China serves as the
narrative. But in other cases, the composer and the poet become
secondary attractions to easily understood or relatable subject
matter. This is also why much contemporary opera looks to plays,
novels, or films for their stories—the art form is demystified in
exactly the way Bauer lamented. Before we know it, the expectation
that opera will tell stories in an equivalent manner to theater and
film begins to rob it of its unique power.
With the narrative now the main organ for making meaning, the
magic space created by music, text, and visual is minimized or
eliminated. The effect is only to reinforce opera’s alien relationship
to contemporary culture. Rather than bridging the divide between
the art form and our time, an operatic version of a great film usually
pales in comparison. It’s not fair to compare Wagner’s Ring cycle
with J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (in either its novelistic or
cinematic form), because literature and film tell those stories with a
swiftness and fullness that opera can’t manage. Narrative-driven
operas usually reveal the genre to be the most unwieldy and indirect
way for a story to be told. And if the public is being told that story is
what matters most, why should they continue to engage with
“irrelevant” works from the past, with their “stupid stories”?
We then need to ask: if opera has such a difficult time with
narratives, why haven’t we eliminated them altogether? Perhaps
that’s a more viable approach to opera’s magic ambiguity, as Philip
Glass and Robert Wilson suggested with their landmark Einstein on
the Beach (1976). In this singular work, image replaces narrative
and non sequitur stands in for drama for four uninterrupted hours.
Language becomes a texture rather than a mechanism for
storytelling—even if, in the opera’s final scene, a hymnlike
description of two lovers at a park bench feeds our need for a
“soothing story” at bedtime (SEE PLAYLIST ). The theorist Hans-Thies
Lehmann called this kind of piece post-dramatic theater—that is,
theater in which atmosphere and composition replace the structure
of a narrative, giving shape and meaning to a new kind of theatrical
experience.
But much as I find the boldness of a non-narrative work like Einstein
on the Beach thrilling and inspiring, I must admit that I’m not ready
to give up on story. Narratives that take full advantage of opera’s
idiosyncrasies still have much to offer artists and audiences.
Sometimes I like to think of a story as a rope hanging from the top of
a well, giving audiences something to hold on to as they climb down
into a murky obscurity. With a story, the insatiable need to
understand has an outlet, and even the most casual observer has
something they can grasp. And, as Ashley’s Perfect Lives illustrates,
the inclusion of a narrative can still leave ample room for ambiguity.
A story can give artists the license to tackle what they really want to
explore: the network of themes that invisibly influence that same
story, while always pointing beyond it. (Ashley ultimately called
Perfect Lives “an opera of ideas.”) We need to divert the audience
away from confusing the red herring of narrative for the main event.
The opera is not in the story; the story is in the opera.
When the narrative is the main event, and everything else follows
from it, the mechanics of the art form appear clunky and old-
fashioned. But when the story is in the opera—or when it becomes
one element among others that make up a less predictable
composite—opera escapes the structure of conventional theater and
becomes its own magic space. Scenes that a dramatist might
dispatch quickly could, in opera, become epic explorations of ideas
that go far deeper than the words alone would imply. One spoken
line when sung can open up worlds of emotions when stretched,
repeated, chopped up, or otherwise transformed (as Monteverdi’s
exiled queen from Coronation of Poppea proves).
The “stupid story” in Mozart’s Magic Flute follows a young prince
searching for his beloved, and having to undergo extraordinary
trials to unite with her. But can anyone say that this is what The
Magic Flute is actually about? Beyond the plot mechanics, the work
is much more interesting and complicated. Perhaps on the surface a
story of dragons, magical instruments, and mysterious trials seems
nonsensical—if we expect the narrative to be the driving factor. But
read symbolically, the piece reveals an enormous capacity for
wisdom and interpretation (see Chapter 5).
Opera-in-the-story asks us to consider a narrative concretely; story-
in-the-opera teaches us to read a story in symbols. Throughout his
career, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung advocated for a symbolic
reading of religious texts as a mechanism for understanding who we
are. In his late essay “The Undiscovered Self,” he looked for the
generative possibilities in religious myths that don’t hold up to
factual analysis. A story like the resurrection of Jesus is an example
of “impressive mythological symbolism which, if taken literally,
comes into insufferable conflict with knowledge.” For Jung, a
congregation understanding a story’s truth as merely symbolic is
less likely to lose faith than a congregation asked to consider a story
too literally. “Is it not time that the Christian mythology, instead of
being wiped out, was understood symbolically for once?” Joseph
Campbell elaborated on Jung’s concept in his own lectures (which
can be heard on the excellent podcast Pathways). Campbell
proposed that the resurrection of Jesus is not a factual, material
reanimation, nor does the story of Exodus retrace the geographic
steps of the Jews fleeing Egypt. Both stories for Campbell become
symbols of a refusal of the status quo in favor of a future possibility
still to be realized. (Maybe religion is one of the only mechanisms
remaining to us beyond fiction for developing our ability to read the
world symbolically.)
Opera resembles religious parables in their elasticity; they also
present dramatic circumstances that signify much more than what
we see. While Puccini’s exacting description of a Roman dawn in
Tosca may make anything other than a literal reading of the scene
difficult, other operas take on increased power the more we
approach them on symbolic terms. Take Leoš Janáček’s The Cunning
Little Vixen (1923). Its surface story, based on a Czech comic strip,
follows a sly female fox constantly outwitting the myopic humans
around her. If we perceive the work as a narrative suited for
illustrated squares in a newspaper, we might quickly dismiss it as
breezy entertainment. And many productions stop at that surface
story, with singers dressed as animals jumping around the stage and
trying to imitate animal behavior.
But a naturalistic production of this opera is a huge mistake—not
only because most singers trying to mimic animal movement usually
end up looking embarrassing. The opera is reduced to only its
surface level—which is ultimately the least interesting layer. Listen
to the luxurious music that Janáček pours into this seemingly simple
tale, with heartfelt depictions of the changing seasons, extraordinary
orchestral waves that bring the inner world of the animals to life,
and a profound sunset at the Finale, as the human character reflects
on love’s mysterious effect on the cycle of life. (No wonder the
composer asked for this moving soliloquy to be played at his own
funeral; SEE PLAYLIST .) The score keeps reminding its audience that
the work is much more than the story; it’s a deep meditation on
nature and humanity’s complicated distance from it.
A symbol is only as strong as its multivalency—that is, its ability to
be constantly recontextualized and reinterpreted according to the
standpoint of the reader. Symbolic readings demand ambiguity
because they die once they start dictating; a symbol is no longer a
symbol the moment it becomes easily understood. If the painter
René Magritte’s pipe in The Treachery of Images can only be
understood as a stand-in for a phallus, there’s not much true
symbolism left. But anyone with an intolerant attitude to ambiguity
will seek out that single meaning, and explanatory texts on the wall
next to a painting satisfy those viewers at the expense of the
artwork. Discovering the best way to invite an audience away from
the urge to decipher—away from the dominance of narrative—and
toward the symbolic should be the primary mission of all opera-
makers.
And yet, the mission poses a challenge: opera needs to somehow
play out in the material world, that nuts-and-bolts world of concrete
things. Understanding the story of Exodus or the resurrection in
symbolic terms is relatively easy when they are words on a page.
But as soon as those stories are embodied and presented, open-
ended symbolic readings become more difficult. In any production
of Cunning Little Vixen, the singers must still somehow represent
foxes, chickens, mosquitoes, badgers, and more if the piece is going
to have any relation to its original material. I dread to imagine how
she would feel if I asked the soprano to play “the symbolic
manifestation of nature” instead of the darting consciousness of a
fox.
The humanity of opera is ultimately the most difficult thing to
render in symbolic terms. Actors, singers, and dancers can be
understood as symbols only when presented in clear-cut allegory—
like the figure of Music in Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. As captivating as the
opening scene may be, the abstract representation of music rarely
moves us very much, even as she speaks of music’s ability to console
the heartbroken. But when the grieving Messenger sadly recounts
Eurydice’s death, she ends up making a stronger claim for the
consolations of music than La musica herself. As long as operas are
performed by flesh-and-blood humans, readings that are purely
symbolic will result in disembodied allegory.
As an alternative to the realistic and the symbolic, I propose poetic
readings as the most rewarding path—especially for an art form like
opera. Unlike most narrative fiction, poetry possesses a natural
aptitude for ambiguity; it’s looser, more associative, and more
interested in potential meanings that arise from familiar words
being used in unfamiliar ways. Aristotle contrasted poetry—how
things might have happened—with “chronicle,” or history, an
account of how things actually happened. Narrative fiction is
inclined to adhere closer to the experience of a chronicle, and opera,
in the era of cinema and realistic theater, now tends to that
experience as well. But opera, born of actual poetry (the libretto),
truly achieves its power when considered poetically.
In a poetic reading of Cunning Little Vixen, the singers can be both
the animal and not the animal at various moments. In a poetic
reading of Trovatore, perhaps some resonance can be drawn from
all those babies being thrown into fires (although I must confess to
not being able to find one myself). We can inflect the story without
being subject to it—as when reading a great poem we can be taken
on an allusive journey to meanings much deeper than anything
literal. The audience makes the meaning for themselves.
The French philosopher Jacques Rancière suggests a useful way to
understand the potential of a poetic reading over a literal or realistic
one. At a lecture he gave in Los Angeles, he spoke of fiction not as a
world but as a framework of objects that instigate a dialogue with
the reader’s subjective experience. If we think of a performance in
those terms, we begin to resist the idea of a coherent and closed
universe onstage in favor of the variety of possibilities that might
emerge from our active engagement with what we are experiencing.
In his book The Emancipated Spectator, Rancière writes:
The spectator also acts, like the pupil or scholar. She observes,
selects, compares, interprets. She links what she sees to a host of
other things that she has seen on other stages, in other kinds of
places. She composes her own poem with the elements of the poem
before her. She participates in the performance by refashioning it in
her own way—by drawing back, for example, from the vital energy
that it is supposed to transmit in order to make it a pure image and
associate this image with a story which she has read or dreamt,
experienced or invented.
In the freedom enjoyed by every audience member, Rancière
imagines the mechanism for an almost utopian social equality:
In a theatre, in front of a performance, just as in a museum, school,
or street, there are only ever individuals plotting their own paths in
the forest of things, acts and signs that confront or surround them.
The collective power shared by spectators does not stem from the
fact that they are members of a collective body or from some
specific form of interactivity. It is the power each of them has to
translate what she perceives in her own way, to link it to the unique
intellectual adventure that makes her similar to all the rest in as
much as this adventure is not like any other. . . . What our
performances—be they teaching or playing, speaking, writing,
making art or looking at it—verify is not our participation in a
power embodied in the community. It is the capacity of anonymous
people, the capacity that makes everyone equal to everyone else.
What Rancière describes as an ideal, liberated state of spectatorship
is only possible with productions that leave space for poetic flight.
He builds off an idea developed by Roland Barthes in his book Image
—Music—Text: “the death of the author is the birth of the reader.” In
other words, the power of a work of art is centered not with the
artist but with the receiver and interpreter of that work. This is still
a radical idea when applied to opera, with its cult of authorship
surrounding the familiar works of the canon. The reverence for past
masters—Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, Puccini, and so on—places power
squarely in their cold, dead hands. It is not our agency as the living
spectator that is actively cultivated and addressed. The works
become a closed entity, a locked-up world we can only ritualistically
reenact. Poetry, on the other hand, points beyond itself to create
what I described in Chapter Two as an open form—or what the
Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco considered an “open
work.” For Eco, an open work is a celebratory title for ambiguous
and inconclusive art:
The poetics of the open work posits the work of art stripped of
necessary and foreseeable conclusions. Every performance explains
the composition but does not exhaust it. . . . Every performance
offers us a complete and satisfying version of the work, but at the
same time makes it incomplete for us, because it cannot
simultaneously give all the other artistic solutions which the work
may admit.
Some of the most fascinating operas are literally “incomplete”:
Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, Alban Berg’s Lulu, Puccini’s
Turandot. But what would happen if we considered all operas
incomplete? Meaning, as the artist Marcel Duchamp put it, that the
audience completes the work. Then every opera would become a
work of poetry, an open work, trying to break free of the confines of
the surface story.
Which brings us back to narrative: in the “open work” approach to
opera, story can serve different purposes—as a hook for the
audience, a springboard for the artist, a spine for the event—but the
opera itself becomes much more than just story. Narrative may
ground the audience in an argument or situation, but it always
leaves space for a poetic engagement that goes far beyond the
literal.
So instead of emphasizing narrative and topicality as a way to
disambiguate, and instead of jettisoning narrative altogether to
preserve its function in poetic readings, a middle path seems to offer
the best solution: let’s simply decentralize the role of narrative in
opera. Let’s use the narrative as needed and cast it off as quickly as
possible to explore complexities and paradoxes as only opera can.
Then the narrow narrative may no longer obstruct an audience’s
meaningful encounter, and an openness to the genre’s multiplicity is
much easier to accept.
Operas with decentralized narratives abound in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, offering exciting examples of what
“narrative-in-the-opera” can achieve. When the Hungarian avant-
garde composer Péter Eötvös announced that his first large-scale
opera would be based on Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, his
contemporaries were surprised that such an experimental artist
would choose such a traditionally constructed drama, which depicts
the slow burn of family strife in a Russian dacha. But rather than
following Chekhov’s narrative arc, Eötvös ingeniously transformed
the four-act play into three sequences that present the action from
three different characters’ points of view. Musical gestures and
dramatic moments reappear in different form across all three
sequences, always revealing a different perspective. Two separate
orchestras—a chamber orchestra in the pit and a larger one far
upstage and unseen—create an acoustic illusion of music drifting
through indistinct spaces, as if from the past. Fittingly, the opera
begins at the end: the three sisters’ famous speeches that close
Chekhov’s play are placed at the beginning in a spellbinding trio (SEE
PLAYLIST ). Chronological time gives way to the haunting, cyclical
experience of memory; Chekhov’s original play becomes merely a
reference point in a musical-dramatic work that stands entirely on
its own.
After a fascinating, ambiguous treatment of Nixon’s visit to China,
composer John Adams and director Peter Sellars turned their
attention to Robert Oppenheimer for their opera Doctor Atomic
(2005). The first act begins with action-movie energy, depicting the
race to prepare for the first-ever test of an atomic bomb on July 16,
1945. But the musical and the theatrical languages change
drastically in the second act: although superficially dealing with the
hours before the test’s successful execution, all sense of narrative
arc is suspended. Instead, a tapestry of perspectives disrupt the first
act’s linearity, and the audience is drawn in to the interwoven
psyches of people on the brink of the “brave new world” the bomb
will introduce. Poetry, prophesies, dreams, and nightmares take
center stage, as markers in narrative time occasionally reappear to
give the audience a faint grasp on the chronological story. Adams’s
music holds this all together with a cohesive, symphonic unfolding
that allows each audience member the space for reflection and
contemplation. The piece doesn’t end with an illustrative depiction
of the bomb’s blast—what orchestral or theatrical effect could ever
hope to match that horrific act? Instead, a distorted, scarred
electronic soundscape absorbs past, present, and future the same
way the explosion’s fireball transformed the white sand of
Alamogordo into green glass.
Just as Adams and Sellars resist the “biopic” treatment of
Oppenheimer and Nixon, the French composer Olivier Messiaen
shows little interest in a step-by-step biography of Saint Francis, the
central character in his towering epic Saint François d’Assise (1983).
Despite its five-hour duration, the opera lacks any conventional
dramatic development: there is no antagonist and ultimately only
one scene of conflict. Instead, Messiaen depicts stations in the life
journey of Saint Francis as he teaches young apprentices, preaches
to birds, and performs or experiences miracles. The libretto, written
by Messiaen himself, presents each figure in archetypal terms. And
the language, rather than introducing us to recognizable situations
and relationships, always veers toward the poetic. We see a Saint
Francis prone to cosmic visions, declaimed in a poetry that’s almost
Dadaistic. He interrupts sensible dialogue with his disciples to offer
ecstatic prayers in enigmatic images. In Act II, a young monk
remarks that it’s springtime, which elicits this response from Saint
Francis: “A celebration! An exclamation point! An island like an
exclamation point! An island of the ocean and beyond the ocean!
Where the leaves are red, the pigeons are green, the trees are white,
where the sea changes green to blue and from purple to green like
the reflection of an opal!” The monk, standing in for the audience,
can only respond in bafflement: “What are you saying?”
With story and text so elliptical, it’s up to the music to create a
cohesive journey. And an ingenious musical mind like Messiaen’s is
more than capable of fulfilling that charge. His eccentric and ecstatic
style makes the sound world of this opera unlike any other piece
written for the stage. One moment evokes Japanese kabuki theater,
the next harks back to science fiction B movies from the 1950s. Five
hours of musical fascination alternate between the beguiling, the
terrifying, the honey-sweet, and the psychedelic. And despite its
potentially off-putting elements (duration, lack of narrative,
unabashed religious sentiment), a performance of Saint François
invariably sells out and ends with rapturous applause—in large part
because of the music’s undeniable pull.
But Messiaen outdoes himself in the opera’s central scene, nearly
fifty minutes long, centered around a sermon Saint Francis preached
to a flock of birds. This symphonic scene becomes the massive
culmination of Messiaen’s lifelong love of birdsong, an essential
feature of his music. Decades of research, studying bird melodies
around the world, went into creating an overwhelming musical
tableau in which “nothing seems to happen” except an elderly man
singing hymns to his aviary companions (SEE PLAYLIST ). Despite the
scene’s centrality to the opera, even Messiaen’s most zealous
supporters admit that it can try your patience.
Imagine the poor director charged with staging this scene! How are
they to keep an audience engaged and tuned in to the expansive arc
of the music, when so little seems to happen in the story? Are they
really supposed to somehow depict birds flying around the singers’
heads for fifty minutes while the music creates an image so much
larger than any stage can hold?
In fact, the work of the director is crucial for a work like Saint
François, in the bird sermon scene above all. To understand how, we
first need to separate out the strands of an opera—music, text, and
production—and examine how directors weave them together.
OPERA UNBOUND
I recently took a friend to a very poor production of an opera, set in
a vaguely modern period and staged in an aimless way. My friend is
a smart film and event producer who had seen “twenty or so” operas
but had never developed a love for the art form. At intermission, she
was cagey, not wanting to risk seeming ignorant or rude in front of
her opera director friend. But once I expressed how awful I thought
the performance was, the conversation got interesting. As we
dissected individual elements or moments, her own perspective
started to develop. We pulled up pictures of other productions of the
same opera, so she could see the range of possible iterations the
piece might inspire, and compared the implications for what we
were watching. Swiping through different sets, she stopped at one of
an abstract space and remarked, “I don’t know how that one makes
sense with the story, but it certainly looks like how the music
sounds.”
When a performance is not going well, it can be difficult to pinpoint
precisely where the problem lies. Is it a director’s bad idea? Are the
singers not strong enough actors? Maybe the orchestra hates the
conductor and is purposefully playing badly in revolt? (Yes, this
does happen!) Or is the opera itself just not very good? Even for
professionals and music critics, parsing out why a performance
doesn’t gel is a challenge that can spark heated debate.
In her difficulty to distinguish where the music starts and the
scenery ends, my friend unwittingly revealed how opera suffers
from what neuroscientists call “the binding problem”: the fact that
simultaneous stimuli appear to us as a singular experience, even as
they activate different modalities in the brain. When we see a red
ball bouncing, for example, the color, the shape, and the movement
are all processed by different parts of our brain. How, scientists and
philosophers of the mind want to know, does consciousness
synthesize such varied information into one unified experience? A
paper on the subject for the National Institutes of Health suggests
that we can learn how by focusing on a single element at a time.
Likewise, in an art form that seems like one enormous “binding
problem,” separating out the various elements can give audiences a
greater command over their own perception.
The binding problem for opera is not a conflict between just two
principal components, as summed up by the title of an opera written
in 1786 by Antonio Salieri: Prima la musica e poi le parole, “First the
music and then the words.” Since the music is almost never actually
written before the words, Salieri’s motto advocates rather for
music’s primacy in a two-headed race for opera’s dominant voice. If
only opera were that simple! But this art form is never just words or
music; those two elements are forever triangulated by an
intervening element. It’s tempting to call the intersecting third party
the visual—namely, the staging and designs. A better name might be
the production (closer to the French term mise en scène or the
German Inszenierung).
The production is the animation of the words, the music, and the
conditions surrounding their materialization in time and space, born
in the imaginations of the director and their designer colleagues. No
mere referee in a ping-pong game between words and music, the
production creates a distinct and dynamic third avenue of meaning.
It’s like an electrified third rail running alongside the musical and
textual tracks.
I think of the three planes less as a binding and more of a braiding,
the ensuing pattern becoming an unpredictable weave. Since two
stable, document-based entities (a music score and a libretto)
require this anarchic, transient third element (a production) for life,
the three tracks should receive equal weight. It’s not just a question
of prima la musica when it comes to opera, especially when Salieri’s
catchphrase leaves out everything theatrical.
(Then again, even thinking in terms of “three tracks” is reductive.
Music, for example, shouldn’t be limited to simply what’s heard. Our
nervous systems as well as our ears are processing the waves of
sound emanating from an orchestra pit, revealing many forks in the
road to our understanding of a piece as it unfolds. The myriad
possibilities at any one moment of a performance are exponential—
but we’ll never get anywhere if we keep atomizing all the things
opera binds together. So let’s consider the three primary tracks as a
starting point.)
Disentangling these constituent elements is an essential exercise
during the performance of an opera. The German playwright Bertolt
Brecht argued this point in the first half of the twentieth century.
Brecht hated the Wagnerian model of merging the arts in opera,
calling it a “witches’ brew” that cast a narcotic spell over its
audience. The effect was a sleepwalking public, robbed of all critical
faculties and surrounded by an undifferentiated fog. In the ultimate
elaboration of his theatrical theories, called A Short Organum for the
Theater, Brecht set out a solution for separating the various artistic
strands that make up a performance. He also considered story a red
herring, unifying the experience just enough to allow each artistic
voice some autonomy. Coordinated action will still be the hallmark
of a theatrical evening, but the blurring of artistic lines should be
avoided: “Let us invite all the sister arts of the drama, not in order to
create an ‘integrated work of art’ in which they all offer themselves
up and are lost, but so that together with the drama they may
further the common task in their different ways.”
The purpose of Brecht’s unbinding—similar to Adorno’s dream of
radio broadcasting rehearsals—is to produce inquisitive and
awakened spectators. An audience that doesn’t just go with the flow
but questions, dissects, and reflects would realize the potential for
change in our societies and ourselves: “Humanity does not have to
stay the way it is now,” Brecht urged, “nor does it have to be seen
only as it is now, but also as it might become.”
Thanks to Brecht, European theater has had a century of practice in
unbinding its constituent elements. Audiences have been trained to
appreciate the difference between the production and the text,
making it easier to understand the creative interpolation of the
director when Hamlet, for example, is set in modern-day dress. But
American operagoers have mostly been spared the hermeneutical
challenge Brecht set in motion. In keeping with a general intolerance
for ambiguity, performances in our country mostly minimize the
production element by syncing it up cozily with instructions in the
libretto. The linguistic and production tracks are thus fused
together, clearing the way for the first track—music—to dominate
(prima la musica).
This is why Carmen tends to look the same no matter where you see
it in the United States. The title character will likely wear a frisky red
dress, her matador lover will carry a red cape, and the incongruity of
French music within an “authentic” Spanish setting will be shrugged
off as a given. All because we have come to assume that this is what
Carmen originally looked like—and therefore, like the music and
text, must remain unchanged. Production in this way becomes
reduced to image, most often the original image connected to the
first performances. It’s an unimaginative attempt to simplify
matters, usually defended as fidelity to authorial intention (what the
Germans call Werktreue, or “loyalty to the work”). That attitude
assumes, of course, that Bizet actually liked the original sets and
costumes. Perhaps, like composers today, he never had a say in how
his work was visualized. All the more tragic, then, to think that
Carmen is now bound in an endless, unthinking repetition of those
original choices.
There’s something inherently American about “Mickey Mousing”:
aspiring for a complete reinforcement of sight and sound. In this
case, binding is not a problem but a goal. The fathers of the
American musical, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein,
pursued a unified aesthetic that they called “integrated”—so that, as
Rodgers put it in his autobiography, “the orchestrations sounded the
way the costumes looked.” Entering a theater in this country has
begun to take on the assumption of a pact between artists and
audience: what shall be put before us is a closed system that will be
entertainingly explicable; every sensation shall correspond perfectly
to every other; and any mysteries will be resolved by evening’s end.
What is heard shall reinforce what is seen as frequently as possible,
if not exclusively.
When music never veers away from a one-to-one relationship with
the words, it quickly becomes dull and predictable. And when the
production underlines that same idea again, there’s hardly any
interest left to find. To return to the telescope analogy: when the
lenses are perfectly calibrated to create an unambiguously sharp
image, there’s not much compelling you to look for long.
The notion that the music, text, and production tracks benefit from
some independence from one another is not widely accepted by
opera audiences, no matter how sophisticated. The distance can be
unsettling, especially in relation to the music and the production.
Many an audience member who saw La bohème set on the moon, as
the director Claus Guth has done in Paris, found the dissonance
between what they saw and what they heard intolerable. Likewise,
an audience that came to my reverse-order Bohème in Detroit may
not have suspected that the work’s authors didn’t originally intend
to begin with Mimì’s death and work backward. Opera’s version of
the binding problem is the expectation that all elements in a
performance have only one way of belonging together.
Film and television have only further entrenched an audience’s
expectation of sight and sound in sync. The cliché of sappily swelling
strings to signal a film’s emotional climax has come to epitomize a
demand for lock-step coordination between what we hear and what
we see. I recall as a teenager visiting Universal Studios in Florida,
where a special exhibit for the children’s television network
Nickelodeon particularly captured my imagination. In a replica of a
sound stage, a spooky campfire scene from the show Hey Dude
played on a monitor with its original score; brooding sound effects
and long-held bass notes prompted a foreboding sense of danger as
the characters told a ghost story. The scene was then shown a
second time, with the visual edit exactly the same and the actors
delivering the same lines, but the music changed to a bouncy,
lighthearted score with whistles and kazoos. The exhibit might
sound like a manifestation of Adorno’s or Brecht’s dream of making
an audience aware of the constituent parts of an artwork. Instead,
we had been given evidence that the ominous soundtrack was
“correct,” while the silly soundtrack was out of step with the
storytelling. It was a perfect illustration of Hollywood’s factory
precision in calibrating sight and sound in a way that has cultivated
our eyes and ears to respond identically. Audiences have carried this
kind of expectation with them into the opera house, even if, as the
German director Walter Felsenstein put it, opera is a unique place
where “the ear sees and the eye hears.”
The pleasure we feel in an art form with multiple tracks of meaning
derives from its possibility of divergence, even contradiction. In
their A History of Opera, Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker use the
character of Wolfram in Wagner’s Tannhäuser (1845) to illustrate
the richness that arises when music and text do different things.
Judged merely by what he says, Wolfram comes across as square
and pious; but he is given sensual and searching music that reveals
another perspective. Abbate and Parker distinguish such complexity
as the “plot-character,” rooted in the music, and the “voice-
character” as we hear it in Wolfram’s words. It’s a useful way to
parse out the joys of opera—to which I would add the third voice of
interpretation. The singer’s individual vocal color, physical
demeanor, and expressivity can’t help but alter our view of the
character. And the way Wolfram is costumed—as schoolboy? punk
rocker? medieval minstrel?—reveals another layer. In addition to
plot-character and voice-character, we must consider the
contingency of “production-character.”
To unbind opera, imagine the three principal tracks as having three
distinct authors:
The musical track has the composer;
The literary track has the librettist;
The production track has the director.
If the first two authors are living, all three tracks have equal weight
and intersect with each other. If they are deceased—as is the case
with the majority of operas produced today—then the director
assumes a different responsibility: to prove why we should still be
performing the work even after the first two authors have died.
The director has the license to take whatever means necessary to
make the piece come to life—including cutting, rearranging, and
editing. While directors must be well versed in the original
intentions of the composer and librettist, they understand that a
production is only interesting if it intersects the other two elements
in an unstable relationship. Otherwise, the Mickey Mousing
predictability will make the experience tedious. Then again, if the
production is always countering the words and the music, it
becomes predictable in another, more cynical way. The
responsiveness demanded of the director to lead the audience on
the opera’s journey is its own unique form of authorship.
As Brecht put it, narrative becomes the place where the three
authors meet. The story may begin with the librettist, who puts
character, environment, and situation into words; but in creating
music from those words, the composer also takes on a storyteller’s
responsibility. A director then considers how the narrative unfolds
on both of those tracks to decide how the production will relay
drama to the audience: what may be elaborated, alluded to, or
contradicted in the language and the music to offer continuous
fascination. All three are master storytellers: the narrative is
everyone’s responsibility and belongs to no one. And like the lenses
of a telescope, the more they shift in and out of focus, the more
enthralling the overall storytelling becomes. What then opens up is a
field of potential meanings beyond the narrative. The music and text
can be understood as engines of nonliteral significance; and the
production becomes the temporary articulation of a limited range of
what’s possible.
The questions posed and contradictions offered by the third track
can help an audience find their way to a poetic reading of the work.
A spectator’s attention zooms in and out of what’s happening
onstage, sometimes taking in the sensory overload of the
experience, other times honing in on what’s occurring on each
individual level: What is the music doing? What is the poetry doing?
What is the production doing in relation to those two tracks? And
then come the deeper, more profound questions of interpretation
and subjective meaning. If the language of a love duet is curiously
scored for four saxophones: why? If the production seems to be
playing against the music: why? If the director has changed the
ending: what does that illuminate?
There are micro and macro ways a director helps a spectator
understand their interpretation. The macro level is more obvious:
the entire apparatus of set, costume, lighting, and video choices
ranging from the time period the piece is set in to the color of the
stage furniture. But a powerful interpretation really lives on the
micro level—the articulation of individual moments. Choices made
around any one individual line can illuminate an entire
interpretation.
The totality of a director’s perspective on Debussy’s opera Pelléas et
Mélisande (1902) can be read from how the soprano delivers her
first line as Mélisande, the beautiful young woman encountered by
the hunter Golaud in a mythical forest. Having lost his way during a
hunt, Golaud discovers her crying by a well. When he approaches
her, Mélisande rapidly but quietly sings, “Don’t touch me, don’t
touch me, or I’ll throw myself in the water!” It’s a memorable first
line for a character who will remain an indecipherable mystery for
the entire (rather indecipherable) opera.
The soprano, working with the director and the conductor, may
choose to present the line as a feral act of self-defense or with a
dreamy, detached half-smile. She may be staged threatening the
hunter with a knife, or she might be tied to a tree, indicating a
traumatic backstory. Does she come across as damaged and
deranged, or is she calm and in control of the mysterious world
around her? In less than ten seconds, this single line will inflect the
character and the drama as a whole, setting the rules of engagement
for the audience with her and the production. It tells you how the
interpreters view Mélisande—and, by extension, what they think
about a wide range of broader ideas, like the roles of women in
society. If the line carries no particular insight and simply plays out
“as written”—if the interpreters defer interpretation—that, too, tells
you the production track is deferring to the first two tracks and isn’t
likely to offer a strong perspective.
The production interprets and comments as much as it articulates,
and with every choice at the smallest and largest scale, it can reveal
the inexhaustible flexibility of an opera that is falsely viewed as
eternal and unchanging. By adding a living and conditional voice to
the authorial constellation, the production makes the entire work
open and alive. This is particularly important for operas with
deficient narratives like Il trovatore; the production can de-center
the narrative from our experience of the work and perhaps lead us
to a poetic reading. A hyperactive, steampunk-styled 2013 staging of
Trovatore at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich by the director
Olivier Py was described by Mike Silverman of the Associated Press
as “a crazy-quilt approach that is bound to horrify traditionalists.”
But singing in that production led tenor Jonas Kaufmann to consider
the deeper resonance of the story. He described “the overall theme
of the production” as the impossibility of escaping your family
history: “Everything they say, they do and they feel is a result of
those awful things which happened in the past; therefore they don’t
have a chance to live their own lives.” This is what happens when
the story is in the opera, rather than the opera in the story: the plot’s
absurdity becomes secondary to a poetic reading that brings life to
an otherwise deeply problematic work.
In the case of operas that already feature a de-centered narrative,
the production can supply a cohesiveness that may otherwise seem
elusive. To return to the long bird sermon scene in Messiaen’s Saint
François: since the sermon consists of so little action and so much
music, the director needs to devise a theatrical mechanism to shape
the time as if the scene depicted a dramatic situation. This is not to
impose conventional modes of drama on an unconventional work;
instead, it’s about finding a corresponding mechanism for visual
evolution, to keep the scene stageworthy rather than suited for the
concert hall. The traditional recourse of conflict between a hero and
villain isn’t necessary—especially in an opera that Messiaen himself
proudly explained features very little conflict to keep the focus on
joy, bliss, and transcendence. Tensions, processes, and explorations
can all shape a scene wherever narrative takes a backseat.
Even if a director’s idea for the bird sermon is jaw-dropping and
brilliantly executed, any isolation it betrays from the remaining
three-plus hours of opera will render the scene a gimmick, spectacle
for spectacle’s sake. In a poetic reading, the images, ideas, and
actions need to resound from the beginning of the performance until
the end. A director engages with the music, the text, and the broader
context to draw out ideas beyond the narrative. What is the opera
ultimately exploring, and how can those themes be transformed into
a theatrical process? The bird sermon scene will only be effective if
it’s also placed in a resonant relationship with all the other
production decisions. Any theatrical mechanism devised for the
scene doesn’t need to follow the narrative, but it must resonate with
the larger ideas of the work.
The examples of Pelléas, Trovatore, and Saint François illustrate how
critical it is for a director to take a stand on the narrative. There are
endless choices directors make with their teams to articulate a
vision, including the level of reality or artificiality to strive for and
which meaning—of a work’s many possible meanings—will become
the focus. No single production can exhaust the possibilities of the
music and text. This is a cause for celebration and wonder: through
the production track, old texts can reveal themselves to us in ever-
new ways. So we must approach each and every production as a
perspective, a reading specific to the worldview of the author of that
perspective.
The director Peter Brook, in his seminal book on theater The Empty
Space, observes that “theater is always a self-destructive art, and it
is always written on the wind.” Any production has only about five
years’ validity for Brook because “all the different elements of
staging . . . are fluctuating on an invisible stock exchange all the time.
Life is moving, influences are playing on actor and audience, and
other plays, other arts, the cinema, television, current events, join in
the constant rewriting of history and the amending of the daily
truth.” In short, “the theater is relativity.”
The joy of directing lies in being a relational artist—not a stand-
alone artist like a novelist or painter. Everything we do is in
relationship to the work and to the other artists co-creating with us.
And each project offers an opportunity to explore a new facet of the
world. I take that to be my constant challenge: not to rest on the
discoveries I’ve already made but to engage the music, the text, and
my collaborators in a dialogue that will push us all into ever new
ideas, new language, and new experiences.
THE TURN OF THE SCREW PROBLEM
In developing a strong, thematically resonant reading, a complicated
danger lies in wait for directors: the seduction of oversimplifying, of
limiting the work to a single reading. Is it possible to make decisions
about the work’s material articulation that will maintain ambiguity
rather than reducing it?
Thomas Bauer, in his essay “The Disambiguation of the World,”
takes aim at the opinion that “everything must be explained;
everything must be understood; and when it’s not understood, it
won’t matter. In theater—in its essence a refuge for ambiguity—this
task is taken up by the director, who must lead the audience (not
always successfully) through the meaning of the play or opera,
according to their opinion: why it is relevant to our times and what
message it has to offer those of us living today. This experience is
now obligatory in art, as it allows . . . multiple meanings to take the
form of a singular meaning.”
Bauer is a bit harsh to us poor directors here. After all, it is our
responsibility to lead an interpretation of the work. Yet the kind of
production he criticizes is easy to recognize: one that falls into the
common trap of placing an opera in a decipherable (usually
contemporary) setting and forcing every action to correspond
perfectly to this cogent universe. Let’s say that instead of
nineteenth-century Seville, a director places Carmen in a modern
Seville shopping mall. On the surface, there’s no reason to believe
this idea shouldn’t work—in fact, it seems to take advantage of the
freedom that staging brings. But such productions often fail to rise
above the clever. They quickly become straightforward guessing
games for the audience, predicting how the director and designers
will transport key elements into their alternate universe. (Carmen’s
deranged lover will likely be the mall’s security officer, while the
cigarette women vape safely indoors.) The idea can boast the patina
of boldness—as a clear divergence from Mickey Mousing—but
drawing clear correspondences between the opera’s original world
and our own results in a circle as closed as traditional productions.
Lacking in anything but a superficial divergence, such productions
ultimately disambiguate. The telescope is once again perfectly
focused: the forms are crisp, the colors vivid, and the desire to
continue watching usually short-lived.
This type of production is particularly popular in Germany, which
offers the most opera performances per capita of any country in the
world. As Alex Ross reported in a 2022 article for The New Yorker,
Germany’s eighty state-supported opera companies have created a
“quasi-utopia for the art form.” The repertoire is varied; the
audiences are democratic; and “with so many productions, directors
feel free to try out new ideas, some outlandish and some revelatory.”
We thus credit (or blame) Germany for the notion of Regietheater—
a German portmanteau defining the type of production driven by a
strong directorial hand. (Less generous spectators prefer the term
“Eurotrash.”) A multiplicity of meaning is not demanded from any
one production; rather, multiplicity emerges from comparisons
between several concurrent productions of the same work. Concepts
are therefore free, and often encouraged, to be completely single-
minded. In some circumstances, this approach can indeed be
revelatory, but too often an audience can smell a director’s
desperation to make their own brilliant contribution outshine the
brilliance of any other contributor.
Each time I work in Germany, I sense the expectation to devise
productions as though I were a scientist presenting a study: start
from a point of hypothetical meaning and rationally move through
the work to prove my point. A successful experiment maintains a
sharp focus of the telescope and dispels any entropic pull toward
ambiguity. Such productions are highly analytical, intellect-based,
and accompanied by lengthy program notes. A frequent gauge of
success for a German production—if you ask critics and
dramaturges—is called Konsequenz, meaning “consistent” and
“consequential.” A konsequent production achieves the coherence of
a formal argument, where any idea introduced by the director
threads the production thoroughly. Inconsistencies—even
intentional ones in the name of paradox, disruption, or openness—
mark a faulty argument/reading/interpretation and brand the
production an inkonsequent failure.
This situation is surely what irritates Bauer: the directors forcing us
all to see the opera through their funneled perspective, with
everything considered only in relation to one idea. But as a response
to Bauer’s critique, we must concede that the production track, as a
material realization, will always struggle to maintain ambiguity. We
might call this “the Turn of the Screw problem.”
Henry James’s novella famously lives in an unresolved space around
a central dilemma: a governess charged with taking care of two
young children believes ghosts are terrorizing them. The nature of
these ghosts—a figment of the governess’s hysterical over-
imagination?—remains open to the reader’s interpretation. But in
Benjamin Britten’s 1954 setting of the story, the reality/fantasy
ambiguity is difficult to maintain when the ghosts require a flesh-
and-blood tenor and soprano onstage: the ghosts are unmistakably
there. Their real presence in the house is even more clearly proved
by the beginning of Britten’s second act, depicting a private scene
between the ghosts with no human perspective (SEE PLAYLIST ).
In Metaphysical Song, Tomlinson argues that the opera’s lack of
ambiguity is “in part a simple by-product of dramatic
representation. The way [Britten] chose to present the ghosts, with
direct interactions between them, and between them and the
children, threatened already to render them too solid.” When
Tomlinson considers how a production might grapple with the
challenge of the ghosts’ physicality, he shares Bauer’s contempt for
the disambiguating presence of the director: “One could imagine, for
instance—if without much enthusiasm—an ambiguity preserving
operatic Turn of the Screw presented as the governess’s internal
monologue, in the fashion of Schoenberg’s Erwartung.” His lack of
enthusiasm for a production that comes down so hard on one
interpretation arises from the story’s central indeterminate tenet
having been explained away.
A frequent response to the Turn of the Screw problem is to “let
things remain ambiguous”—to try and make no choices, ostensibly
to allow the audience complete interpretive control. This may sound
refreshing, but the results are almost invariably indistinct. Music
and text ultimately come across as fuzzy and formless, as the simple
playing out of a piece without perspective. Without the clarity of
strong choices, a production can hope for none of the precision and
luminescence that can bring it to life. Through a telescope, it would
be so out of focus that the image you see has no definition
whatsoever. (Or, put another way, “It’s all a blur.”)
American audiences should have no difficulty recognizing this sort
of experience; the third track pretends it isn’t there and tries to
draw no undue attention to itself. The focus is placed solely on the
music and the text (an experience that can just as easily be
replicated in a concert presentation or at home with a recording).
The design, by default, falls back into the recognizability of past
productions and “staying true to the author’s original intention.” I’ve
heard conservative operagoers argue that no interpretation at all is
preferrable to a self-involved and “outlandish” one. It can be hard to
convince someone who thinks this way that protecting a work from
a confrontation with reality robs it of any opportunity to reveal
fresh insight and new resonances.
Let’s also imagine singers trying to find their own way in one of
these uninflected productions: resisting any interpretation, the
director can only offer them unhelpful vagueness. When a soprano
playing Britten’s governess needs to decide whether to play a
certain monologue as bewitched or clear-headed, her director can’t
give her guidance that might fire up her imagination. She can make
up her own mind—but so can the tenor and soprano playing the
ghost characters of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, who might decide
something completely different. In the resulting production, a
familiar sight on operatic stages, the singers all seem to be in
different worlds: a director hasn’t unified them around a common
vision or at least created a consensus for what’s happening in any
given scene. Avoiding making a choice is itself a choice—and quite
possibly the only one that will always be wrong.
In these circumstances, you can understand how directors might
end up taking the scientific, or konsequent, approach. The Turn of the
Screw problem makes clear that production choices lessen opera’s
ambiguity. And if that’s the case, why not go all the way with a bold,
unambiguous direction?
How each artist grapples with this problem defines their
contribution to an operatic experience. In my case, I have evolved a
perspective distinct from the German Regietheater. I’ve always been
drawn to Inkonsequenz because of opera’s proximity to poetry, with
its irrationality, flights into the unknown, and expansion of language
and therefore of our perceptions. I want to encourage poetic
readings of a work rather than follow a fixed goal, through
productions that oscillate between specific meanings.
In 2014, when I staged Adams’s Doctor Atomic in Karlsruhe,
Germany, I wanted to visualize and thematize the opera’s narrative
shift between the more expository first act and the expansive
second. Leaning on expectations posed by the title for superhero
rhetoric, I turned Act I into a comic book: behind a projection scrim
of hand-drawn animations, the singers appeared in boxes revealed
by sliding doors. The years of World War II, the opera’s setting, were
in fact the “golden age of comic books” with the debuts of Superman
in 1938, Batman in 1939, and Doctor Fate in 1940, among many
others. A comic-book approach also conjured America’s sense of
moral clarity then, as if the line between good and evil were black
and white, and action unfolded in a causal and linear manner. An
apparent conviction of moral mission, in the face of suspicions that
the Germans were creating their own weapon of mass destruction,
motivated Oppenheimer to begin working on the atomic bomb. But
moral clarity quickly darkens, both historically—with the criminal
deployment of the new technology on Japanese civilians—and in the
context of the opera, which asks us to reconsider the mythic
narrative Americans still use to talk about this era. The comic-book
aesthetic of my production, then, started to unravel as the first act
continued.
A konsequent production would carry the comic-book aesthetic from
beginning to end. But just as the opera makes a leap from narrative
to a post-dramatic landscape, the projection-heavy first act of my
production gave way to the many performers inhabiting one
enormous, curved piece of graph paper. The more choreographic
language of Act II was resonant with the work’s themes: the blank
page at the discovery of a primal creative/destructive force and the
onset of a new “nuclear” era; the illusion of any division between the
opera’s characters; the ingenuity and horror of the human mind.
Naïve faith in a clear story as promised by Act I’s comic storytelling
was exposed as a tragic fallacy.
Although the production earned me the Götz Friedrich Prize that
year, the expectation for Konsequenz has become so deeply
ingrained in German culture that some audiences had a difficult time
making the leap with me from Act I to Act II. At the award ceremony,
I used my acceptance speech to justify a choice that some claimed
was illogical: changing the language in a production to keep it open
and encourage poetic rather than linear readings. My conceptual
process didn’t begin with a preconceived meaning, which I then
used to rationally “explain” the opera from beginning to end.
Instead, I engaged the imagination of my entire team to search for
what felt true moment by moment through the piece. The meaning
isn’t formulated before work begins, but emerges only once the
production is complete. That’s the poetic and nonscientific approach
that I think makes for the most exciting opera.
In my own productions, I aim for a high specificity on every detail—
each word, each note, and each movement—but I don’t believe in
forging the composite into a closed circle. The more that individual
choices keep opening up the opera to continuous reconsideration,
the more I can preserve ambiguity and grant agency to the
spectator, as Rancière, Barthes, and Eco would have it. I want a
production to contain as much of the original work’s
multitudinousness as possible, without vanishing into vagueness. A
director must seize the spectators’ attention with the specificity of a
strong interpretation, and at the same time leave space for their
own interpretations.
I don’t know that I have a solution to the Turn of the Screw problem,
but if I were ever to direct Britten’s opera, I would look for a way to
constantly evade closure. Instead of deciding whether the entire
opera is in the governess’s imagination or the ghosts are real, I
would look to create a constantly fluctuating stage reality, specific in
each moment but not reaching any final conclusion. One scene might
articulate a particular reading (the governess hears the voices of the
ghosts but doesn’t see them); the next might support a contradictory
reading (the ghosts inhabit the physical world of the manor, moving
the furniture and starting a fire); and perhaps the next would
suggest a completely unexpected reading (the wealthy landowner
who engaged the governess has actually paid off his kids and hired
actors to play the ghosts in a twisted social experiment).
Maintaining concurrent possible readings from scene to scene, and
always with a committed specificity, can allow an ambiguity of
multiple perspectives to flourish.
Not every director (or every audience member!) will find this kind
of storytelling satisfying. The key point is that any interesting idea
must evolve and become more complicated as a performance
continues. Just as music develops and never stays stationary, the
time-based nature of a performance demands unceasing change. A
concept that is introduced and does not evolve will remain inert.
The opera, in the flow of time, will pass it by. But when a production
concept accompanies the audience in that process of duration—
shifting, progressing, morphing, falling apart, transforming—then
the work has been brought to life.
The telescope a director invites an audience to look through should
therefore always be shifting in and out of focus, never staying at one
calibration for long. The degree of blur should entice us to look
deeper, to search for clarity, even while realizing that any lucidity
will be short-lived. The result can be an invigorating openness, with
ambiguity maintained (paradoxically) by precision. It’s a precarious
but pleasurable balancing act that defines, for me, my role as
director: preserving possibilities beyond my own interpretation.
THE ENCHANTED SPACE
Let me sum this chapter up not as a conclusion, but as a starting
point for further exploration.
Rather than considering opera imprisoned by outdated modes of
storytelling, we should think of it as occupying an excitingly
indeterminate space beyond narrative. Opera is fundamentally a
musical art form, and yet it’s so much more than music; it’s
inherently theatrical, and yet it’s so much more than a play; it
demands a proper spatial relationship, and yet it transcends
architecture; the visual aspects dominate, and yet it is not to be
confused with the visual arts. Its interstitiality is what makes opera
so bewildering and difficult to decipher—but it’s also what brings
the art form close to contemporary life.
Audiences must be able to tolerate a large amount of ambiguity if
they are to find pleasure in an experience created by multiple
authors. The director takes them on a journey away from the safe
and recognizable haven of narrative into an uncharted and barely
explicable meeting place of music, text, and production. With three
primary tracks running as a performance unfolds, opera
simultaneously offers different meanings that sometimes converge
and sometimes clash. The effect is kaleidoscopic and contrapuntal;
opera’s potential for the layered meaning we find in poetry is the
reason it remains the only narrative art form whose masterpieces
include “stupid stories.”
I would love for opera audiences to stop worrying and learn to love
ambiguity. Maybe one way to achieve that is a bait and switch: what
if we called it something else? Say we started calling ambiguity
“enchantment”—since in any case I believe theater’s true capacity
for magic consists in its ability to hold multiple realities at once, to
make a paradox visible. Let’s consider opera’s nonreality not as a
deficit but as a power—to create an enchanted space, with many
meanings and possibilities somehow coalescing. Opera would
become not a punishing exercise in developing a “tolerance” for
ambiguity, but an experience that makes ambiguity and complexity
so pleasurable that we long for more in our daily lives.
When an art form offers so much potential, any single interpretation
is bound to feel partial and incomplete. Surrounding every choice is
a maze of forking paths, pointing in all directions to every choice
passed up. We can confidently believe in a future for opera only if
we can preserve that multidimensionality. The opera house is not a
place where various media come together to be reduced to a single
meaning or even a single story. Instead, different voices offer as
many diverting stories as possible without losing a certain amount
of coherence. True opera is a state of tension on the precipice of the
possible, always threatening to collapse but somehow, miraculously,
sustaining. Even sometimes triumphing.
 5

CASE STUDY: THE MAGIC FLUTE IN

BERLIN
Getting booed is strange.
Not the booing of a lone dissenter or a handful of disgruntled
patrons, like the two grumpy critics on The Muppet Show. That
isolated expression of displeasure pops up occasionally in American
theaters but often seems out of place. (The current default reaction
at the end of any live performance in this country, the standing
ovation, used to signal great enthusiasm but has since become as
customary as a 20 percent tip.) I mean the type of booing where an
entire audience seems out for blood—the kind you read about
happening at the Paris premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring
(1913) or at the opening of Patrice Chereau’s centenary production
of Wagner’s Ring in Bayreuth (1976).
The practice is alive and well in Europe, and especially Germany.
Booing the singers or conductor happens occasionally, but at most
opening nights of an opera, a “booing chorus” greeting the director
and design team at the curtain call has become as commonplace as
our standing ovation. (I’ve recently seen a marketing campaign for
an opera company that read, “Come for the music, stay for the
Standing O.” In Germany, you could update that: “Come for the
music, stay to boo the director!”)
I’ve been on the receiving end of this kind of reaction only once, at
the 2019 premiere of my production of Mozart’s Magic Flute at the
Berlin Staatsoper Unter den Linden. I knew our “booing chorus”
would be extreme, since the audience had already begun to boo at
the end of Act I. And sure enough, the wall of sound that greeted our
bows was unlike anything I’d faced before.
What, you might ask, could I possibly have done to receive this kind
of public shaming?
I wish I could claim “ambiguity intolerance” as the reason. Instead, I
must admit that the performance just didn’t gel. The rehearsal
process was one of the most turbulent I’ve ever experienced, and
although we were supported by the theater’s intendant, Matthias
Schulz, the general hostility toward me and my team was perhaps
best encapsulated by a technician I spotted in the wings during the
curtain call with his camera out, ready to film us being trashed. Even
after a rocky process, every imaginable obstacle on opening night—
sicknesses, cancellations, technical malfunctions, even bad weather
—seemed to conspire against us. Watching the opening
performance was like observing a working rehearsal for a show that
needed a lot of work.
Still, when we took our bows, I felt surprisingly calm as the
avalanche of boos socked us. (And perhaps also relieved that no one
threw anything!) The first performance may have been flawed, but
my team’s colorful, loud, fantastical, complicated production had
crystallized my perspective on this opera. There was no question
that I could stand behind our work.
More surreal than the actual booing was Matthias’s genuinely
enthusiastic reaction after the curtain fell. If this had been America,
the theater’s management would surely have proffered at least
superficial consolation: “Don’t listen to them,” or “Their reactions
are all politics,” or “It has nothing to do with you and your great
work.” Instead, Matthias seemed elated despite the negative
response. He acknowledged that the production was not going to be
to everyone’s taste, but he was sure it would make an impact after
this tumultuous premiere and achieve what he called “cult status.”
Directors usually stay with a production only through opening night
—a dispiriting tradition, implying either that a production has
become complete, closed, and immutable after the first
performance, or that our meddling is no longer welcome. We
therefore miss out on the continuation of the process the conductor
and the singers undergo as a show finds its momentum. (I always
tell people to attend the last performance of an opera rather than
the first, because it’s invariably a stronger and more confident
show.) And we also miss out on that untranslatable sensation of
what transpires in an audience as they experience the work. As
word of mouth travels and audiences begin to arrive with
expectations, a palpable shift can be felt in the auditorium. At the
premiere, the ideas are new for everybody equally; that level playing
field is exciting but much harder to read. For example, I later learned
that our opening night audience had included its share of
enthusiastic supporters. Afterward, I had to make do with reports
that Matthias’s vision of cult status was starting to materialize:
performances were well sold, and the audiences were younger and
genuinely fascinated by the production. Reviews of the opening
were scathing, but critics who attended subsequent performances
began to rave. And the set designer Mimi Lien and costume designer
Walter van Beirendonck won that year’s Beazley Award from the
London Design Museum—a satisfying rejoinder to initial criticisms
of the show as garish and “bunt” (meaning “colorful,” with not
entirely positive connotations).
Could it be, after our public drubbing, that my team actually came
out on top?
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
IT HAD BEEN A GREAT honor for me to be invited to direct at Berlin’s
Staatsoper, not only one of the oldest opera theaters in Europe but a
stage that carries enormous personal significance. When fresh out of
college, I spent a bohemian year in Berlin, learning to speak German
and absorbing all the theater, opera, and dance I could. With three
opera houses, a dozen orchestras, and countless theaters, the
breadth and depth of live arts in the city made my time there a kind
of self-directed second education. As I was still learning about opera,
frequent (and dirt cheap) visits to the Staatsoper shaped much of
my understanding of what the art form could be. Every experience
there was exciting, regardless of what was playing. I got to know the
building inside and out, including the best ways to sneak in to a
show (the paltry sums I earned teaching English were stretched
awfully thin that year). I’m still in touch with members of a social
circle of other people my age who went out after every show to
argue over what we’d seen. Twenty years later, the invitation to
direct my own production at this theater felt like a circle closing.
And not just any opera but The Magic Flute, probably the most
beloved opera in Germany. For thirty years, the Staatsoper had
performed the work in a reconstruction of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s
original, iconic set designs—partly to honor Schinkel’s role as
architect of the building, and partly to have something “historical” to
offer tourists. Mounting a new production of this tremendously
important work—displacing a legendary museal staging—was not
for the faint of heart.
Whenever I am asked to name my favorite opera, The Magic Flute
usually springs to mind first. This often surprises opera fans, who
expect me to name a more obscure or thorny contemporary piece—
or at least one that’s a bit more logical. “Magic Flute? Really? But it
barely makes any sense.” The Egyptologist Jan Assmann considers
Mozart’s opera alongside the pyramids as among “the greatest
enigmas in human culture.” Its resistance to the tidy rationality of
more straightforward narratives makes it a piece people love to
trash: the story is “stupid” or “meaningless” and defies reason; the
music, although sublime, shifts registers so often that you have no
idea where it belongs; and the reliance on “magic” and spectacle is
childish, not dignified or deep enough for the operatic stage.
Such complaints echo the stubborn adults in Antoine de Saint-
Exupéry’s beloved book The Little Prince. At the beginning of the
first chapter is a six-year-old’s drawing. We are asked to identify the
ambiguous shape: is it a boa constrictor that has swallowed an
elephant? or simply a lumpy hat? The critical eye of the adult fails to
see the more fantastical intention of the child, who is deemed an
artistic failure. The child would be better off studying sensible topics
like mathematics, history, and grammar. “Grown-ups never
understand anything by themselves,” the narrator learns, “and it is
tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to
them.”
Like The Little Prince, The Magic Flute illustrates a conundrum of
maturity: why do so many children intuitively understand the opera,
while adults dwell on its irrational, inexplicable, and contradictory
aspects? Grown-ups tangle themselves up in search of consistency
and causation, disdaining the opera’s lack of coherence and closing
off its direct communication to their inner child. The opera may
indeed be confounding in its shifting modes from kaleidoscopic to
Shakespearean, from naïve to philosophical—but it’s best
appreciated when we can approach it with the eyes and ears of
children.
Mozart, who wrote his first opera at age eleven, is sometimes called
“the eternal child.” To the serious classical music lover, the label
may seem like an insult, but Magic Flute proves its validity: his
penultimate work for the stage (written when he was only thirty-
five) is a loving ode to a childhood he never quite left. The opera is a
paean of hope that music can help us return to the uncorrupted
nature of our younger selves, before mature self-consciousness
made everything so complicated.
The ideal spectator of Magic Flute is the young girl in Ingmar
Bergman’s film version, who sits in the audience with wide eyes,
delighting in what she sees. Bergman begins his adaptation as if it
were a theatrical presentation that gradually becomes cinematic:
two-dimensional sets grow more and more three-dimensional, and a
presentational style gives way to close-up confessional delivery of
the text and music. But the camera throughout constantly returns to
the girl in the audience, a framing layer of reality that undermines
the audience’s tendency to believe in what is being depicted. The
montage of images—the world of the opera cutting directly back to
the face of this little girl—implies that the film’s cinematic leaps are
actually the result of her imagination. It is she, not Bergman, who is
transforming the artificial presentation onstage into an authentic,
immersive, and internal experience.
We do this instinctively when we visit the theater as children; we
trust what we see, and the theatrical universe extends well beyond
the wings. We watch a performer exiting the stage and assume that
character is entering some other out-of-view space, just as our
parents leave our room to go on existing someplace else. As adults,
we might imagine that performer smoking a cigarette on their
break, as Bergman’s actors are seen doing. We adults have learned
to read the clear delineation of fiction and reality, and we recognize
the theater’s proscenium arch as the frame dividing the two. But for
the child, the boundary between worlds is porous, and the
proscenium arch is invisible.
What prevents adults from recognizing the boa constrictor in Saint-
Exupéry’s drawing or following the lead of Bergman’s young
spectator is the loss of childlike wonder that so often accompanies
growing up. Like Tamino, the prince at the center of the opera’s
story, each adult faces a rocky road of maturity marked by
disillusion, temptation, tragic loss, and fear of death. Those
challenges tend to alienate us from our childlike state; the world
around us becomes disenchanted. The Magic Flute doesn’t deny that
life is full of suffering and despair—but the true trial is to never lose
our youthful joy in the face of those hardships.
The opera makes childhood divine, as personified by the only
faultless characters in the piece: the three “beautiful and wise” boys,
who sing in perfectly spaced harmonies and always show up in the
nick of time. They first appear as mute guides to Tamino and his
mysterious, bird-catching companion, Papageno. Throughout, the
young trio repeatedly intrude on the scene to save the adults from
destroying their lives. They are this opera’s equivalent to a deus ex
machina—in place of Athena, Mozart gives us these charming little
cherubs.
The Three Boys have one moment, at the beginning of the Act II
Finale, where they address the audience directly:
Soon the dawn will come,
And the sun will begin its golden path.
Soon all delusion will vanish,
And the wise will be victorious.
Oh blessed peace! Descend again
And return to the hearts of humans:
Then this earth will be a paradise
And all mortals equal to gods!
This is the kind of language we imagine issuing forth from Sarastro,
the sagacious high priest who sings with a sonorous bass. Sarastro is
a confusing character. Because of his stentorian voice and
patriarchal authority, audiences are socially conditioned to consider
him wise and truthful. He sings two arias, each resembling a lullaby
—the slowest music in the opera. The chill that Sarastro brings to
the party can either indicate that he has achieved a sublime level of
tranquility, or that he is now far removed from what the
philosopher Hannah Arendt would call the vita activa. While the
Three Boys sing hopefully of a utopian future, where humanity can
reach a divine status, Sarastro’s most famous aria, “In diesen
heil’gen Hallen” (“In these holy halls”), tries to portray the present
state of his temple as perfect—a hard pill to swallow, since we have
seen how the temple is run by enslaved “Moors” who are mercilessly
whipped if they disobey. As the opera continues, Sarastro’s own
unchecked authority seems to be his only “virtue” and gaslighting
his only remaining skill. On the other end of the spectrum, the Three
Boys—always active, always a life force—are offered as our true
guides. They carry with them the hope that we will find our way
back to paradise, our natural state, back to the childhood we’ve lost.
If Sarastro’s music aims to put us to sleep, the Three Boys constantly
try to wake up our dormant inner child, as if to say: When we keep
the child in us alive, even in the face of death, we may realize the full
potential of our lives.
Dismissing magic as a child’s game is easy for the serious, adult
spectator. But even the simplest forms of magic, like sleight-of-hand
illusions, provoke a sense of wonder at the suspension of our
perceived limitations. “Magic” has everything to do with reality: the
opening up of possibilities we have long taken for granted as closed,
or the return to an enchanted vision of the world. (Wonder was one
of humanity’s six essential passions for Descartes.) Theatrical magic
is the same magic accepted by children, who believe that Tamino’s
journey continues when he leaves the stage. And a similar awe takes
place when characters manifest seemingly unimaginable acts: grace
instead of revenge, as in Mozart’s operas Idomeneo and La Clemenza
di Tito; forgiveness rather than refusal, as in The Marriage of Figaro
and Così fan tutte; courage overcoming fear, as in Magic Flute. We
may berate others for “magical thinking,” for believing problems will
magically solve themselves or that consequences can be outrun. But
opera reminds us why we need to believe in magic—not in the sense
of delusional living but in the spirit of seeking out what remains
possible even when all the odds are against us.
In the first act Finale of Magic Flute, Papageno attempts to rescue
the princess Pamina, daughter of the Queen of the Night (and, for
me, the real hero of the opera), from Sarastro’s temple. But they are
trapped by Sarastro’s enslaved henchman Monostatos. “Now it’s all
over for us,” they sing in despair. Then, out of thin air, Papageno
summons the will to fight for their lives: “Wer viel wagt . . . wer viel
wagt . . . wer viel wagt gewinnt auch viel!” The sentiment is not
particularly deep: “Whoever risks big . . . whoever risks big . . .
whoever risks big can often win big!” But the music depicts
Papageno rapidly ratcheting up his courage, repeating “wer viel
wagt” higher and higher, before taking action. And his action is the
kind of “sleight of hand” magic that might seem childish: he plays a
music-box melody on his magic bells, instantly hypnotizing all the
angry guards and rendering them harmless.
This swift little scene is one of the opera’s most humorous moments,
a comedic counterpart to the more serious bravery that Tamino and
Pamina are called to generate. But even here, Mozart is showing us
that magic begins with an act of will in our hearts. Papageno
discovering his courage supplies the true sorcery of the scene; his
magic bells and Tamino’s magic flute are only effective tools for
“stage magic” once the characters commit internally to seizing their
destiny. This is the deep secret that the opera demonstrates each
time it’s performed: all external magic emerges from a more
powerful, more beautiful inner alchemy.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
NOTHING IN THE MAGIC FLUTE is what it seems. The story revolves
around sudden shifts of perception, which constantly confound the
prince Tamino. When he first hears the Queen of the Night’s account
of Pamina’s violent abduction by Sarastro, Tamino takes her words
at face value and vows revenge. But approaching Sarastro’s temple,
Tamino is surprised to see that the doors are inscribed with
virtuous words, denoting a “Temple of Wisdom,” a “Temple of
Reason,” and a “Temple of Nature.” “Did I reach the seat of the
gods?” he wonders. This is certainly not the nightmarish realm he
was expecting. Instead, Tamino confronts a cryptic character known
only as “The Speaker.” What follows is one of the opera’s weirdest
and best scenes. The Speaker bars Tamino’s entry to the temple and
asks him to reconsider his assumptions. “Has what you’ve heard
been proven?” The complete 180-degree turn leaves Tamino dizzy
to the point of despair: “When will you dissipate, endless night?
When will my eyes find the light?” An unnamed chorus replies:
“Soon, soon . . . or never!” It’s an inscrutable scene that would feel
right at home in a Kafka novel. (Ingmar Bergman used the music of
this scene powerfully in another, much darker film, The Hour of the
Wolf.)
Aristotle’s fantastic concept for what Tamino experiences was
peripeteia, or the sudden turning point in a story as a character’s
fortune changes. But in most Greek tragedy where peripeteia played
a crucial and recognizable role in the drama, the reversal of fortune
occurred shortly before the play’s final denouement. The change of
perspective in Magic Flute appears quite a bit earlier—at the
beginning of the Act I Finale, with much more opera still to come.
Additional reversals will take place—most famously when the
grieving, sympathetic Queen of the Night reveals another side of her
personality in “Der Hölle Rache” (described in Chapter Three).
Brilliantly and confoundingly, Magic Flute introduces one peripeteia
after another—and because nearly every character undergoes at
least one sudden shift of perception, the audience is not at all clear
whom they should trust. In the course of a performance, you may
find yourself wondering, like Tamino, “When will this eternal night
be over?”
Peripeteia is probably my go-to narrative device when creating a
production. Beyond their function in the narrative, such moments
help keep the circuit of meaning open. They become the essential
scenes in a production by overturning our assumptions of the stage
reality, pointing to other possibilities and other interpretations. As
mentioned earlier, I try to place spectators in an unstable
relationship to the work, where surprising new perspectives or
unexpected new ideas demand that they reconsider the terrain. To
avoid the closure of an airtight argument (the German concept of
Konsequenz), I want a production to constantly unsettle the
audience and ask for continuous renegotiations of their experience.
As I began work on Magic Flute, I knew that whatever mechanism I
came up with had to keep pace with the frequent shifts and
reversals of the piece itself.
I conceived the opera as a marionette theater, with the singing
actors as life-size puppets. I imagined restricting all entrances and
exits to the space above rather than stage left or stage right, to
maintain the marionette illusion of appearing and disappearing
from the sky. When it became clear that not every entrance could be
vertical, we supplemented moments of actual flying with a system
we called “fake flying”: the singing actors kept their feet on the
ground but stayed attached to the fly system above by three elastic
yellow strings, so the audience never lost sight of the main
characters’ inherent artificiality as manipulated puppets. Other
characters surrounded our protagonists as wind-up toys, jacks-in-
the-box, or simply shadow puppets. In short, the opera’s motley
crew of characters all became figurines in a children’s theater,
blown up to human scale.
Mozart’s music pairs nicely with the lightness and simplicity of a
marionette. The score must always sound as effortless and natural
as child’s play (despite how challenging it may be to perform). But
what really interested me was how easily the marionette as an
image could evolve through the production, with moments of
peripeteia. An operated toy is a perfect symbol of the quintessential
human dilemma: do we act from our own free will, or is some
invisible force pulling us to perform roles in a theater we mistake
for reality? A poetic reading, maintaining the childlike wonder of the
toy theater, also allows the opera to chart the evolution of individual
consciousness. The marionette’s wood giving way to humanity
mirrors the alchemical procedure of converting our inner metal into
spiritual gold.
 Marionettes reaching for divinity: Anna Prohaska as Pamina and Florian
Teichtmeister as Papageno.
Early in the opera, Tamino receives a portrait of the queen’s
daughter Pamina and is seized by an unexplainable paroxysm of
feeling. “This portrait has an enchanting beauty . . . I feel something
I’ve never felt before. Could this be love?” In the way the melody
unpredictably twists and turns, Tamino’s aria serves as a microcosm
for this wily opera. His strong emotion inspires a blissful state of
confusion, catalyzing his transformation. However, since it’s still
early in his journey, he doesn’t display a hero’s secure sense of self.
The aria shows him questioning, doubting himself, and unsure of
what to do. In my production, Pamina’s portrait became a small
marionette that the puppet Tamino could manipulate with his own
(manipulated) hands. Like a series of nesting dolls, a marionette
holding a marionette was a powerful image for me of the character
at this stage: unaware and impossibly far from self-perception.
Pamina is not yet a subject for him but an object, a thing. And (as our
digital age still proves true) falling in love with an image is an
egoistic illusion. Nevertheless, his initiation has begun, and the
humanizing process, quickened by music, becomes possible.
At the end of the production, Tamino and Pamina remove their
strings and stand on their own feet. Our two marionettes face their
greatest fears—gravity and abandonment—to become conscious of
their strings and gain mastery over their condition. Through
confusion and trials, they find a way together to become noble—to
become fallible—to become human. Without ever losing a fairy-tale
veneer, Magic Flute accompanies the audience through a
reenactment of all the misperceptions and difficulties that keep us
from our potential for such transformation. Faced with endless
reversals, feints, and illusions, Tamino and Pamina nevertheless
achieve a transcendence from the material world. Overcoming
received prejudices and superstitions from the previous generation
(Sarastro and the Queen of the Night) has enabled them to become
enlightened humans beyond any doctrine.
How could anyone call the story of The Magic Flute stupid?
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
NOT LONG AFTER THE FIRST performances of this opera in 1791, the
German playwright Heinrich von Kleist wrote a short but influential
text (far too little known in the United States) called “On the
Marionette Theater.” The article appeared in three installments of
the Berliner Abendblätter, the daily newspaper where Kleist was
employed as a theater critic. His critical voice was harsh, befitting
his status as a neglected genius (in his own time, only three of his
plays were ever performed). But his relative obscurity also meant
that the theater was still essentially a theoretical proposition for
him, and the speculative tone of this essay carries an unmistakable
air of philosophy.
The article relates a dialogue between an unnamed narrator and
“Herr C.,” the leading dancer at the opera. The narrator is surprised
to have often noticed Herr C. on the street “among the rabble,”
enjoying performances by a marionette troupe. What could such an
educated and accomplished artist find to amuse him among such a
lowly form of entertainment?
(From the first paragraph, Kleist captures a central conflict between
“high” and “low” art that remains an eternal conflict in opera, to
which I will return in Chapter Seven. The conflict applies to Magic
Flute as well, since the opera wasn’t written for Vienna’s dignified
and grand court theater, but for one of the independent theaters on
the outskirts of the city instead. Just as Kleist’s narrator begins by
believing that nothing worthy of the great artist’s attention could be
uncovered in a childish art form, Magic Flute is similarly and all too
frequently dismissed as inherently juvenile.)
Yet Herr C. claims that human performers can learn much from their
inanimate counterparts. The puppet, lacking in basic consciousness,
doesn’t suffer from the self-consciousness that Herr C. calls an
“affectation” in his human counterparts. He reflects on the image of
a boy removing a splinter from his foot, a “graceful” gesture because
it’s unperformed. The boy exhibits no self-consciousness in his
action, which makes his posture arresting and beautiful. As we
mature, Herr C. argues, such spontaneous acts of unaware poise
become impossible; as adults, we are too locked in our own heads
and too conditioned by society to act with this kind of simple,
elemental grace.
Herr C. seamlessly shifts the argument onto the metaphysical plane
when he suggests that watching the puppet move with a grace lost
to adults is a reminder of our fallen condition, “unavoidable ever
since we ate from the tree of knowledge. But paradise is barred up
and the cherubs left behind. We have to journey around the world to
see if maybe we can get in from the back.” The puppet’s defiance of
gravity—the force human dancers fight the most—also becomes a
metaphysical symbol: “the power from above that lifts us up is
greater than what keeps us chained to the earth.”
Herr C.’s ability to glean spiritual dimensions from a marionette
leaves the narrator gobsmacked. The essay ends with a cryptic and
penetrating return not just to the imagery of the Garden of Eden but
to a surprising End of Days:
“Well now, my dear friend,” Herr C. said, “you now have everything
you need to understand where I’m coming from. In our material
world, as intelligence dims and weakens, the grace within it emerges
proportionately brighter and more powerful. Just like . . . an image
appearing in a concave mirror, after disappearing into infinity,
suddenly reappears complete before us; so too, after knowledge has
passed through some infinity, grace comes back—most purely in the
forms of the human body that have either zero or infinite
consciousness. I mean, either the marionette or the god.”
“Which means,” I interjected despite my bewilderment, “we will
have to eat from the Tree of Knowledge again to fall back into a state
of innocence?”
“Without doubt,” he answered. “That is the last chapter of the
history of the world.”
With Kleist’s essay and Bergman’s young spectator as my
inspirations, the concept for the marionette theater production
began to take shape. I gathered a fantastic group of collaborators—
in addition to Mimi Lien and Walter van Beirendonck, the team
included Hannah Wasileski on projections, Reinhard Traub on lights,
and Krystian Lada as the dramaturge—to start to articulate how the
ideas would become animated.
(As I will discuss in the final chapter, everything a director does
demands so much cooperation and co-articulation that pinpointing
the place where I start and the myriad other musical, visual, and
technical artists end is a near impossibility. The collaborative reality
in creating an opera means I can hardly call anything in this
production solely “mine.”)
We decided early on that our marionette theater would be anchored
in the visual notion of collage—just as the musical world of the
opera constantly shifts registers and genres. We looked to create
composite identities for each character rather than straightforward
reproductions of existing puppets and toys. So Tamino and Pamina
seemed fashioned out of wood, but they wore bright red boots and
gloves reminiscent of Osamu Tezuka’s classic manga character Astro
Boy. The slaves became sleek onyx robots infused with
accoutrements from Star Wars and S&M clubs. The Three Ladies
serving the Queen of the Night appeared as three neon-colored
heads emerging from one voluptuous, Rubenesque naked body, a
kind of grotesque excess of maternal presence that threatens to
suffocate the budding prince. The magic animals Tamino enchants
with his magic flute became the frozen animals of a carousel,
liberated from immobility and set free to dance into the wild. And
the all-important Three Boys perched on a cloud wearing monkey
masks, recalling the Japanese myth of Mizaru (“see no evil”),
Kikazaru (“hear no evil”), and Iwazaru (“speak no evil”). Mimi’s sets
played with two-dimensionality and emphasized verticality—set
pieces descending or ascending rather than the more conventional
stage left and right—and always involved a sense of visual
assemblage. The effect was a never-ending phantasmagoria, fitting
with the opera’s frequent peripeteia, and taking full advantage of the
theater’s elaborate stage machinery.
Krystian connected our ideas to the work’s historical origins.
Mozart’s opera has much in common with what were known in
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Vienna as Maschinenkomödien,
popular stage works driven by a fascination with the theater’s
mechanisms for creating illusion. Circus-like quick changes and
special effects dictated the story and dramatic situation of these
works, transporting audiences to exotic locales and astonishing
them with moments of stage magic. Some argue that
Maschinenkomödien conveyed a philosophical and religious
perspective of the world as full of illusions, with humans as mere
puppets in a larger machine. This popular form of entertainment
helps explain why Magic Flute is structured the way it is; but the
opera goes further by treating some of the characters as manic
machines themselves. The frenetic, proto-electronic coloratura of
the Queen of the Night’s rage aria is an obvious example of an
utterance from a woman who feels at least part cyborg. The
obsessive, music-box mechanics of Monostatos’s gruesome Act II
aria are also clear evidence of the widespread craze in Mozart’s time
for automatons and early forerunners of artificial intelligence. Toys
and marionettes feel completely at home in this opera.
Maschinenkomödien and their popular counterpart Singspiele are
sometimes considered precursors to the American musical—and
like musicals, Magic Flute alternates between music and spoken
dialogue. For a director, the music is far less a challenge than those
dialogues: once music has disappeared, life seems to have vanished
from the stage, as if the floor has just dropped out or something has
gone terribly wrong, forcing the show to grind to an unexpected
halt. Singers who can project their arias unamplified to the back of a
large auditorium rarely know how to use their speaking voice in this
way, resorting to either booming, old-timey declamation or, to
preserve intimacy and truthfulness, a cinematic low volume that the
audience can barely hear. In either case, the production’s energy is
sapped. Even if a director manages to get the delivery right with one
set of performers, once the cast changes, that specificity becomes
very hard to maintain. I may have fond memories of frequenting the
Staatsoper when I was younger, but the Magic Flute production I
saw back then featured wonderful singers struggling mightily with
the spoken sections. They delivered their dialogue in a clunky, sing-
song way that indicated a lack of real understanding of the language.
Music can disguise a singer’s lack of comfort with a language, but
spoken dialogue makes it painfully obvious. The alternation
between brilliantly executed music and schlocky dialogue often
makes a performance of the opera a highly uneven experience.
I’ve never enjoyed the dialogues of Magic Flute more than during a
performance by the Salzburger Marionettentheater, where a
recording reenacted the full opera on a miniature stage with classic
marionettes. The performance captured the piece’s essentialized
mode of storytelling, far removed from any psychological realism,
and watching the puppets during the spoken sections was an
enchanting experience. Still, when it came to the musical moments,
the marionettes were less compelling. The work’s depth couldn’t be
conveyed without the human voice and a body responding in direct
and subtle ways with the movement of the music.
I leaned on that experience in Salzburg to find a solution for the
dialogues in Berlin. I decided to have the singers use their own
voices to sing but mutely mime all action to a recording of their
dialogues. We prerecorded them with child actors, which the singers
pantomimed with a puppet-like physicality: stiff and inhuman, as
though they were made of wood or metal. Their mouths did not
move along with the dialogue but stayed frozen, even if their eyes
remained alive. Amplifying the recordings helped keep the energy of
the performance from sinking, with enough sound effects to
maintain a sense of sonic structure (as opposed to a deafening
silence around each spoken word). And then, each time the music
began, as spoken voices of children gave way to the singers’ own
singing voices, music magically made their physicality fluid, graceful,
and organic. Music became an animating force, awakening the
puppets and giving them essential human emotions and a lightning-
quick intelligence.
In preserving a separation of spoken voice and physical body—one
of the hallmarks of puppet theater—we invited the audience to
reenact the imaginative activity of Bergman’s young spectator. Just
as she gradually reads the artifice of the stage world with cinematic
immediacy, a spectator of my production could come to believe that
inanimate objects have taken on a soul. And each time the music
began and the separation of body and voice was erased, the score
transcended the stage illusion, reigniting the spark of life lying
dormant in the toy.
The idea held promise—but to save the production from growing
predictable and repetitive, I had to find ways to make the dialogues
evolve and grow more complex as the performance went on. One
way, I thought, might be to let Papageno speak with his natural voice
as he interacted with the muted singers. He would identify
completely with the puppet world—befitting a character who
refutes any search for higher wisdom. Papageno as a sidekick offers
comedic relief from the serious journey undertaken by Tamino and
Pamina, and he invariably becomes the audience favorite.
Part of Magic Flute’s anarchic and anti-elite power lies in its
treatment of Papageno as an equal hero to the questing Tamino. The
opera refuses to claim one path to truth, as Sarastro or the Queen of
the Night would have the young characters believe. The role was
originally written for Emanuel Schikaneder—the librettist and also
the impresario who ran the Theater auf der Wieden, where the
opera debuted. No wonder Papageno is given the lion’s share of
stage time, even though Schikaneder apparently couldn’t sing very
well. Mozart responded ingeniously to his particular gifts by writing
a role of folk-like simplicity with a limited range, driven more by
comedic delivery than the kind of musical precision demanded of
the other characters. Papageno in fact describes himself as a
Naturmensch, the Enlightenment ideal of an innocent human in their
natural state, uncorrupted by society. He doesn’t seek
transcendence or anything beyond worldly pleasures; he identifies
fully with his artificial environment and is happy staying exactly
who he is within it. Making Papageno the master of his dialogue—
speaking with an ease in this artificial world that the other
characters can’t achieve—positions him comfortably in the illusory
world of the puppets, as well as adding complexity and ambiguity to
his dialogues.
An important evolution in the treatment of dialogues occurs after
Pamina’s devastating Act II aria “Ach, ich fühl’s” (“Ah, I can feel it”).
Fearing she has lost Tamino forever, her thoughts turn to suicide,
and the marionette’s greatest enemy—gravity—seems to win. She
slowly sinks to the ground to sing her aria weighed down by grief.
But her anguish has also given her a clearer, deeper look at her
reality. In the subsequent dialogue, Tamino and Sarastro continue
pantomiming their dialogue, but Pamina can suddenly hear her lines
recited by some other voice. “Stop it!” the singer cries in her own
speaking voice, for the first time. “Who is that speaking for me?”
While Papageno relishes his puppet world, Pamina becomes aware
of it as an oppressive system, one that silences her voice. Despair in
the face of the machine’s injustice may be the prerequisite dark
night before the dawn of full realization—and indeed, Pamina
emerges from her suicidal thoughts to face that dawn (thanks to the
intervention of the Three Boys, naturally).
Allowing Pamina to recover her speaking voice on the way to
becoming an equal hero to her male counterparts became a way of
critiquing the work’s misogynistic aspects—which also frequently
undermine contemporary productions. Residents of Sarastro’s
temple hardly miss an opportunity to denigrate women: “Women
blab and don’t act,” “Protect yourself from feminine treachery,” and
“A woman needs a man to lead her” are just a few of the smears
parroted by the temple priests. Tamino himself, after having been
called to act by the Queen of the Night, mimics the priests’
perspective in the second act quintet, by disparaging women’s
“claptrap.”
What, then, are we to make of Pamina’s journey through the piece?
While we first see Tamino terrified and fainting at the sight of a
snake, one of Pamina’s first lines reads, “I don’t shy from death.” And
after her emotional devastation, she emerges to lead the male hero
through a final ordeal, a direct confrontation with death known as
the “Trial of Fire and Water.” In the face of what Tamino describes
as a “portal of terror,” Pamina reacts with natural grace: “I myself
will lead you, just as love guides me by scattering roses on our path
—because roses grow where thorns are found.” Pamina, then, rather
than serving as Tamino’s obedient handmaiden, sets the example of
courage. If he had listened to the chauvinism parading as wisdom in
Sarastro’s temple, he would have never completed his spiritual
journey.
It’s impossible to imagine Mozart identifying with the misogynist
trends of his time. Not only do the women in his operas possess an
interiority that their male counterparts lack, they also find
opportunities for agency within a system built on their
subservience. The greatest example of this must be the end of The
Marriage of Figaro, where the countess confers forgiveness and
mercy on her cheating husband. She is elevated to a status
equivalent to that of Emperor Titus in the composer’s La Clemenza
di Tito, embodying a grace the men in Figaro frequently fail to
realize.
So if Magic Flute itself is not misogynist, how are we supposed to
interpret the crudely sexist sentiments sometimes expressed? It can
be hard to understand that the text given to a dramatic character is
not necessarily a position endorsed by its authors. But if we practice
separating music, text, and production, we find that opera offers
myriad ways to create diverging points of view. Disentangling the
tracks opens up a distance between a character’s perspective and
authorial intention, and what may seem like confirmation can
quickly become critique. When you consider Pamina’s role in the
final scene, it becomes easy to see that Magic Flute actually exposes
sexism as a shortsighted social weakness and foolish prejudice
standing in the way of true wisdom. If a production fails to call out
misogyny as it appears—either by letting it slide or by affirming it—
an audience will not be able to make sense of what it means for
Pamina to lead Tamino at the end. Such is the power of opera when
we stop looking for a Mickey Mousing relationship between music,
text, and production. Refutation and contradiction, derived from
interrogation and exploration, become essential tools in drawing
closer to what the piece is truly saying.
Sarastro’s priests are not only notorious misogynists, they are racist
as well: the Black, enslaved Monostatos is constantly flogged and
denigrated by Sarastro, who ends up administering much more
cruelty than wisdom. As discussed in Chapter 2, the one aria given to
Monostatos is a a self-loathing screed, claiming “ugly” Black men can
only win a “beautiful” white woman by force. As he does for the
misogynistic duet of the priests (“Beware of women’s wiles”),
Mozart allots almost no time to this prejudiced view of humanity:
Monostatos’s aria rarely takes longer than a minute to perform.
When Sarastro stops the attempted rape, he preaches one of his
platitudinal cradle songs: “In these holy halls, we forgive our
enemies, and whoever doesn’t is not deserving to be human.” How
should an audience reconcile the character’s sagacity with what they
just witnessed—the fact that his sacred temple enslaves and
punishes fellow humans and excludes women? I believe Mozart was
exposing the duplicity and closed-mindedness of his “enlightened”
eighteenth-century contemporaries. The libretto scoffs at
superstition as the antithesis of wisdom, but Mozart ultimately
ridicules the prejudices that render all forms of ideology regressive.
The marionette once again offered for me a perfect symbol of how
racism, misogyny, and prejudices of all sorts turn each of us into
puppets who unthinkingly accept the status quo. Tamino and
Pamina can only evolve when they are liberated from any
manipulation by the previous generation. One of the central
mysteries of the production would then become: Who is pulling the
strings? Who is controlling the events of the opera?
In a more conventional production, Sarastro, like Shakespeare’s
Prospero in The Tempest, would likely be revealed as the opera’s
grand puppet master. His “wise old prophet” vibe carries a
superficial veneer of the divine, substitute father, and he gets the
work’s last triumphant solo. But that concept affirms a sense that his
ideology is correct, prejudices and all. Some directors might present
the Queen of the Night as puppet master: we certainly watch her
manipulate Tamino, Pamina, Papageno, the Three Ladies, and
Monostatos. But we also recognize that her ideology is built on
power and violence, a perfect mirror to Sarastro’s ultimately
egocentric worldview. Placing her in the Svengali position would
likewise affirm her position as correct.
For a while, I imagined a production with Sarastro and the Queen of
the Night as a warring couple—more like Shakespeare’s Oberon and
Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream—not agreeing on how their
play should proceed and which of them is really in control. They
would fight over the stringed characters, pushing and pulling until
one of them (most likely Sarastro) eventually won out. Instead, I
decided that both Sarastro and the Queen of Night should become
marionettes. This act undercut any sense of their power; rather than
master manipulators, they themselves were manipulated. The self-
centered and partial views of humanity they espoused no longer
seemed eternal but provisional.
I could have opted for complete ambiguity and left the question of
puppet master unanswered—not unlike the silence surrounding
Tamino at the beginning when he ponders, “Has some higher power
saved me?” Tamino, more than any other character, is plagued by
the possibility that behind reality is a mere void, an “eternal night”
without light. Keeping that potential reading open as long as
possible created a tension and suspense in the production, but I
ultimately needed to provide an answer—not least to ensure the
production resisted a nihilism I can’t endorse myself.
So in the final scene, I revealed who was pulling the strings all along.
All set pieces and puppet characters vanished, and a smaller-scale
version of the theater appeared on the empty stage. Looming above
that stage-within-a-stage, were the puppeteers: six children, the
singers who played the Three Boys (now in contemporary clothes)
and three young girls. Sarastro sang his final triumphant lines
offstage, lip-synched by one of the boys, while all six lip-synched the
offstage chorus. There were no adults in sight, and the children
jumped around and celebrated their triumph as the curtain fell.
The prerecorded dialogues connected this idea to the rest of the
production, as the characters were all voiced by the six children we
would meet at the end. As opening night unfolded, the overheard
intermission chatter indicated to me that this was a bewildering
(and for some, deeply annoying) choice. I offered no clear indication
why we were hearing children’s voices; only at the very end would
the audience understand that the recorded voices were the young
puppeteers, animating the characters in their play.
We did, however, drop obvious hints throughout. In the first scene,
the traditional sound effects of wind, thunder, and lightning crashes
were supplanted with children’s exclamations of “Pow!” and “Bang!”
In the first major scene change, the children read the original stage
directions, interrupting each other as they stumbled over the old-
fashioned, ridiculous depiction of the slaves’ quarters. “What weird
language,” one of them said, before the scene began. Most important,
during Monostatos’s self-hating aria in Act II, the children’s voices
supplied real-time critique. “This must be a very old text,”
commented one. “None of what he’s saying is true—why should we
see him as evil?” Other young voices tried drowning out his language
with cries of “Stop! Stop!” Finally, unsure how to proceed with the
drama, one child ambivalently suggested, “Maybe we should just let
him sing.”
The children, then, provided a contemporary rejection of the work’s
racism in real time. The temptation to merely excise the offensive
aspects of Magic Flute by cutting this aria and dialogue is a difficult
one for contemporary productions to resist—and surely cutting
them is far better than simply taking no stance at all. Instead, in my
production the warts-and-all text remained but was actively negated
as it unfolded. The voices of the next generation modeled an act of
refutation.
The ideas embedded in Magic Flute that I wanted to highlight were
perhaps best captured by giving children this supernatural authority
at the end. Children carry the ever-renewing hope of evolving
human consciousness and repairing the world.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
IN THAT POWERFUL MOMENT WHERE Pamina begins to lead Tamino, the
key transformation of my production occurs: she shows him how to
remove their marionette strings. The two puppets have become
humans and they embark on their final trial together, the Trial of
Fire and Water (SEE PLAYLIST ).
What’s most curious about this climactic trial is how Mozart scores
it. He passed up the chance to impress his audience with an
imagistic soundscape, as he did to describe the turbulent surface of
the ocean in his earlier Idomeneo. Instead, music for what’s meant to
be the most terrifying ordeal of the evening is written as sparely as
anything else in the opera: just solo flute and quiet percussion. After
a long evening of two-dimensional drops and (literal) flights of
fancy, this scene demanded something different from our
dramaturgy. I took the quietness of Mozart’s music as the
inspiration for a final trial that would also feel subdued, humble, and
unexpectedly ordinary. So Tamino and Pamina removed their
strings, found their “sea legs” as humans, and left the puppet theater.
They entered a modest, unadorned but three-dimensional kitchen.
Their quiet task: lighting the stove (fire), filling the pot from the sink
(water), and cooking a meal they would quietly share.
This decision was the one that truly enraged the opening night
audience; their boos drowned out Mozart’s gentle march.
I’ve given much thought to why this everyday image provoked so
much wrath, as I found its frailty quite touching—refreshingly
honest after a great deal of artifice. A recognizable, contemporary
kitchen pulls the rug out from under the audience’s feet—perhaps,
as Tamino discovers, everything we’ve been led to believe in this
production was wrong? Such moments of overturned expectations
are the ones I find the most exciting. For Germans, maybe less so:
the sudden shift to the kitchen was read less as an illuminating
peripeteia than as resolutely inkonsequent.
Since the production opened, I’ve been asked to “explain” the choice
on several occasions. It’s a depressing proposition, implying that
you only meant one thing. (“If artists truly despise you,” Joseph
Campbell once said, “they’ll tell you what they meant by their art.”)
When I offer an explanation, it’s as if there was one magic solution
all along that I’ve purposefully withheld from the audience. That
would make directors more like teachers asking the class a question
for which there’s only one right answer. Instead, I am looking to
create an open field of possible meanings to be considered and
completed by the spectator.

“Death is a kitchen”: Julian Prégardien as Tamino and Anna Prohaska undergo

the Trial of Fire and Water.
Even now, the move to the kitchen is one I resist explaining. I can
discuss how the scene describes the most important trial for a
mature couple: finding the magic in everyday life. Falling in love
with an image of someone is easy, but it’s much harder to keep love
alive in the daily tribulations that truly make up a relationship. I
could mention the other associations that make this decision feel
right—but since there isn’t only one key to the riddle, I am
ultimately more interested in how others read production choices. I
would even consider it among the primary reasons I direct: to
perceive how a choice I make resonates with someone else. It’s a
way to broaden an appreciation of a work’s mystery and, by
extension, the mysteries of the world.
So when Krystian heard my idea for the kitchen, his mind
immediately leapt to a beautiful image expressed by the Chilean
poet Pablo Neruda: “After death, heaven will be an endless kitchen.”
We shared this association with the singers, who absorbed it to the
benefit of the scene. Mimi’s impulse was to design the kitchen as a
kind of utilitarian, almost featureless container of space, offering
maximum contrast to the colorful and mostly flat images that
populated the rest of the production. Both artists took the initial
idea and elaborated on it, enriched it, made it more multi-
perspectival. They demonstrated how collaborative thinking and
sharing a vision ultimately secures a sense of multiplicity.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
THREE YEARS AFTER THE TUMULTUOUS opening night, Intendant
Matthias Schulz invited me to return and make some adjustments to
the production—an all-too rare opportunity in opera. Unlike
commercial theater, where a lengthy preview process gives
everyone involved a chance to revise their work, what you see on
the opening night of an opera is basically what you will get for as
long as the show exists. I wish that opera could find a way to
introduce revisions to the production process more regularly,
especially for world premiere operas (imagine the pressure on
composers and librettists, who spend years writing a work that
must emerge perfectly on opening night!). It would require a
systemic shift away from product and toward process—and,
considering the economic implications, seems difficult to imagine.
Under normal circumstances, I would not have been given the
chance to revise my Flute production. But after Covid-19 arrived, the
flying system the Staatsoper rented to create the marionette illusion
was no longer available. The singers’ more intricate flight paths
would need to either undergo a simplification or be reassigned to
the “fake flying” tracks. I was disappointed at first, since the
technical wizardry of the flying anchored what I originally thought
would make the production distinctive. If the singers flew less, the
production might no longer capture the music’s anti-gravitational
fascination. But Matthias saw an opportunity here: if the production
could be simplified, it could be performed more frequently
throughout the season, rather than in discrete pockets around the
flight system’s availability. Much to his credit, when Matthias could
have walked away from a controversial production, he chose to
reengage and reinvest in it instead. With that commitment, I went
back into the world of this production.
This rare opportunity proved a revelatory experience. Without
changing any of the ideas or the basic design, the clarity and
communicability of those ideas exponentially increased. It probably
shouldn’t have surprised me to discover that the production was
much stronger with less real flying. The singing actors landed more
frequently on solid ground, with the “fake flying” strings indicating
their relationship to a mysterious higher power. Entrances and exits
may have been more conventional—more horizontal, stage left or
right—but none of that ended up speaking as strongly as what the
performers themselves could do. Being grounded gave them the
security to play the marionette rather than experiencing its hung-up
reality. More important, the spirit of the production was reclaimed
from the technical machinery and put back where it belonged: with
the performers.
Other changes helped the overall production read better, such as the
reintroduction of projections we originally cut because of a lack of
proper tech time. But one decision in particular truly changed
everything—and may seem completely contradictory to my praise
of ambiguity in Chapter Four. I disambiguated the entire production
by restaging the overture.
In the first version, the identity of the puppet masters was withheld
until the very end. But as my friend and collaborator Du Yun so aptly
put it after seeing the production, “Opera is bad at the reveal.” It’s
true. Perhaps because opera already challenges an audience’s
capacity for comprehension, any additional mystery becomes much
harder to communicate.
Only a handful of operas are built around a big last-minute reveal, in
the spirit of the films Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects. Leoš
Janáček, the Czech composer of Cunning Little Vixen, created one
prime example in one of the strangest operas of all time, The
Makropulos Case (1925). The opera revolves around a beautiful,
youthful woman who confesses in a stunning closing monologue
that she is 337 years old. The opera gives absolutely no indication
that this is where the whole piece is heading: the first act is almost
relentlessly banal, set in a lawyer’s office and centering on a
complicated legal battle in rapid-fire Czech. Mundane twists and
turns—set to music that is anything but mundane—finally give way
to the exquisite final revelation, which, for those with a high level of
ambiguity tolerance, is well worth the ninety-minute buildup. The
opera is a director’s dream, because its fantastical aspects open up a
broad field of visual possibilities. On the other hand, directors
invariably spend a lot of time trying to disambiguate the work at the
beginning so that the audience can have something to hook onto,
some reason to stick with it through the legal debates and
convoluted intrigues. The opera remains somewhat of an oddball
rarity, produced on occasion by the larger repertoire theaters but
not what anyone would call an audience favorite.
When I worked with the designer Es Devlin on a production of
Meredith Monk’s ATLAS, she recounted a remark from a British
actor that has stuck with me: “The audience will go with you to hell
and back,” the actor told her. “But the bus has to say ‘Hell’ on it.” In
other words, if you can signal to an audience where you’re taking
them, you’ll be amazed how openly they consent to coming along.
The road can even be circuitous and nonlinear, full of scenic byways
and detours. But in the end, you’ll be surprised how far you can take
them.
So my revised production put the destination on the front of the bus:
during the overture, the curtain rose on the tiny puppet theater I
had originally saved for the ending, with the six children coming out
one by one. They brought with them small, inanimate puppet
versions of all the characters we would later see embodied by the
singers. I was worried this would make the production less
interesting: neutralizing a central mystery and rendering the Finale
moot, returning to an already-seen image rather than presenting a
final twist. But whatever the production may have lost in mystery it
gained in clarity. The children’s voices mocking the original German
and repudiating the text’s racism were now embodied, and those
moments landed with this new audience as they hadn’t at the
premiere. With spectators knowing where I was taking them, they
clearly enjoyed the ride much more. When the children reappeared
at the end, the image proved satisfying rather than redundant—not
unlike Ingmar Bergman’s shot of the young girl at the end of his
Magic Flute, reminding us that everything we just saw was a child’s
fantasy.
Through this Magic Flute experience, I was able to finally articulate
what real ambiguity means to me: highly specific choices (a
marionette, a kitchen) in an unexpected relationship to the music, the
text, and all the other artistic decisions, creating an experience that
can’t be reduced to one meaning. Ambiguity needs to reside on the
macro level of a complex composite, rather than on the micro level
of an individual decision, where it can read as indistinct and vague.
This kind of ambiguity opens up new directions and unexpected
relationships to the source material. It demands a degree of clarity
and commitment—strong, clear decisions that accumulate,
becoming something greater than the individual ideas, and not
easily explainable.
 ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
AT THE FIRST PERFORMANCE OF the revised version, Matthias asked me
if I was going to take a bow. I opted against it, mostly because I
didn’t relish reliving the experience of opening night. (Why poke a
sleeping bear?)
But when this audience rose to their feet to cheer—yes, a standing O
in Germany!—the booing of the premiere felt fully exorcised. Maybe
I got the last laugh on the production after all?
In any case, I should have taken that second bow.
 6

THE USE-LESS ART

THE ECONOMICS OF OPERA
When Detroit opera reopened its theater in 2022 with my
production of La bohème, the company was still grappling with one
of the unspoken truisms of the pandemic: “Opera is nonessential.”
Whatever mask of self-importance opera wore prior to Covid-19, it
was ripped away and replaced with KN95s. If we thought the work
we were doing offered meaning and value to people’s lives, the
shuttering of every opera house and the stacks of canceled contracts
made one thing clear: it wasn’t valuable enough. I certainly don’t
disagree with the measures taken to protect the safety of artists,
staff, and audiences, but it was eye-opening to see how easy forgoing
opera was for many; some even seemed relieved that the duties of
enduring resolutely unentertaining evenings faced indefinite
suspension.
As we cautiously planned Bohème, fearing a new viral surge all the
while, Covid tests suddenly became scarce. An article in The Atlantic
cited Dr. Walid Gellad’s concerns that tests were being wasted on
frivolous pursuits: “We don’t want our limited testing supply tied up
by people who just want to know [their status] so they can visit their
friends or go to the opera.” To drive the point home, Gellad’s quote
became The Atlantic’s Instagram tile, turning the disparagement of
opera into a meme.
It was hard for those of us who make our living or derive deep
meaning from opera not to take this personally. My own way of
grappling with a sense of superfluousness was to somehow make a
virtue of it. I grew to understand that opera, like all great art, is
inherently use-less.
That is sure to sound insulting, especially in our consumer culture,
where everything must have a use, including us. (Especially us.) Our
entire way of being is so centered on consuming that even use-
lessness has its use: as a diversion, as rest in between our useful
stints as a working cog in the machine.
Use-lessness should not be confused with meaninglessness; as
discussed in Chapter Four, opera has an overwhelming capacity to
hold meaning in multitudes. And it is opera’s very resistance to
reducibility—to meaning just one thing—that frustrates any
discussion of function. Plenty of unintentional, potentially useful
consequences may emerge from our encounter with a work of art: a
change of perspective, a new understanding of an emotion that
confuses us, a resolve to be more politically engaged. But that’s
different from having a prescribed use, in the Brechtian sense of art
acting as a hammer to shape the world with. A useful tool is one-
size-fits-all and a means to an end, and the more we judge art based
on its intended result, the closer it gets to the kind of consumerist
view that art is better at subverting than serving.
In 1933, the French playwright and theoretician Antonin Artaud
wrote a bracing manifesto entitled “The Theater and the Plague,”
which I reread during the Covid lockdown. Artaud describes a
plague as having a disintegrating effect on both the body and society
—but also possessing a beneficial power of revelation and
transformation beneficial to humanity. Describing the chaos brought
about by a plague, Artaud writes, “The dregs of the population,
apparently immunized by their frenzied greed, enter the open
houses and pillage riches they know will serve no purpose or profit.
And at that moment the theater is born. The theater, i.e., an
immediate gratuitousness provoking acts without use or profit.”
Art is not a tool; it’s not a medium for something else to happen. It
contains its own totality. To call it use-less is not to dismiss art but to
celebrate it. And despite all efforts to position itself at the height of
the cultural hierarchy, opera is the most use-less art form of all: the
most complicated, the least commercially viable, the least reified. It
is the telescope-as-kaleidoscope, an instrument built not for the
purpose of clear vision but for the proliferation of possibilities. To
reduce opera to a function is to miss what makes it inimitable.
To love opera means to love its impracticality.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
AS AN ENORMOUSLY EXPENSIVE ENDEAVOR that exists only in the moment
of its performance, opera faces an impossible economic position in
this country. Most arts organizations here are nonprofit entities,
equivalent to charitable organizations held afloat by grants and
donations from private patrons. These worthy causes are given the
privilege of not paying taxes for their quixotism—that is, for
pursuing a mission instead of chasing profit. Naturally, what may
appear as a legislated generosity toward organizations defying the
demands of the marketplace is ultimately a classic capitalist move,
where a contrasting perspective is co-opted to strengthen
hegemony. If alternatives to capitalism can be regulated and
codified, then the dominant system can continue effectively
unchallenged. Artists working in this alternative, noncommercial
sector are expected to take on the ethos of poverty and sacrifice
demanded by the company; we must stay in our place and remain
grateful, never demanding improvements to how we work or what
we earn.
Nonprofit status, a designation that predates the U.S. Constitution,
has seen little development since the Revenue Act of 1917
encouraged donations by making them tax-deductible. And because
American opera companies operate exclusively in this nonprofit
mode, categorized with homeless shelters and soup kitchens, they
go on the defensive. They are forced to prove they have a function in
our society—or, in classic nonprofit speak, they “serve the
community,” an arrogant euphemism for offering handouts to the
deprived. For a use-less art form like opera to demonstrate a
quantifiable quotient of usefulness requires elaborate workarounds.
Education departments have proved the most successful
workaround. There is much to admire in the way organizations have
filled the void of American arts education, through programming
that runs parallel to what happens onstage. And, as one of the most
effective demonstrations of usefulness, an education department
becomes the easiest part of the company to fund. But once opera
seems relevant as a service, what happens to the art? To put it
bluntly, the works themselves start becoming secondary, a parasite
on a useful organization. Because they have so little ability to sustain
themselves, opera productions need to be as financially contained as
possible. How could you possibly justify spending so much money
for an art with no prescribed use?
But arts organizations face a paradox that humanitarian nonprofits
don’t: they are also subject to the same pressures as their
commercial counterparts. An opera company competes with
charities on one side and the profit machines of Broadway and
Hollywood on the other. This situation became evident to me when
an executive from MGM Films came to see my production of
Christopher Cerrone’s Invisible Cities, presented by the independent
company I founded in Los Angeles, The Industry. We scheduled
around twenty performances for a limited audience of 200 per
show. The executive, who confessed to “hating opera” but loving this
production, admitted that he couldn’t understand how a company
like mine worked. “You would have to run for years before you start
seeing a return,” he correctly observed. However, there was simply
no way we could see a return; even if we extended and ran for years,
the cost of any one performance was way higher than anything we
could earn on ticket sales. (We would have had to price the tickets at
$2,500 apiece just to break even, rather than the more accessibly
priced $50 we were charging.) “I don’t get it,” the executive said,
“how are you supposed to make money?” I explained how my
company’s nascent nonprofit status worked, and that nothing about
the endeavor was geared toward a profit margin; donations from
foundations and individuals made up the difference between costs
and revenue. The executive kept pushing: “But why would anyone
invest money if it’s a losing proposition?”
That’s when I understood that even for people savvy in the business
of producing art/entertainment, our work is perceived not as a
social service like a nonprofit’s but rather as the equivalent to other
commercial enterprises. This executive operated among people
investing in films or musicals as an altruistic alternative to the stock
market: if you lose money, at least you’ve supported artistic creation
along the way. Once again, art becomes useful as a commodity, with
the surplus benefit of signifying an investor’s values—an intangible
way to mitigate any potential loss. Opera, orchestra, dance, and
nonprofit theater companies work entirely differently from the
dominant commercial model; there are no investments, only
donations, an inevitable financial loss.
The most pernicious aspects of commercial art-making impact
opera’s mission-driven work. Chief among them: the expectation
that all commercial live art must obey the dictate of “giving the
audience what it wants.” This manifests itself in the traditionalist
perspective that defines most American opera companies, where
“what the audience wants” usually means presenting opera the way
they have come to know and expect it. The audience, the assumption
goes, wants their powdered wigs and their livestock during
triumphant marches, and they will grow irate at any creative
intervention. They won’t want to see Bohème in any way other than
how they have always seen it. Thus the prevailing mandate at most
opera companies is to pacify the tradition-bound.
While Hollywood films spend millions on market research and test
audiences, opera companies don’t tend to listen to a broad cross-
section of society when it comes to making artistic decisions. They
listen primarily to the voices of the donors who keep the
organization alive, and to the company’s board of directors—a
governing body of powerful volunteers, required by U.S. tax law,
usually comprising a company’s most generous donors. In other
words, our government’s mechanism of nonprofits, devised to
support selfless sacrifice for the common good, has created
unspoken oligarchies within our democracy. An opera company’s
constant fear is the ever-present possibility that displeased donors,
disliking what they see onstage, decide not to renew their generous
donations next year. So the showbiz mantra “Give [the audience]
what [it] [wants]” is better articulated as, “Give [the entire
population of this city] what [a small percentage of wealthy
individuals] [knows].”
What organization, under that kind of pressure, would venture
something risky? Lucky the opera company whose largest donors
are truly selfless; who donate not to attend galas or patron lounges;
who don’t attempt to influence the artistic output; who realize that
they donate to maintain an institution and not to see only what they
know and understand. Lucky . . . and rare.
A new opera written today faces the strongest pull of a company’s
commercial yoke. In desperate attempts to prove “relevance,”
companies tend to develop projects based on success in other
media. You can almost see the marketing copy now: “If you liked the
film The Silence of the Lambs, you’ll love it as an opera!” Noble
examples have certainly resulted from an earnest interest in
transporting the work of one genre into another—but they are often
accompanied by pandering and cynicism, as if chosen for their
marketing potential rather than artistic merit. The mantra in this
case would be: “Give the audience what they wanted at the movie
theater, but slower, longer, more expensive, and less entertaining.”
It’s difficult for a new opera to capture the exegesis of the moment;
the long gestation of the creative process can always make it seem
behind the times. A three-year process to commission and produce a
single opera would be considered “lightning speed” in today’s opera
world. Compare that with the rapid turnaround times composers
were expected to adhere to in, say, the early nineteenth century—
Gaetano Donizetti, who completed sixty-five operas in fifty years,
would often sign contracts requiring him to produce four operas a
year—and you can begin to understand why so many large-scale
operatic commissions today tend to be over-thought, overwrought,
and lacking in the spark of spontaneity that makes great art. Unlike
theater, literature, or the visual arts, opera can only respond to
major currents in social life with a significant latency.
My reaction to this conflicted state of opera, especially since Covid,
has become: Why do we so desperately pose as the equivalent to
commercial forms of entertainment instead of simply being who we
are? Opera has never adhered to the beauty standards erected by
mass media. It fits uneasily, if at all, with the rapid demands of the
attention economy. It feels completely out of place with how we
consume other art. So a perceived competition with the conformity
and profitability of commercial art can only be at opera’s expense.
The “American way” of producing opera, with its emphasis on
glamour, glitz, and showbiz economics, defeated the late, great
opera impresario Gerard Mortier, a Belgian producer whose 2007
appointment as General Director of New York City Opera was over
before it began. He withdrew from the position in 2008, before his
first season, when he realized how much resistance his vision of
opera would face within a mold predicated so strongly on
marketplace appeal. I was working at City Opera at the time, and I’ve
never forgotten how he responded to doubts about his program’s
appeal to the tried-and-true operagoer. “We cannot merely offer the
audience what it thinks it wants. Instead, we have an opportunity to
give them something they never even knew they needed.” I’ve never
heard the true mission of this art form articulated better.
Opera in America now sits in the crosshairs of our consumerist
machine. No wonder it struggles at the same time for relevance
(from the marketplace perspective) and financial feasibility (from
the charitable/cultural perspective). Seasons are based either on the
assumption of what an audience will buy (i.e., Hollywood
commercialism) or on the worthy purposes of a charitable
organization (i.e., works primarily created for one, and usually only
one, designated use). No wonder the art form feels so directionless
in this country—and no wonder every company tries to justify its
own existence through signs of usefulness.
There must surely be a way out of this gulf between the nonprofit
and the commercial.
A couple of theater companies—the New York Theatre Workshop
and Public Theater in New York City—have hit on a hybrid
producing model, where works first developed in a nonprofit way go
on to a commercial production on Broadway and then on tour. The
profits earned from the most successful shows (like the musical
Hamilton) are channeled back into the nonprofit arm to support
other endeavors. This is an intriguing avenue for opera to consider,
although there is an aspect of it that I haven’t figured out: what part
of opera could be leveraged for profit? If opera is the art form most
resistant to reification, that also means it has the least to offer
toward monetization.
Instead, I now believe that opera’s only hope is to somehow escape
both modes. If the nonprofit mode has reduced the actual art to a
secondary activity, and the commercial mode requires dependence
on the latest fashion, then we must discover a different way to
cultivate the peculiar use-lessness of opera if we want to see it
thrive.
Changing opera’s business model may seem like a back-end concern,
but the confused expectations around opera’s place in America’s
entertainment market is directly impacting the art-making. It will
take creativity and imagination to figure out a new way forward, and
it will require artistic minds to get involved in the nonartistic
aspects of creating opera.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
FOUNDING AND RUNNING MY OWN nonprofit opera company has turned
me into more of a salesman than I anticipated. I was aware that
some administrative effort would be a necessary evil for facilitating
my artistry. Little did I know I would become a round-the-clock
hustler for the vision I was trying to bring into the world. Artists in
the live arts today, lacking the patronage of a museum or other
institution, are somehow expected to be both a charitable self-
sacrificing saint (in the nonprofit mode) and a no-holds-barred
entrepreneur (in the commercial mode). I’m sure that demand has
silenced the best artists, the ones who could have truly changed our
perception of the world. I’m also sure it has led to the ascension of
artists savvy at working the system but who may have less to offer.
Thinking of this irresolvable tension, unsure where exactly I am on
that spectrum between worlds, I’m reminded of producing
Hopscotch with The Industry—an opera we tended to call “a mobile
opera for 24 cars.” The gist of the piece was that four audience
members at a time would drive through Los Angeles experiencing
the operas in twenty-four geographically conditioned chapters,
sharing a car with performers and undergoing a round-trip drift
through the city. (I will discuss the piece in more detail in Chapter
Nine.) To make something like this happen, I would need to rally an
enormous troop of support for the project—not just financial
support or civic support but also in-kind support, like pro bono use
of technology that would otherwise be out of reach for an
independent, small-budget company.
So I put on my salesman hat and drove to Las Vegas to attend the
world’s largest technology convention, called the Consumer
Electronics Show, or CES. I went there to follow up in person on
conversations I’d started with a company that specialized in real-
time video streaming with no delay. The technology, pioneered for
major sporting events, held the key for realizing one of my dreams
for Hopscotch: I wanted each scene taking place around LA to be
streamed back to a central location, allowing a secondary audience
(not in cars) to watch the pieces simultaneously as they happened
throughout the city. I wanted a zero-latency stream to capture real
time as truthfully as possible, screening exactly what was happening
all over Los Angeles with precision. One scene in particular involved
a phone call between two women, each in separate cars, where I
hoped a delay-free live stream could offer the sense of a proper
dialogue between them from a vantage point beyond both vehicles.
The technology that can accomplish this feat, used regularly for
broadcast television, entails a highly specialized use of satellites in
space rather than more conventional communication lines (read:
very expensive). Any hope of achieving this within our budget
required the enthusiastic buy-in of a company who could get on
board with our nonprofit mentality. There was some reason to
believe this was possible. The audio company Sennheiser had
provided generous in-kind support for Invisible Cities, and they
agreed to help us with Hopscotch as well. Sennheiser not only
showed genuine curiosity about the projects’ technical challenges,
they also justified their donation as research. The meaningful
exchange I had with them made me optimistic going into my Las
Vegas meeting.
Granted, the setting was not exactly right for this kind of pitch:
massive commercial forums such as CES are clearly meant for high-
level partnerships far beyond the stakes of small nonprofit arts
organizations. In a showroom buzzing with salespeople and aglow
in rapidly changing LED screens, like Times Square and the Wall
Street stock exchange compressed into one jumbled exhibition hall, I
sought out the company specializing in zero-latency streaming. I had
been hounding their president for weeks via e-mail, finally receiving
what I should have known was a brush-off: “I’m too busy to talk
now, but if you come to CES, I will be happy to hear more about your
project.” I could see the disappointment in his eyes when I
introduced myself and reminded him about our correspondence.
Now he was forced to sacrifice lucrative time to listen to a profit-less
idea for a “mobile opera.” Seeing no escape, he sat down with me
and let me pitch him on the project. I wasn’t far into my description
of the project before I noticed the quizzical, eyebrow-raised stare I
had come to expect whenever I tried describing my work-in-
progress. But when I got to the part about a simultaneous stream of
twenty-four cars with no delay in sound or video, he stopped me
and asked with considerable consternation, “Why are you doing
this?”
I was completely caught off-guard; no one had ever asked me that
question. I stuttered some tried-and-true platitude about the role of
art in society, but whatever words came out failed to mask the
insecurity provoked by his question. The meeting didn’t last much
longer and ended with a handshake and that classic American
rejection: “Good luck to you!”
The drive between Las Vegas and Los Angeles is long and
monotonous; at night, when you can’t see the desert landscape
around you, it can feel as though you’re hurtling into an endless
black hole. It’s a perfect setting for replaying something over and
over in your head. In this case, it was “Why are you doing this?” In
the hyped-up, accelerated commercial environment of that
conference, I was compelled to reach for a purpose, something easy
to understand and translate into marketable value, for the very
impractical thing I was pursuing. Even if the mismatch of
perspectives was easy to shake off, the question wasn’t. Why was I
doing this?
Maybe driving allowed me space to meditate on that question, but it
was on the road that I turned over something like an answer. I
thought back to a scene in Leos Carax’s surreal 2012 film Holy
Motors, one of my favorites and an inspiration for Hopscotch. The
film follows a man who gets in and out of a white limousine
throughout the day, taking on various guises and performing in
different film genres at each destination. The film’s stylistic shape-
shifting is bewildering and unpredictable, gleefully resisting logical
reduction at every turn. His faithful driver engages with him in
existential dialogue throughout, and at one point she asks him,
“What do you do this all for?” His simple, perfect reply: “The beauty
of the act.”
I wish I had remembered it in Las Vegas when I was confronted with
that same question. What better way is there to summarize an
artist’s reason for doing what they do? If we leave meaning in the
hands of the spectator rather than the artist (“The death of the
author is the birth of the reader”), then it should be the spectator—
not the producer and not the creator—who should decide what
“use,” if any, an artwork can offer. Ideally, the spectator might
realize that the search for usefulness is a knee-jerk reaction our
marketplace economy tries to cultivate in us. Let art offer us an
escape, a precious pocket in time where that voice is silenced.
Opera’s use-lessness is, to some, the reason for its absurdity. I think
it is opera’s absolute incongruity with everything around it that
opens up pathways of possibility—precisely when our consumerist
sense of reality wants us to believe that no new possibilities exist.
This is why I consider opera a rebellious, misfit art and not a
standard bearer; in its lack of a singular use, opera can offer
alternatives to any structure limiting our understanding of the
world. Each individual spectator can decide on a work’s meaning
and value to them; let artists concentrate instead on the beauty, the
audacity, and the boldness of acting in the face of use-lessness.
 7

TOWARD AN ANTI-ELITE OPERA

Is opera a standard bearer or a pallbearer of the status quo?
Most aficionados subscribe to the former—the notion that opera, in
its grandeur and refinement, represents a pearl of cultural
production. Going to the opera, as Pretty Woman illustrates, signals
classiness and affirms that everything is in its right place.
I have never looked to opera for affirmation of anything, certainly
not for recognition of my taste’s superiority over anyone else’s. But
among a typical audience at an opera, you can usually find no small
number of people seeking precisely that kind of confirmation. They
prefer to preserve opera as a signifier for self-serving virtues rather
than a viable and contemporary mode of expression. That reduction
of opera to its economic signifier—despite all use-lessness—is
suffocating the art form and keeping it from realizing its
possibilities. What a terrible thing to happen to work with so much
still to say.
Advocating for opera’s use-lessness is an offensive against one of its
most common historic uses: for the adornment of authority and the
entrenchment of the existing social hierarchy. As a private event in
the Italian courts, opera offered a spare-no-expense theatricality
that projected the power and wealth of the work’s supporting
patrons. Spectacle was a form of political justification, and
extravagance became self-serving. The equating of display and
dominance seeped into opera’s DNA.
But as opera morphed from private to public entertainment, the
pageantry stopped affirming a powerful patron and instead started
adulating the audience. The spectator’s elevated position, their own
superior status, became the locus of the work’s glory. Abbate and
Parker describe early opera settings, especially regal interiors, as
“flattering the audience by involving them in a world of unabashed
magnificence.” Even today, operatic spectacle holds up a
sycophantic mirror to its audience, fulfilling their desire to see
themselves reflected back in opulence. (Maybe this is the reason
audiences still applaud the scenery when the curtain rises.)
That’s opera as standard bearer of the status quo. What if opera
were its pallbearer instead?
Is it even possible to imagine the art form today, created through the
surplus wealth of philanthropists, as challenging our understanding
of the state of things? For defiance and resistance to earn a place in
the genre’s identity, the opera world will have to kill, once and for
all, any association with a concept that seems central now: elitism.
Most everyone’s first experience with opera brushes up against
some form of elitism, harking back to Parsifal’s chastisement for
“not getting it.” For me, the jarring experience of attending the San
Francisco Opera as a student at UC Berkeley still casts a shadow
over how I think about opera. Back then, I had to take a grimy BART
train to the Civic Center Station and walk through an unhoused
community gathered on the street. The cacophony of sights, sounds,
and smells never failed to make me deeply pessimistic about the
state of our society (was it irony or accuracy that led to this plaza’s
being named the civic center?). After making my way through a truly
gruesome spectacle, I arrived at the opera house, whose
architecture demands you ascend a grand stairway flanked by
columns to enter the theater (named the “War Memorial Opera
House”) and escape from real life. Its gold and velvet interior
reinforced the feeling of a gilded cage, physically and aesthetically
protected from the outside world. At twenty, having taken the train
and walked the street, I couldn’t connect with a space that so
flagrantly displayed its callousness. Opera aspires to integrate every
imaginable art and craft. Yet attending one, with the jarring shifts of
reality, can make you feel fractured, incongruous, and isolated.
On one particularly egregious evening, the opera I saw was Alban
Berg’s Wozzeck, an emotionally devastating work from 1922 about
an impoverished couple and the social mechanisms that gripped
them in a cycle of crime and destitution. The title character, in a
tormented first aria (SEE PLAYLIST ), sings:
We poor folks! Look, Captain sir, money, money—try setting someone
with no money on the moral path! Each one of us has their flesh and
blood! Sure, if I were a gentleman, with a hat and watch and monocle,
I would speak nobly. . . . I’ve always wanted to be virtuous! There must
be something beautiful about virtue, Captain sir. But I’m just a poor
guy! Our kind is unlucky in this and the next world! I think, if we made
it to heaven, we’d have to manufacture the thunder!
As Wozzeck sang, I found it hard to concentrate: the elegant older
woman next to me couldn’t sit still and repeatedly shook her arms to
adjust her golden bracelets. The jangling added unwanted
percussion to the score and covered Wozzeck’s singing . . . though
she didn’t seem to be listening anyway. I had my issues with the
performance—the clichéd stylization of the stagecraft and the
hollow, routine acting—but the hypocrisy of the experience,
especially after traversing a dystopian streetscape of shameful civic
neglect, marked a breaking point for me. The evening is fixed in my
memory as a critical inspiration for getting involved in opera as a
director. Berg’s musical realization of his poor couple’s inner world
could actually do so much to motivate us all to imagine a better,
more just society. But that night, his opera’s potential couldn’t be
heard over the clang of expensive jewelry and the dissonance with
our world.
I may not come from wealth myself, as a first generation American
and the grandchild of Holocaust survivors. But I have no chip on my
shoulder with regard to successful individuals, especially those who
give their money away to make art and culture happen. For all I
know, the listless woman with the bracelets may have been a
benefactor of the opera. Maybe she even underwrote that night’s
performance. Or perhaps she was tired after a long day trying to
improve San Francisco’s “civic center.”
It’s the catering to wealth that causes the problem. Companies
beholden to the well-off self-select a position of fear. Unwritten
rules govern the art: Nothing onstage must challenge our patrons’
position, nor must anything rattle the wealthy. Bend the
programming to what they find familiar, comforting, and reassuring.
This mentality has tipped the scales toward one population, toward
elitism, and away from any other potential audience.
Opera in America has every incentive to adhere to the status quo—
mostly for a sense of security that those paying the company’s bills
will continue to do so. But the illusion of predictable stability lulls
people into laziness. Companies and producers settle into a clear-cut
transactional attitude between the art and its patrons. Soon, the
operas being selected and the ideas behind the productions are
viewed through the lens of whether the benefactors will give a
“thumbs up” or “thumbs down” with their checkbooks. Opera’s
potential as a critical or transformational voice faces myriad
barriers long before the first rehearsal.
The effect on artists and the art itself is profound. The pressures a
producer feels to please the people paying for an artwork almost
invariably trickle down to the artists themselves. When they show
up to a first rehearsal of a new production, will they be encouraged
to strike out in new directions, to give voice to a fresh perspective
that might not immediately appeal broadly? Or will they be urged to
position their work within the trajectory of acceptable expression,
laid down by the endless repetitions of canonical works?
It’s useful here to compare Berg’s opera about the poor and
downtrodden with Puccini’s opera that is, ostensibly, also about
poverty: La bohème, populated by starving artists outwitting the one
percent of nineteenth-century Paris. One of these works remains the
most popular opera of all time, while the other is still considered
“challenging.” Puccini cloaks his beggars in luxurious and seductive
sounds, arias and duets that are ravishing and live in your head for
days. Singers’ voices are borne on a pillow of orchestral sound with
vocal lines frequently doubled by the string section. Despite poverty,
sickness, and death, Puccini’s music embodies the affirmation of an
ultimate harmony, and productions of Bohème invariably transform
the characters’ poverty into luxury. Rodolfo and Marcello are meant
to reside in a tiny, ramshackle garret with no heat and past-due rent.
But on the typical stage, their living quarters are usually blown up to
seem like the most enviable penthouse in Paris. All in all, their
hardships are portrayed as pleasantly and warm-heartedly as
possible, and even the suffering seems sweet.
Berg’s vision of poverty, on the other hand, is an expressionistic
swirl of orchestral colors that often confronts the singers with an
antagonistic field, a fitting mirror of an individual’s struggle against
a cruel society. Wozzeck dies by drowning in his last scene, but from
his very first aria he is frequently swimming against an
overwhelming sonic tide. Unlike Puccini’s comforting blanket of
sound, Berg wrote music that perfectly fits Adorno’s image from
Minima Moralia: “The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying
glass.” Puccini’s score is a fitting capstone to the nineteenth
century’s development of opera, while Berg’s score marks a radical
advancement of musical language, taking opera in new directions in
the twentieth century.
The comparison can stand for much new work that wants to be
socially engaged or critical. Even as producers put a lot of resources
into the development of a new work, they encourage creators to
strike a chord in the pleasing direction of Puccini. 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. 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. To discover new and different aural ideas that
express the need for an altered perspective of our society.
A prime example of a completely new-sounding opera is X: The Life
and Times of Malcolm X (1986), music by the prolific and polyglot
Anthony Davis to a libretto by Thulani Davis and a story by
Christopher Davis. Surely a work on such a revolutionary subject
can’t be expected to fit easily into the accustomed language of opera!
Just as Malcolm X introduced powerful new language to articulate
America’s racism, Davis’s score expands opera’s vocabulary. Its New
York City Opera premiere showcased a large and mostly Black cast,
with a full orchestra augmented by an eight-piece improvising jazz
ensemble. The fiendishly difficult score veers from high modernism
through R&B—not like a mindless turning of the radio dial, but as a
dizzying enactment of double consciousness. A virulent aria for
Malcolm X closes Act I by turning the spotlight on the audience (SEE
PLAYLIST ). “You want the story, but you don’t want to know,” he
sings. “My truth is, you’ve been on me a very long time, longer than I
can say! As long as I’ve been living, you’ve had your foot on me,
always pressing. . . . You want the truth, but you don’t want to
know!” It’s hard to imagine anything less “flattering” to the
traditional opera audience than this searing indictment of our
complicity with systems of oppression.
Davis’s vocal writing is demanding and virtuosic, with unpredictable
and unrelenting rhythms. His musical ideas seem built on repetition,
but they are constantly shifting in volatile ways, embodying an idea
of Black music that the poet Amiri Baraka called “the changing
same.” The concept is far from a detached aesthetic idea; it
embodies the specific cultural perspective, the “exact replication of
The Black Man in the West,” Baraka described in his 1966 essay
“The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music).” The interplay
between individual performer and collectivity Baraka writes about
could just as easily describe what Davis’s opera is really about: not
just the famous man who became Malcolm X but his entire “life and
times.” “We want different contents and different forms because we
have different feelings,” Baraka writes. “We are different peoples.”
Inviting this worldview into the narrow world of opera, into the
hallowed halls of Lincoln Center, was a gutsy endeavor. But since its
premiere, X has rarely been heard from again. Mounting a new
production became my top priority when I became Artistic Director
of Detroit Opera in 2020. Not only because the subject matter had
taken on renewed urgency in the heat of the racial reckoning of that
summer. Not only because Detroit is a predominantly Black city and
Malcolm X’s footprints there are still fresh in the ground. But
because the music, like the human life at the work’s center,
confronts the status quo. At the opening of our production, directed
by Robert O’Hara, the company’s traditional operagoers were
challenged by the score’s “changing same” style. Not so the Black
members of the audience, many of whom reported attending an
opera for the first time. And the attendance was record-breaking: X
was the first sold-out opera performance in Detroit since 2005,
when the company premiered a new opera based on Toni
Morrison’s Beloved.
In its scale, X is a grand opera to rival the largest works in the
repertoire. But in its deft handling of explosive subject matter and
uncompromising musical character, X carries none of the elitism we
ascribe to the canon. It remains to me an example of what a new
piece should be, the epitome of an anti-elite opera.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
A REDDIT THREAD WITH THE prompt “Why is opera considered elitist?”
offers some hilarious illuminations:
“Pulls out gilded opera glasses: Because those with such opinions are
cretins.”
“I don’t know, but it’s certainly nice to have an entertainment where
you don’t have to mingle with hoi-polloi.”
“Because nobody likes it, so the entitled people enjoy the fact that
they have a differing opinion.”
Some users, opting for a less humorous commentary, blame
“exorbitantly expensive” opera tickets: the art form is elitist because
only the wealthy can afford to enjoy it. But opera’s admission prices
are not particularly outrageous when you compare them with
sporting events, Broadway musicals, or stadium shows. In fact, most
houses sell tickets at a much cheaper cost than the average baseball
game. Price is quantifiable, but far harder to quantify is the attitude
of elitism that permeates opera.
If a certain snobbery emerges from a conspicuous coddling to the
wealthy, an elitist attitude can also be felt among the so-called
aficionados, opera’s most discerning and erudite spectators,
separated from the plebeians in their cultivation and knack for
distinguishing the good from the bad. While a “less educated”
audience may enjoy a performance, the cultured connoisseurs need
to flaunt their wisdom and status. They are the first to be outraged
at the liberties taken by the stage director, or disgusted at how an
artist pales in comparison with the great singers of the past. They
quickly and loudly point out a singer’s vocal issues—sometimes real,
sometimes imagined—and compete to be the first to shout “Bravo!”
in exaggerated Italian diction after an aria.
The true enjoyment of art demands above all an open mind and
open heart. I thought of this at a 2022 blockbuster exhibition
dedicated to Vincent van Gogh at the Detroit Institute of Art, which
featured seventy-some of his paintings on loan from all over the
world. I stood in front of a well-known image of an undulating
landscape I’d studied in an art history class and had last seen in
Amsterdam ten years earlier. But I noticed a shift in my perception,
as that painting was now affected by at least three factors
simultaneously: the paintings directly to the left and to the right; the
works in Detroit’s permanent collection I had passed on my way to
this temporary exhibit; and the hurly-burly of Detroit itself, the
world beyond the museum steps that everyone brought inside with
them. And that’s saying nothing of more transient points of contact,
such as the national news that morning, or the irrelevant thoughts
currently coursing through my mind. The composition on the canvas
had not changed in 150 years; and yet it signified something unique
based on those contemporaneous factors—some controllable, like
the exhibition’s curation, but mostly indeterminate.
As I stood in front of Van Gogh’s familiar painting again, old
academic habits of viewing instinctively kicked in. I assessed and
categorized form and color, contextualizing the work within a
rationally organized and well-rehearsed historical trajectory. But
now I found myself attempting to silence that learned voice; instead,
I tried viewing the painting with something closer to naïveté. What
happens when I just show up, forgetting everything I know about
the painter, the work, and art history? It was like seeing the painting
for the first time: I was able to imagine the blank canvas, with every
line and color pursuing something unknown. The anticipatory
standpoint of searching, rather than knowledgeable reflection,
became the painting’s dominant angle. The artist’s vitality and
imagination suddenly became overpowering, and the painting held
an immediacy and resonance I never could have expected.
The satisfaction that comes from viewing art with the experience of
acquired habits invariably involves self-congratulation: I have
studied this, I can understand it, I can appreciate it. This is what it
means to desire confirmation in art rather than seek a discovery. If
we believe that confirmation is the ultimate destination of
understanding art, we get lulled into a false sense of superiority,
becoming elitist. For those of us who have invested a lot of time in
some form of “art appreciation,” there is an unlearning required to
approach a painting with a clear mind. Now I try to wipe the slate
clean each time I engage with an artwork. I imagine the blank
canvas, the block of clay, the empty timeline, the empty page, or the
empty stage; everything added or taken away is a choice
commanded not by foresight but by intuition. The work itself, rather
than my ability to appreciate the work, becomes the focus.
Many Americans uncomfortably equate education with elitism. But
education is not the problem; it can offer invaluable tools for
becoming both more perceptive and more receptive—especially
useful skills when approaching challenging work. But when that
education blocks the actual presence of the work, we fail to perceive
the myriad ways it can show us what we don’t already know.
There’s a story about Berg giving a pre-performance lecture for
Wozzeck that I love (even if some claim it isn’t true). He allegedly
delved deeply into the musicological details of his score, discussing
its formal dimensions and various technical intricacies in minute
detail for almost an hour. He then concluded by saying, “Now forget
everything I just told you and simply experience the work.” That still
remains ideal advice for a “difficult” work like Wozzeck.
I would have made one suggestion to Berg: give your lecture after
the audience has experienced the opera on their own terms, by
which time—ideally—their curiosity and desire to learn will have
been awakened. With their own experience as the central reference
point, the lecture could reveal what was happening beyond their
impressions. If they listen to the work again afterward, they will
appreciate Berg’s mastery in a way that deepens their personal
connection to the piece. If listening inspires them to a third or fourth
or fifth viewing, they would likely find Berg’s elucidation drifting
further and further away. Rather than repeated viewing for the sake
of mastery or confirmation of what they have learned, an audience
returns to relish the prismatic and ever-unfolding light of repeated
exposure.
If the experienced spectator does not advance past the self-
congratulatory stage of art appreciation, a performance that doesn’t
meet expectations can only be an affront. This is why you often see
opera aficionados so disproportionately enraged at the mere
thought of a production diverging from their learned understanding
of a work; they see red in vociferous self-defense of what they have
mastered. Any comment thread online provides ample examples of
over-the-top wailing about directors destroying operas by
conceiving them differently. One of my favorites has to be a
comment on a Daily Mail article reporting on my production of La
bohème: “I do not want to be on this planet anymore.” (A
commiserating reader replied, “I hear you!”)
It is this grandstanding, much more than the ticket price, that makes
opera appear so pompous. If there were some way to curb the
aficionado’s displays of arrogance, the shift of energy in the
auditorium would make for an entirely different experience. What
can feel forbidding may instead seem inviting and inclusive. At the
very least, the oxygen in the house would certainly circulate better
without so much hot air.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
IT WASN’T SO LONG AGO that opera singers were featured on
mainstream television, like The Ed Sullivan Show or The Muppet
Show. The Looney Tunes send-up of Wagner remains for many as
much opera as they’ve ever experienced. The director Peter Sellars
shared with me a childhood memory of a handyman pulling up to
his home in a pickup truck . . . with the Met Opera broadcast playing
on his radio. Opera’s position in culture didn’t use to be as remote as
it feels now.
It’s easy to view this situation cynically, as though the bejeweled
televised appearances of beloved sopranos like Beverly Sills and
Leontyne Price represented a mainstream co-opting of opera to sell
an image of upward mobility, so important in postwar American
society. But when Leonard Bernstein or Maria Callas appeared on
prime-time television, they did not reduce classical music to a mere
signifier, as Pretty Woman does; rather, passionately performed
music by the best interpreters of the time infiltrated households
around the country at no cost. The Ed Sullivan Show, a popular
variety program that, in the estimation of the New York Times,
“defined American taste” from 1948 to 1971, featured opera on over
a thousand episodes. Sills called the experience of singing on the
show “staggering” when she considered that “‘more people would
hear you sing than heard Caruso in his whole lifetime.”
There’s no silver-bullet answer for why opera has lost its footing in
the popular imagination in the decades since. Some claim that the
proliferation of specialized channels for entertainment has made it
difficult to have unexpected encounters. While an Ed Sullivan
devotee may have tuned in for the Beatles and discovered bel canto,
the myriad options vying for a contemporary consumer’s attention
make accidental exposure far scarcer—and surely the algorithmic
filters that shape our hyper-personalized experience of social media
have made the problem exponentially worse. Others blame a
diminished presence of the arts in schools. A 2008 report by the
National Endowment of the Arts stated that “all 18-to-24-year-olds,
no matter what their socioeconomic status as children, were less
likely to have had a childhood arts education than the 18-to-24-
year-olds of 1982.” The same study laid out data to prove that “arts
education has a more powerful effect on arts attendance than any
other measurable factor.” (In which case, I should stop encouraging
art lovers to forget their education!)
We can speculate on what happened to opera as American culture
has changed, citing so many doom-and-gloom statistics. But what
about opera’s own culpability in the loss of its popularity? It’s hard
to look at companies today and not sense a voluntary removal from
all contemporary conversation, as they retreat behind red velvet
curtains and fill fewer and fewer of the plush seats. Lincoln Center in
New York embodies this remove both socially and architecturally. In
the 1950s, to realize the dream of a central performing arts complex
on the city’s West Side, over a thousand working-class Puerto Rican
families had to be displaced. And exclusion remained the dominant
tone of the resulting venues, where fortresses of imposing archways
and columns, far removed from Broadway, implicate the visitor in a
similar “ascent” from the street that San Francisco’s War Memorial
enacts. The complex seems to be looking down its nose at the city’s
riffraff and offering sanctuary to an arts-initiated elite.
Carnegie Hall, meanwhile, is located right in the heart of New York’s
bustle; pedestrians might pass it by without even noticing. And even
if blaring ambulances have nearly ruined my experience of
extremely quiet moments in a Mahler symphony, there’s a natural
energy and vitality in this hall that’s much more difficult to muster
within the travertined compound of Lincoln Center. That certainly
explains why Carnegie Hall remains New York’s musical mecca,
while the initial aspirations of Lincoln Center have called for
significant overhauls and renovations over the last two decades,
with an eye toward a more inviting inclusivity.
The conversation around opera’s and classical music’s remove from
society is often pitted as a tension between “highbrow,” “lowbrow,”
and “middlebrow” cultures—a hierarchical image that betrays the
elitism of those drawing the distinctions. What elitists would term
low or popular culture circulates broadly, while opera and classical
music remain a refuge for a (dwindling) few. But when opera
companies are in panic mode, they inevitably grasp at trying to
appeal to a lowbrow culture they clearly disdain. In attempting to
lure a younger, sexier demographic to the opera house, whether
through sarcastic and pithy language or photoshoots of singers in
leather jackets in front of spray-painted back alleys, most marketing
efforts demonstrate a tone deafness to the real culture on the street.
They usually only ever serve to reinforce a division.
But if it does work, and the communication around an opera feels
intriguing or enticing enough for someone to give it a try, what
happens when a newer audience actually arrives at the opera
house? Most likely some variation of the Parsifal performance
described in Chapter One: a feeling of being left out by the ritual.
And if the production mimics the kind of rote repetition the Knights
of the Grail undergo, the promise of the alluring marketing will feel
like a bait and switch.
“What makes it so difficult for our culture to be communicated to
the people is not that it is too high, but that it is too low,” is how the
French philosopher and activist Simone Weil articulates the
difficulty in connecting philosophy (what she calls “our culture”)
with the working class, in her posthumously published book The
Need for Roots. In watering down everything that makes a work
highbrow—opera, let’s say—and making it palatable to “the people,”
we patronize those we subconsciously prefer to keep beneath our
stature. This is akin to believing that the uninitiated need things
dumbed down to understand them, while the aficionados, like
colonizing missionaries, stoop to spread the light. (The success of
Davis’s X in Detroit proved the opposite: that an uncompromising
aesthetic can speak intuitively to its intended audience.)
To counter this condescension, Weil proposes “not popularization,
but translation, which is a different matter.”
It isn’t a question of taking truths—of already far too poor a quality
—contained in the culture of the intellectuals, and then degrading
them, mutilating them and destroying all their flavor; but simply of
expressing them, in all their fullness, in a language which, to use
Pascal’s expression, makes them perceptible to the heart, for the
benefit of people whose feelings have been shaped by working-class
conditions.
A crucial distinction here is that the “translation” is not one-
directional, from above to below. Culture itself benefits from this
encounter.
The search for modes of transposition suitable for transmitting
culture to people would be very much more salutary still for culture
than for the people. It would constitute an extremely precious
stimulant for the former, which would in this way emerge from the
appallingly stuffy atmosphere in which it is confined, and cease
being merely something of interest to specialists. For that is all it is
at present—a thing for specialists, from top to bottom, only more
degraded the nearer you approach the bottom.
Weil could easily be describing the current state of opera, the “stuffy
atmosphere” of opera specialists a perfect description of too many
nights at the opera house. But what I find remarkable in her thinking
is that acts of translation, while necessary, involve no loss or
diminishment whatsoever. If “the subject dealt with is the human
condition,” she argues, the greatest art will speak more directly to
those with a personal experience of the emotions the work explores.
“What an intensity of understanding could spring up from contact
between the people and Greek poetry, the almost unique theme of
which is misfortune! Only, one would have to know how to translate
and present it.”
“Translating and presenting” is precisely what the opera director’s
work can do. A production can come across as belittling and affected
—a self-conscious updating of sets and costumes to draw a too-
simple analogy between past and present. Or it may unlock the work
for an audience of any experience or education level. A democratic
respect for the audience sets the bar high but always aims to engage.
The pathway of translation is an arduous one, but each production
demands that the interpreters walk it.
This attitude remains a minority opinion at the higher level of opera
management. At a board meeting following my production of La
bohème in Detroit, a kind board member who did not like
experiencing the piece in reverse order asked a question I knew
others had been thinking. “An audience may not know anything
about Bohème before seeing this one, and now they may never know
that Puccini intended it to go the other way. Isn’t it our
responsibility to offer a reference to those who want to experience
the opera the way it was intended?”
I appreciated his generous interest in understanding more about
something he initially rejected. I prefer this dialogue much more to
how another board member reacted: she was allegedly so disgusted
by my “hanging a Picasso upside-down” that she resigned from the
board. Had she thought to engage with me about the production, I
might have helped her understand that comparing Puccini and
Picasso denigrates both, because the two art forms are different.
One is a finished work, a marker of time unchanged other than by
the degradation of the pigments and the canvas. The other, as I
argued in Chapter Four, is an open-source text that demands our
interpretive intervention.
To the more curious board member, I explained my disagreement
with the notion that our role is to offer reference points or an
objective reanimation of an opera. Every re-creation can at best
realize inherited assumptions of how we think performances used
to be. And even if airtight documentation existed detailing how a
work was originally performed, we are no more beholden to those
instructions than we are to restricting ourselves to candlelight for
illumination. If we are looking for references, we should consult our
phones, tablets, and laptops, which provide limitless access to past
recordings. These reference points—landmark performances, world
premiere productions, and so on—can be called up instantaneously
for further study and research. Live performances, appearing
contingently in our time and in our community, should contribute
translations that bring works closer to us, so they become
“perceptible to the heart.”
We don’t talk about elitism in those rooms of power, where a
company’s board meets to exercise good governance. Maybe
because a sense of belonging to an elite ideal is part of what propels
people to volunteer for these positions in the first place. That
particular board meeting, in the wake of a performance that was
meant to be celebratory and conciliatory, felt like a stand-off
between defenders of tradition and the vanguard of what was now
taking place. In the terse discussion, one board member joined in via
phone. Although she wasn’t visible, her slow and careful voice
betrayed a woman “of a certain age.” “I’d like to share my experience
of this Bohème,” she proclaimed, and a hush fell over the room.
As she began, I was expecting the worst. “I have repeatedly tried to
get my granddaughter to come with me to the opera, and after
convincing her that this production of Bohème was going to be
different, she reluctantly agreed.” The woman was very well spoken
and knew how to tell a story; we hung on her every word. “I was
skeptical myself as to how this concept was ever going to work,” she
continued, “and when the performance started and Mimì died in the
first twenty minutes, I thought, ‘There’s no way my granddaughter is
going to understand what’s going on.’ So at the end of the
performance, I asked her what she thought of the production.” The
woman took a dramatic pause, and we all leaned in.
“She . . . loved it!”
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
THERE IS ANOTHER KIND OF elitism that we don’t talk about—not in
boardrooms, production meetings, or design presentations: the
elitism of seeming to burn resources on extravagant productions, all
while our natural climate is literally on fire. It’s a kind of “Let them
eat cake” attitude that constructs an entire universe for a mere five
performances, before it all ends up on the junk heap.
How can we justify the excess of opera when the world is in survival
mode? Humans have steadily and inexorably made the planet
uninhabitable—so why are we expending our precious resources on
something so ephemeral? In our daily lives, we are called to
conserve more, to participate in sustainability, to tiptoe on the earth
rather than leaving deeply entrenched footprints. How do those
necessary (and perhaps too late) correctives resonate with the
extravagance we see onstage—not to mention the wastefulness the
audience purposefully does not see? There is an elitism in flaunting
excess, as if opera deserves a bigger piece of the natural resources
pie than anyone else.
Who am I to talk, you might be thinking, since many of my
productions might appear to be single-handedly responsible for
deforestation? But opera at its most epic can also, paradoxically,
create conditions for people to think differently. Opera can’t teach,
but it can always inspire. Engaging with new ideas, new sounds, and
new visions may motivate a spectator to seek solutions for problems
that seemed intractable, whether it’s homelessness, racism, or the
climate crisis.
Our relationship to the land was a central theme of Sweet Land
(2020), a world premiere opera produced by my Los Angeles
company, The Industry—and which made it only halfway through
the performance run due to the Covid shutdown. Before public
gatherings of any kind were prohibited, we hastily came together
one last time to film the piece and to preserve something of what
we’d created. While I’m grateful for this record, the video version for
me is disappointing for missing the central character: the land. The
experience of the fictional opera always relied on the constant
reminder of the real land that was underfoot and the real stories
that resist the dominant national narrative of “Manifest Destiny.” Its
staging was never intended to be experienced walled up and
removed but was instead porous and influenced by the natural and
unnatural environments surrounding us.
Sweet Land essentially told diverging stories of the encounter with,
encroachment upon, and attempted erasure of a mythic Indigenous
population, whom we called the “Hosts,” by an equally mythic group
of colonizers, the “Arrivals.” The conceit was for the audience to be
split, one watching the story of the Arrivals invading and violating
the land by building a train, the other group following the story of a
potlatch after the Hosts uneasily welcome the Arrivals. The two
audience groups sat together to witness the landing of the Arrivals
before diverging into those two tracks. An intermediary, liminal
space we called the “Crossroads” brought the audience back
together before they diverged again to experience a revision of the
first narrative they saw. The train, once completed, leaves the
insatiable Arrivals disgruntled; as they set off for the next promised
land, they leave behind bones and ghosts scattered on a poisoned,
industrialized land. Meanwhile, the feast has turned into a meal at
the forced wedding of a last remaining Host woman with a crude
Arrival, each of whom remembers the past very differently. In the
end, both audience groups returned to where they had started. But
no one had the same perspective on the piece called Sweet Land.
Their experience itself became a crucial aspect of the narrative, as
the forking paths re-created the diverging and partial views of
historical events. It became impossible to talk about Sweet Land
without foregrounding your individual experience of it—a fitting
metaphor for the humility we need in order to talk about our
national identity.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Sweet Land was the
intersection of voices that created it. The jobs usually taken by one
artist were shared by two: two composers, Raven Chacon and Du
Yun; two librettists, Aja Couchois Duncan and Douglas Kearney; and
two directors, me and Cannupa Hanska Luger (who also created the
fictional characters’ regalia). Each pair played on the Arrival-Host
dynamic in at least two ways. Indigenous artists (Raven, Aja, and
Cannupa) worked alongside artists who had arrived in this country
through some form of migration (Du Yun, Douglas, and me). And
each pair consisted of one artist with experience creating opera (Du
Yun, Douglas, and me) and one brand-new to the territory (Raven,
Aja, and Cannupa). Even then, all six of us had to work together on
co-articulating our ideas so that music, text, dramaturgy, and visual
representation could resonate. We took opera’s inherent
collaborative nature to the next level, which Aja and Douglas
discussed in a dialogue we printed in the program.
AJA: The collaboration, the breadth of it, made so many wondrous
and nuanced things possible.
DOUGLAS: You can see how opera can create an ecosystem in which
collaboration becomes sustaining. . . . There is something about that
collective creative possibility that’s just powerful. Add to that what
happens when you have collaborators who are trying to make
something that could have a sociocultural impact; collaborators you
can engage with questions in a very serious way. You might not
always agree, but you feel there’s real discourse happening even in
just making the damn thing.
It was great to read the librettists’ thoughts after our work was
complete. Beginning the project was, naturally, a much trickier
proposition. To discover what could have been (and sometimes
was) an uneasy path toward consensus, the six of us articulated the
values we wanted to hold and guide every decision in the
production. Among those values, a mindful expenditure of natural
resources felt particularly important for a production about
indigeneity and the widespread attempts to exclude Native
perspectives from the story Americans tell about ourselves. We
selected the site for the production—the aptly named Los Angeles
State Historic Park, a narrow parcel of land downtown where
Yaangna, the most important Tongva village in the region, was once
situated—and reaffirmed our commitment to treading lightly on this
land.
But in the frantic run-up to the opening, the material realization fell
out of sync with our professed values of preservation and
mindfulness. The set designers—also a duo, Tanya Orellana and
Carlo Maghirang—were tasked with creating spaces that spanned a
huge area while honoring the land’s history. They designed three
ambitious spaces—for the “Feast” track, the “Train” track, and the
gathering space where the piece began and ended—with long
tunnels snaking through the park that connected them. Like good
collaborators, Tanya and Carlo extended and enriched the ideas
brought up by the six creative team members. But they faced almost
insurmountable obstacles in realizing both their designs and
ecological mindfulness. Anything we built had to sit self-supported
on the land, because preservation purposes forbid stakes in the
ground deeper than eighteen inches. We also committed to gifting
all the set’s materials to a local arts school for its reuse. A worthy
aim—but requiring us to construct the sets to be adaptable, which
stressed our already tight build schedule and a budget that didn’t
account for that extra care.
It’s hardly unusual with The Industry that a set is still being finished
as the first audience members are arriving. In this case, our first
audience comprised invited members of Tongva, Tataav’am, and
Chumash tribes for a free community preview. As people started
approaching the very land we wanted this opera to hold sacred, all I
could see were screws, sawdust, and splinters scattered through the
grounds. The project we imagined as a laying bare of the mechanism
of colonialism was undergirded by a reenactment of colonialist
carelessness with the land. It felt like a defeat. I shared my
conscience pangs with Cannupa, who suggested that the only
solution was to acknowledge our shortcomings up front. So after a
ritual invocation by a Tataav’am elder, Cannupa and I both greeted
the audience and recognized the production’s heavy footprint on the
earth.
The moment was sobering—and when Covid hit, things got worse.
The chaos of our mid-run cancellation forced us to dismantle the
sets rapidly and under the most unsafe conditions imaginable. The
two-by-fours and planks we planned to donate were rendered
mostly use-less through haphazard disassembly; most of them were
thrown away. Beyond the cruel irony of another plague silencing
Indigenous voices, the improvident use of the earth’s resources
made me worry that there was no escaping the pernicious influence
of America’s founding spirit of exploitation.
In the early phase of the pandemic, accompanying the shock of the
world shutting down, I sat with a sense of failure around this
project. I wondered whether opera had any hope of pursuing
alternatives to wastefulness. But a year later, I received an
unexpected call from Marvin Schober, an energetic manager at the
Department of Water and Power who oversaw the utility’s recycled
water program. He had worked closely with us in the year before
Sweet Land’s premiere to help us find a solution for the Crossroads,
an improvised musical interlude reuniting the audience in an open
field. The Crossroads offered the audience a meditation on the land:
by sitting on it, feeling the crisp bite of the February air, and
experiencing the discomfort of not knowing what to look at or how
to engage. We imagined projected images revealing layers of history
—but instead of projecting on hard surfaces, which would distract
from the natural environment, I wanted the images to crystallize
and disappear as if airborne. The artist Alex Schweder and
projection designer Hana Kim collaborated on the idea of a mist
system that would allow images of livestock and industrialization to
seem as if they were emerging from the dark night and disappearing
into the sky. That ghostly trace would also prepare the audience for
the opera’s final scene, where they returned to their starting
location and heard voices whose disparate texts were projected on
the industrialized landscape around the park.
How could we create a mist effect—requiring a lot of water in a
drought—without being wasteful? The park, it turned out, had an
elaborate system of reclaimed water as part of its sprinkler systems,
distinct from the potable water in the drinking fountains. We would
need to work with the Department of Water and Power to figure out
the safest way to use this water for something other than what it
was originally designed for. When Marvin heard what we wanted to
do, he became incredibly engaged. “I’ve never done anything like
this before!” he enthused. But he also warned us that reclaimed
water was highly unsanitary. If we could find a safe way to keep the
water at a remove from the audience, he would authorize our use of
it. Although the original design had the mist surrounding the
audience, with the projections covering a 360-degree field, using
reclaimed water was more important than achieving an “immersive”
effect. After all, the real immersion we were after was not into an
illusory art installation but rather the reality of the land. In frequent
negotiations with our production manager Mariana Perez-Seda, we
reached a consensus: the mist wall became a backdrop for the
singers, far enough from any contact with artists or audiences, but
still powerful enough to give the effect of ghostly projections
floating in front of the downtown Los Angeles skyline.
Marvin’s call a year later broke the news that The Industry was
going to be recognized as “Customer of the Year” by his department.
Sweet Land, they claimed, was a model of creative adaptation and
art’s resourcefulness. The award (in the shape of a drop of water, of
course!) put all the collaborators’ efforts into perspective. Sweet
Land had not just been an irresponsible act of wastefulness but also
an example of how green thinking will require the same creativity
that artists deploy in every project. Nothing lets us off the hook from
striving for a more mindful use of every resource.
In process and in structure, Sweet Land was perhaps the most anti-
elite project I’ve ever participated in. Why this is such an anomaly in
the opera world is, perhaps, best articulated by Cannupa, in the
dialogue that we printed in the program:
CANNUPA: It’s funny, because within my normal art practice I have
been thinking about the importance of art existing as a verb rather
than a noun. Art as a noun is how it becomes controlled: it becomes
a commodity, sheltered in edifices in every major city to box it up
and put everything in their place. I keep thinking about that in
relationship to opera itself: why has it become this elite form, when
those original projects simply brought artists together to create a
narrative and communicate to their community about the problems
of their society? Opera existed as a verb that happens in a place; and
the audience completed the work by embedding the ideas within the
community. The only way to control that is to objectify it. So you
build a house for it, like a museum—and then you’re beholden to
those who paid for it. And a process of objectification begins in a
colonial fashion until it becomes opera as we experience it today.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
ELITISM IN OPERA IS SYSTEMIC, and identifying elitism in the opera
house will not be difficult as you experience the art form for
yourself. Yet an anti-elite attitude is growing in the field, with X and
Sweet Land only two examples of what that looks like. Here’s a guide
for identifying others.
PRINCIPLES OF ANTI-ELITE OPERA
•Exclusivity is not a virtue; inclusivity is.
•Acknowledging that conventional spectatorship breeds acceptance
of the status quo, newer works must challenge and avoid well-
known musical and dramatic conventions in favor of new directions,
new sounds, and new voices.
•“Dumbing down” insults the audience. The opera’s creators and
producers don’t rely on any assumed knowledge of the spectator.
•In classic works, historical indecencies are not relativized or
apologized for but actively called out and revised.
•In newer works, the opera’s subject matter originates from “the
ground up.” No celebration of privilege or power.
•Translation and engagement are encouraged; condescension and
arrogance—toward the artists and members of the audience—are
shamed.
•Rather than schooling the audience on correct and incorrect modes
of spectatorship, the opera house is hospitable and inviting,
encouraging the spectator to make the experience their own.
•In the lobbies and on the stage, opera is actively decoupled from
fantasies of economic advancement. Instead, the possibility of social
and spiritual advancement—accessible to everyone—can once again
become opera’s true aspirational character.
•A mindfulness around the use of natural resources must inform
every choice, from the audience experience to the rehearsal
conditions to the material creation of a production. Where can our
taking be offset by giving?
•Perform opera outside the opera house. In parking garages, in
escalator corridors, in park grounds, and in automobiles. Opera can
happen anywhere.
The final principle has been a particular passion of mine, and one I
feel is still a nascent development for opera. The next chapter will
explore site-responsive works beyond the proscenium arch of an
opera house.
Before turning to that, let me conclude this chapter by considering a
final form of elitism: that of the artist. It’s a dicey topic to address,
since I’ve been considered by some a snob just by way of my
devotion to opera. But let’s look at one of opera’s most surprising
meditations on anti-elitism, Arnold Schoenberg’s great, unfinished
biblical epic Moses und Aron (written 1932, first performed in 1957).
Schoenberg depicts the prophet Moses feeling a direct and
overwhelming connection to divinity—but not to the world he lives
in. He never sings but kind of speak-sings instead, as if he belonged
in neither an opera nor a play. Because his blinding insight sets him
apart from the people he is meant to lead, he must rely on his
brother Aron to communicate his truths. (Aron, completely at home
in the world of opera, sings with a heroic tenor.) The dilemma at the
heart of the opera becomes an allegory for the artistic process: the
truth can be harsh, severe, and forbidding, while art offers a
seductive disguise that allows truth to become perceptible. That
disguise, however, can also be a corrupting force, as Aron’s alluring
singing voice stirs the people into an orgiastic frenzy around the
iconic representation of a golden calf. The irreconcilable difference
between the brothers remains at a stalemate. Moses’s final line
—“Oh Word, you Word that I lack!”—serves as a devastating but
appropriate conclusion to an incomplete opera.
Moses und Aron remains an unpopular work. Instead of capitulating
to “what the audience wants,” Schoenberg committed fully to his
vision at the potential expense of pleasing his public. “Since I can’t
reckon on a performance of the work for a few decades,”
Schoenberg acknowledged in a letter, “I didn’t feel obliged to avoid
difficulties in the choral and orchestral parts!” It remains a
benchmark in the history of opera—Anthony Davis cites it as one of
his major inspirations, with the punishing vocal writing for Elijah
Mohammed in X carrying echoes of Schoenberg’s Aron. But Moses is
considered box-office poison by any company with the resources to
pull it off. When the Metropolitan Opera revived Graham Vick’s
excellent production in 2003, an employee told me, “You could fire a
cannon into the auditorium and not worry about hitting anyone.”
It’s easy to interpret the opera as autobiographical, with Schoenberg
allegorically represented as Moses and Alban Berg, his pupil, as
Aron. While Schoenberg never broke any of the rules he laid out for
his compositional technique, Berg’s more liberal handling of the
same techniques speaks with a surprising directness to an opera
audience. In Wozzeck and his own unfinished opera Lulu (1937),
Berg found seductive and empathetic costumes to drape around his
mentor’s advanced musical ideas. The unrelenting rigor of
Schoenberg’s music still alienates many listeners, and a
performance of Moses und Aron is a rarity. Berg’s music, while not as
popular as Puccini’s, finds far more frequent performances.
I don’t know how Schoenberg grappled with his “disciple” ’s popular
success. Did he consider Berg’s work a betrayal? Was he jealous? It’s
tempting to consider Schoenberg/Moses taking an elitist position,
detached from the populace and parroting a Reddit user’s comment:
“It’s certainly nice to have an entertainment where you don’t have to
mingle with hoi-polloi.” I have heard people reverentially claim that
Schoenberg’s music is so advanced that humanity has not yet
evolved far enough to appreciate it. In his appropriately titled essay
“How One Becomes Lonely,” Schoenberg accepts the messianic fate
of being ahead of his time:
While composing for me had been a pleasure, now it became a duty.
I knew I had to fulfill a task: I had to express what was necessary to
be expressed and I knew I had the duty of developing my ideas for
the sake of progress in music, whether I liked it or not; but I also had
to realize that the great majority of the public did not like it. I
remembered that all my music had been found to be ugly at first;
and yet . . . there might come the promise of a new day of sunlight in
music such as I would like to offer the world.
Schoenberg truly sounds like Moses in this essay, standing alone
“against a world of enemies.” Yet Moses’s remove in the opera is not
presented quite so heroically. The character is much more
ambivalent: his severe truth isolates him more than it inspires
others. Aron may have pushed selling his brother’s sacred ideas too
far, but if he had not taken on the burden of what Weil called
“translation,” the divinity Moses hoped to transmit would have
remained locked away.
The path toward translation is narrow and easily corrupted. But it
may be the only way to avoid the isolation of detached exclusivity.
Devotion to whatever we discover as divine will not be enough; we
still have a responsibility to our fellow humans. This, too, is explored
in the allegory of Moses und Aron: if music is a dialogue between a
musician and a listener, then a new musical language that fails to
communicate betrays a monologic arrogance. Even as opera
explores the limits of human perception, with expanded
vocabularies for music and drama, the essence of what we do must
be grounded in contact and connection.
In short: in imagining anti-elite opera, we must imagine Moses and
Aron’s collaboration as happy.
 8

BREAKING THE FRAME

OPERA BEYOND THE OPERA HOUSE
Here’s a confession: my attention wanders a lot when I’m sitting in a
theater. I can’t keep myself from looking around. I inventory the
lighting grid, try reading my program, observe things I’m not
supposed to, and throw sideways glances at the audience members
around me to see how they are reacting to what’s happening.
Conventional wisdom would either chide me for my lack of focus or
blame the performance for not being compelling enough to hold my
attention. People who sit behind me might assume I’m restless or
bored senseless. But that’s how I prefer to engage with the event in
space: not with laser-focused attention on what happens on the
stage but taking in the whole world of a performance, naturally
including the audience and the architecture. I’m still listening and
imagining and dreaming along with a production as it unfolds; I just
may not be looking at what the director wants me to see.
Little wonder I feel such a connection with John Cage: his work
proves that anything your concentration alights on can become a
perfect catalyst for engaging the world. Realizing the potential of
what we don’t notice is, for Cage, art’s true province. His most
famous work, 4′33″, asks musicians to sit at their instrument for four
minutes and thirty-three seconds, performing the work in three
movements without playing a note. Sometimes called a “silent
piece,” Cage’s work creates space for all the music we choose to
drown out, everything left out of the narrow cone of concentration
that demarcates learned listening from the world at large. The
coughing and rustling of the audience, the hum of the air
conditioner, the thud of a dropped program all make up the piece,
the score, the music. If concentration, like the word “concentric,”
implies a zeroing in on a fixed point, a piece like 4'33" offers an
escape from our otherwise narrowing minds.
I find it enormously freeing to let my mind drift and take in
everything as I watch an opera or listen to a concert, and I must
admit to being that kind of reader as well: a word, a phrase, an idea
sends me into unexpected territory. I don’t stop reading, but the text
fades into the background of my mental activity, as new ideas
inspired by the words push to the forefront. I may occasionally miss
a crucial plot point or a particularly deep thought, but my mind’s
wandering is woven into the fabric of that book in a way that
transcends the literal; the meaning of the words recedes, and my
mind meanders among the ideas presented to me. Music—
inherently, wonderfully nonliteral—can prompt this drift even more
powerfully, so that I feel more deeply connected to what’s
transpiring. I may not be aware of the composer’s clever inversion
of the movement’s second theme in the woodwinds, or whatever.
But when I stop trying to understand a piece rationally and let my
mind wander like a river over new terrain, I am allowing the music
to help me explore how I think and feel. Then it becomes about my
experience, and therefore the development of my consciousness.
Why are we forced to attend a performance of classical music as if
we’re schoolchildren with a stern disciplinarian as our principal?
Why have we reduced spectatorship to a constricting of our
attention to a single point, where everything speaks? Why do we sit
still in the dark and ignore the myriad impressions surrounding us?
Opera today demands complete concentration, an expectation so out
of step with the rapid pace of our “attention economy” that it must
be a contributing factor in the art form’s decline in popularity. But it
wasn’t always this way. Abbate and Parker list the “alternative
activities” French operagoers participated in during an opera
performance in its heyday: “gambling, chess-playing, eating, talking,
ogling one’s fellow attendees, and, in the so-called loges grillées
(shuttered boxes), quite possibly things a gentleman never
mentions.” Sitting silently with single-minded attention paid to the
stage was “not the historical norm.” Yet now—precisely in an era of
extreme attention deficit—opera stubbornly demands your
unwavering absorption. If it’s difficult to focus your mind on one
point for ten minutes, how much harder is it to sit for hours with
only the activity onstage to occupy it?
Even after nearly thirty years of attending operas, I have not
developed the skill of keeping my mind focused on the stage
throughout a performance. Yet by embracing an escape from that
focus, I’ve learned to love opera more. I’m sure I would never have
devoted my life to the art form if I couldn’t also imagine it taking
place beyond the boundaries of the opera house.
We have grown accustomed to engaging with live performance in a
way that feels cinematic, something happening within a frame. That
frame was probably lifted from theaters, where for centuries the
portal we call a proscenium arch separated the world of fiction from
the world of reality. From the spectator’s perspective, the frame
precedes the scene (the literal definition of pro-scenium) and masks
the machinery that creates stage illusion. Almost all operatic
performances take place safely behind this archway that creates a
picture of a faraway, floating world.
If you visit Renaissance and Baroque theaters today, with their
impressive proscenia emblazoned with the names of the generous
benefactors who built them, you can’t help but notice how awful the
sight lines are from anywhere but a lavish central box. The
proscenium often stands in some viewers’ way. What would be an
impossible frustration for audiences now was nothing out of the
ordinary back then: only royal personages could expect perfect
visibility. Not only were sets designed to emphasize the noble box’s
centrality—employing a perfect vanishing point of perspective that
could only be appreciated at the center of the space—the entire
theater was built to remind everyone who was in charge.
Horseshoe-shaped balconies, terrible for viewing the stage, were
fine for catching a glimpse of the stand-ins for divinity in the central
box.
The vanishing point in these theaters was less about an organizing
center for the composition on the stage. The very real center of
attention was in the auditorium: the seat of power.
The proscenium arch is therefore a silent contract with the
audience, and attending theater becomes a rehearsal for being in the
world. The space where we view a representation of society
prescribes a mode of reality, not so much for the world behind the
proscenium, the world of fiction, as for the society in front of the
proscenium (pro-proscenium?), the world of the audience. And just
as society was built on a rigorous system of hierarchies, the
architecture of the hall visually reinforced that hierarchy as natural
and right. Today the problem is not the proscenium but the
accumulated archeology of assumptions it has come to represent. It
orients a well-rehearsed understanding of our position in relation to
our community, and signals a promise that what transpires beyond
it will correspond with our expectations.
Aristocracies and monarchies may have waned in most countries
that produce operas, but the architecture of auditoriums has
remained surprisingly consistent. The proscenium arch has become
less prominent in newer theaters, but it’s rarely eliminated; a
theater losing its proscenium would be like a ship losing its anchor.
Instead, proscenia draw less and less attention to themselves, to the
point where they are now usually an invisible given (like all
ideology). Baroque proscenia were so ornately decorated that even
if you could only see the stage from an oblique angle, the space
surrounding the performance was still something to savor. Since
then, theaters have increasingly followed guidelines of neutrality,
the more to focus exclusively on the performance.
Wagner’s Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, opened in 1876, began a
process that has resulted in drab auditoriums bereft of all ceremony.
Wagner even went so far as to build a series of fake gray proscenia
to push the eye even further into a funnel, emphasizing the drama
onstage as an impossibly faraway universe. To ensure
concentration, house lights in the auditorium are dimmed, maybe
extinguished entirely, as a preemptive strike against an unfocused
public expecting to “see and be seen.” But though the social
pleasures of theater are denied to Wagner’s audience, the awe-
inspiring effect is worth it: when a performance unfolds on the
Bayreuth stage, you easily fall into an illusionistic space that can feel
like a private dream, as the world around you disappears into
darkness.
With models like Bayreuth, it has become bad taste for a new
theater to draw any attention to itself. Theater has become a space
yearning to disappear, inviting the audience to forget where they are
and lose themselves in a fictional universe. Every other space we
inhabit contains history and potentiality, while theaters have
become a void and a nowhere land. Those who watch a performance
as I do can easily feel suffocated in these environments, as our
inclusive concentration feels forced into a flue. The art alone can
rarely succeed in holding our interest for long, when everything
surrounding it is rendered invisible and unworthy of attention.
What would opera look like if it were given opportunities to engage
all its many dimensions: activating the performing space, changing
the spectator’s position, maybe even inviting their active
participation? What if the house lights didn’t go down? What if you
were allowed to take pictures or video? What if you could get up and
move around during the performance, taking it in from different
angles?
To reach its full potential, opera is going to have to explore the
world beyond its conventional frame.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
THE URGE TO ESCAPE THE framework of the proscenium became
increasingly urgent in the twentieth century, beginning with
Antonin Artaud. Before writing “The Theatre and the Plague,”
Artaud completed his first manifesto for a so-called “Theater of
Cruelty” in 1932, which demanded a different social contract from
the one mirrored in the hierarchies of traditional theater:
We abolish the stage and the auditorium and replace them by a
single site, without partition or barrier of any kind, which will
become the theatre of action. A direct communication will be
reestablished between the spectator and the spectacle, between the
actor and the spectator, from the fact that the spectator, placed in
the middle of the action, is engulfed and physically affected by it.
Artaud’s ideas and emphasis on action spurred generations of
theater artists to think differently, especially in America. The
founders of the New York–based Living Theatre, this country’s first
experimental theater collective, called Artaud “that madman who
inspires us all” and “the philosopher, for those of us who work in
theatre, whom we can reach toward most quickly.” Staging “poetic
dramas” as Dionysian group rites meant to provoke a revolution, the
Living Theatre mixed media and broke the boundary between artist
and spectator in search of Artaud’s “direct communication.” By the
1980s, the collective was using participatory techniques to rehearse
and directly involve the spectator in the action.
“Action” was also a key word for the American experimental artist
Allan Kaprow, who considered the action paintings of Jackson
Pollock a harbinger: all the arts would escape their traditional frame
and extend into space. The flung paint making up Pollock’s
compositions created an “instability” where “the artist, the
spectator, and the outer world are much too interchangeably
involved,” as Kaprow wrote in a 1958 essay on the artist. The scale
of Pollock’s paintings engulfed the viewer the same way Artaud
wanted: “the entire painting comes out at us (we are participants
rather than observers), right into the room.” Kaprow followed
Pollock’s lead in exploring art as something spatial and experiential.
“We do not come to look at things,” he asserted in an essay
accompanying his exhibition in New York’s Hansa Gallery. “We
simply enter, are surrounded, and become part of what surrounds
us, passively or actively according to our talents for ‘engagement.’ ”
(The title of this essay, “Notes on the Creation of a Total Art,” could
have been cribbed from Richard Wagner.) Kaprow became most
famous for what he called Happenings, performance art predicated
on a lack of separation between audience and performer. “These
events are essentially theater pieces,” Kaprow noted in 1961,
“however unconventional. That they are still largely rejected by
devotees of the theater may be due to their uncommon power and
primitive energy, and to their derivation from the rites of American
Action Painting.”
With Kaprow as his inspiration, the director Richard Schechner
conceived of an “environmental theater,” which sought to envelop
the audience in the world of a drama. For his 1983 production of
Anton Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard in India, Schechner placed the
audience in a different environment for each act: inside the estate
for Act I, in the cherry orchard for Act II, participating in the party
for Act III, and outside the estate for the farewells of Act IV. Rather
than disappearing into darkness as in Bayreuth, Schechner’s
spectators were always on the move and visible to each other. In an
interview for the India International Centre Quarterly, Schechner
defines environmental theater as an outgrowth of art’s move “from
the framed painting to the collage, to the environment, where the
whole room is designed.” Comparing the effect of environmental
theater with folk rituals like India’s Ram Lila festival, Schechner
points out the anti-elite potential of immersing the audience in the
work.
It touches on inclusion; and an extreme example of inclusion is
participation. In other words, the proscenium theatre and much of
classical theatre . . . functions on the basis of exclusion. You, as an
audience, are invited to watch somebody else do something; and
they are in a different space—actually and conceptually. Two rooms
with a wall removed: you’re in one and they’re in another. You are
not really included, nor does theirs extend out into your world, or
yours back into theirs, except in some sort of metaphorical or
allusive way. But, in the environmental theatre, the audience is part of
the world [italics in original].
Schechner’s experimental techniques have since become familiar,
even over-exposed. Immersive experiences are all the rage, from
theaters to galleries to commercials. Everywhere, that is, except in
opera, which remains ensconced behind the frame of the
proscenium arch. Why?
The answer is primarily a question of acoustics. To the shock of
most first-time operagoers, most operas perform unamplified. I
often find myself correcting audience members after a performance
in the 2,700-seat Detroit Opera House: “No, the singers were not
miked. What you heard were their natural voices projecting over all
those instruments, all the way to the back of the auditorium.” This
certainly provokes amazement and admiration—but most
contemporary audiences, accustomed to amplified theaters, are not
always aware this is so. That means an enormous amount of effort is
being expended to preserve a way of performing that may not even
register with the audience.
It’s truly astonishing to experience a glorious unamplified voice fill a
theater. The acoustic space allows the great earlier operas to take
you on a journey of light and shadow, loud and quiet, with an
extraordinary sonic range that is impossible to achieve with
microphones. I love the unamplified quality of operas, especially in
houses that are more humanely built, with fewer than 2,000 seats
and where silence has a chance to carry true power.
But keeping opera an exclusively unamplified phenomenon has
come at a cost. Sound’s directionality is probably the biggest
impediment to the creative ideas of directors and designers. Since
optimal aural conditions always take precedence over perfect
positioning, singers end up moving downstage and facing fully
forward. In many theaters, just turning slightly profile threatens to
disconnect a singer’s sound from the audience—the reason you see
so many performances defaulting to “park and bark.” Imagine a play
where the actors are never in profile, never upstage, and always
front and center when speaking; that’s often what you experience in
the unamplified spaces where opera happens. You can see why an
“environmental” performance that maintains a nonamplified
tradition becomes an impossibility.
Opera, then, is experienced through two frames: the hall’s
proscenium, which frames our eyes, and the hall’s natural acoustics,
which frame our ears. Without these two absolutes, many
aficionados will not consider what they are seeing “real opera.”
Natural acoustics have become their fetish—and a particularly
sadistic one when a singer’s voice is required to fill a 4,000-seat
theater without support. As thrilling as acoustic singing often is, the
pursuit of that sensation has pitched the entire operatic enterprise
toward achieving the largest possible effect, regardless of whether
the performance is Wagner’s gargantuan Götterdämmerung or
Britten’s tiny chamber opera The Turn of the Screw. Singers who can
fill the expanse of a football field without a microphone and bring
subtlety, delicacy, and alertness to the drama are exceptional . . . and
exceptionally rare. An opera house’s architecture locks in much of
what companies search for: volume, precision, and willingness to
move in sync with the seemingly unmovable machine that runs the
show.
Those who dare tamper with natural acoustics face a wrath out of all
proportion to reality. The first company I worked for was New York
City Opera, which took the ingenious step of deploying a state-of-
the-art acoustic enhancement to the notoriously dead sound of its
Lincoln Center home, the State Theater. Built for George
Balanchine’s New York City Ballet in 1964, the theater was designed
to mitigate the noise of dancers’ footfalls. What makes for a
wonderfully “quiet” experience of ballet turns into catastrophic
conditions for opera. So in the late 1990s, Paul Kellogg, City Opera’s
General Director at the time, added spatial microphones (though
none for the singers) and hundreds of inconspicuous speakers to
give the natural sound a chance with the architectural design. The
enhanced effect was as natural as could be. I had the opportunity to
listen to stage rehearsals with and without the sound system
operating, and the difference was uncanny: the same music could
feel muffled and tired without the system, or direct and present with
the system functioning. This boost helped City Opera fulfill its
mission of nurturing young American talent. Without that support in
the inhospitable acoustics of the hall, most still-developing artists
would have struggled to establish a connection between themselves
and the public.
The innovation Paul Kellogg spearheaded should have been
applauded and adopted by every opera company with an outsized
theater. But they might have been gun-shy after seeing the reaction
this acoustic enhancement unleashed. A headline in the New York
Times about the system, “Meddling With Opera’s Sacred Human
Voice,” says it all. Or nearly. The article quotes the editor of Opera
News (a magazine published by City Opera’s larger Lincoln Center
competitor, the Metropolitan Opera) laying out the intractable rules
of opera: “It’s an implicit contract with audiences that there will be
no amplification of any kind and that they will hear the voices as
God made them.” There was hardly a Times review of a subsequent
City Opera performance that failed to chastise the theater for this
acoustic sacrilege.
Beaten down, the company dismantled the sound system ten years
later, attempting to rectify the acoustic problems with a costly
renovation to the State Theater. Three years after returning to a hall
that now offered an unadulterated experience of natural acoustics,
City Opera folded for good in 2013. I suppose the message is: no
opera is better than acoustic enhancement?
Kellogg’s innovation should never have provoked such a scandal.
Amplification is not a panacea for everything that makes opera lack
immediacy; and it’s true that artless amplification will flatten out
sound, reducing the highs and lows for general audibility. But
there’s no reason to demonize what an enhanced extension of sound
can do to further the evolution of the art form.
After all, the holy acoustic fortress of opera had already been
breached, frequently to revelatory effect. Houston Grand Opera
introduced amplification with two pieces specifically written for
enhanced voices in the 1980s and 1990s. The world did not collapse
—rather, those operas proved to be two of America’s most
astonishingly original works for the art form. In Meredith Monk’s
1991 masterpiece ATLAS, the intrepid voices of the ensemble were
able to employ extended vocal techniques with extraordinary
subtlety. Monk’s musical language is inextricably linked with a
physical language of gesture and dance, demanding a new kind of
performance that is not inherently compatible with the rigid style
many opera singers have been trained to master (to be fair, most
singers have never been invited to explore such a freedom). What
would have happened to her audacious composition if she had been
forced to comply with the demands of an unamplified opera house?
In Houston, microphones not only extended the distance a human
voice could be heard but expanded possible vocal techniques. A new
music, and a new dramaturgy, emerged in an opera that still feels
like no other ever written.
Five years earlier, in the same theater, John Adams amplified his
voices for Nixon in China, heightening the crucial nonreality of the
work. All of Adams’s subsequent operas similarly require an
imperceptible acoustic boost for the singers, which allows his
interpreters so much more freedom. Singers can sing
conversationally rather than “barking”; conductors don’t have to
worry about covering the singers and can let Adams’s astonishing
orchestrations really shine; and directors can place singers
wherever they choose, even facing directly upstage, for maximum
dramatic impact. Adams’s sound designer, the composer Mark Grey,
expertly brings the voices right to the threshold of being noticeably
amplified. The effect is natural and seemingly effortless—and rather
than taking away from the singers, the miking enables them to more
fully inhabit their roles without worrying about volume.
American soprano Renée Fleming, whose voice effortlessly fills the
Metropolitan Opera without ever losing subtlety of expression,
performed the role of Pat Nixon in a 2023 production at the Paris
Opera. When asked about singing with a microphone, Fleming told
the New York Times, “I don’t think it’s helpful to the art form to insist
that there never be any enhancement on the stage. There’s a huge
difference between a subtle enhancement . . . and full-blown
amplification. I appreciate it, especially because a lot of what I’m
doing is way upstage. And many set designers don’t want to be
forced into building boxes all the time to help us with the acoustic.”
Twenty years ago, this kind of comment would have sparked
outrage, and a more ego-driven singer may have denounced the
microphone as insulting. If the rigid resistance to amplification is
indeed breaking down, that’s an encouraging sign for opera.
Then again, in the same year that Fleming sang Pat Nixon, my use of
light enhancement to stage a much older opera provoked irrational
ire among traditionalists. As the sound system was getting dialed in
during the production’s piano dress rehearsal, the company’s
general director pulled me aside to proclaim his outrage over the
amplified voices: “This is an opera house!”
Nevertheless, microphones have definitely helped opera, theater,
and music venture into environments outside the theater.
Schechner’s use of microphones for his Cherry Orchard production
meant that all spectators had access to what was spoken, even if
they found themselves in an unpredictable relationship to the
performer. In opera, a highly sophisticated sound system at the
Bregenzer Festspiele in Austria allows nearly 8,000 spectators at a
time to take in spectacles on an open-air “floating stage” on Lake
Constance. One of the most powerful set designs I’ve ever seen was
for a production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera that couldn’t have
happened anywhere but in Bregenz: an enormous skeleton jutted
out of the lake, holding open an oversized book where the fateful
drama played out. Part of the set’s potency came from its completely
“unoperatic” setup: no proscenium, no orchestra pit, and no offstage
wing space. I remember feeling awed by the scale of that audacious
image, but couldn’t help wondering, “Where did they put the
orchestra? And what happens if it rains?”
When I eventually worked at Bregenz, assisting the British director
Graham Vick on his 2009 production of Verdi’s Aida, I discovered
that the live orchestra plays safely in a separate building, perfectly
in sync with the singers outside on the lake. At the first stage-
orchestra rehearsal, I marveled at how audio and video monitors
allowed the conductor to maintain real-time contact with the
performers, as well as keep big ensembles and choruses together.
The complex series of speakers all around the lake allowed for a
vividness of sound that never felt artificial—and the sound design
always guided your eye to look exactly where the singers were
staged. State-of-the-art sound technology not only made new
experiences like this possible, it created an effect so natural that you
never once thought about the sound design. (As Mark Grey once told
me, “You only ever notice sound design if it’s bad.”)
We now find ourselves daily in environments with higher and
higher volumes—in cinemas, arenas, theaters, nightclubs, even
restaurants. In opposition to that trend, there is surely something
attractive about the nostalgic space of unadulterated sound that
opera offers. The right repertoire and the right theater can still
provide audiences with a magical escape. Opera proudly (or
stubbornly) keeps audio levels lo-fi and unidirectional—even as the
scale and ambition of the art form actually lend themselves to full
immersion in sound and image. So as our ears have adjusted to new
levels and new ways of listening, I can’t blame audiences who attend
a performance of music meant to be ear-splitting—the “Ride of the
Valkyries” from Wagner’s Die Walküre or the “Dies irae” from
Verdi’s Requiem—for walking away with the disappointed feeling
that the music didn’t have the visceral impact of the recording
they’d heard in their car on the way to the theater.
Opera companies fear amplification for everything it might seem to
take away. I can only see the possibilities it opens up—not just for
new work like ATLAS and Nixon in China, but for great works from
the past. At the Hollywood Bowl, a massive venue that seats over
15,000, a sold-out crowd gathered to witness a single performer
with a single instrument playing a single work: Yo-Yo Ma playing the
Bach cello suites from memory. For two and a half hours, the crowd
sat silently in a kind of pure communication. The Bowl’s pristine
sound system allowed every nuance to be savored half a mile away;
never for a second did you believe there was anything mediating
your experience of this music. Thanks to a technological miracle, a
miraculous performance was shared with an unprecedented crowd.
Epic scope and intimacy merged for something ineffable, reaching
operatic heights.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
BEYOND INTRODUCING AMPLIFICATION to expand our acoustic frame, can
more be done architecturally to encourage new ideas in opera
outside the visual frame?
The conductor and composer Pierre Boulez made a notorious
suggestion. As a thinker and performer, Boulez had few rivals in
twentieth-century music; I like to think of him as a philosopher of
sound. On the one occasion I got to meet him, at a lecture on Wagner
he gave toward the end of his life, I was shocked to encounter a self-
effacing man of effortless humor. The decidedly elderly crowd was
charmed by the smiling raconteur—as if he had nothing in common
with the hot-headed revolutionary who had tried taking the New
York Philharmonic in a thoroughly modern direction after Leonard
Bernstein. The younger Boulez was a firebrand, probably best
known for one battle cry: Blow up all the opera houses! The fact that
this incendiary statement remains his best known surely speaks to a
deep-seated desire, even among aficionados, to witness such a
conflagration.
But what did Boulez really mean? If we look at his statement in full,
we see that the target of his attack is the architecture:
Only with the greatest difficulty can one present modern opera in a
theatre in which, predominantly, repertoire pieces are played. It is
really unthinkable. The most expensive solution would be to blow
the opera houses up. . . . But don’t you think that would be the most
elegant? . . . Or one can play the usual repertoire in the existing
opera houses, Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, up to about Berg. For new
operas, experimental stages absolutely need to be incorporated.
This apparently senseless demand has already been widely realized
in other branches of the theatre.
Monk and Adams may have shown how a conventional theater, with
its proscenium arch, does not have to be a limitation to new
thinking; creativity and state-of-the-art technology can still escape
the vanishing point of a traditional experience. But for original work,
Boulez’s point remains urgent: new music demands new modes of
engagement and new configurations of encounter. Altering the
relationship between spectator and performer is hard to achieve
within the separation enforced by the proscenium arch. To create
new work inside the theater will necessarily involve a “blowing up”
of all expectations—at the very least, a subversion of all the
limitations the architecture of opera houses now implies.
The Industry in Los Angeles was born from a wish to discover what
new ideas might emerge away from the proscenium arch. The
resulting work, taking place in spaces that were not built for a
theatrical purpose, is sometimes called “site-specific” or “site-
responsive.” Following Artaud’s dream, the division of artist-
spectator disappears in site-specific productions; a different
relationship offers an unexpected encounter with a work. There are
many similarities to Schechner’s environmental theater, although
the phenomenon is probably as old as theater itself. “From grizzled
medieval tradesmen re-enacting the death of Jesus on a muddied
cart trundling through the streets of York to bespectacled ’60s
avant-garde artists huddled in the back of sweaty bookshops, there
has never been a time when theater has only happened in theaters,”
Andy Field wrote for The Guardian back in 2008. “It would be fair to
say that the idea of sitting down in a purpose-built auditorium of
plush red velvet seats arrayed in a number of tiers is a relatively
new one.”
For my Industry productions, I prefer the term site-responsive.
Rather than a background, the location is a character itself, and the
productions search for connection and dialogue with the found
environment. This process brings immediacy and history to the
surface—since, unlike the “invisible” space of the theater, the site is
an inextricable partner in the performance. There’s a powerful
tension in the juxtaposition of a devised fiction with the silent
witnesses of history that haunt every space, including (maybe
especially) those sterilized locations some call “non-places”—
parking lots, escalator corridors, abandoned lots. How can a fiction,
embodied in a performance, shake off a space’s layers of routine
experience and uncover what might be sleeping under the concrete?
Attempting to escape the narrow perspective of the vanishing point,
my projects for The Industry became increasingly expansive in their
use of space—leading up to Sweet Land, as described in the previous
chapter. The company’s first production—and in many ways the
inspiration for starting the company in the first place—was Anne
LeBaron and Douglas Kearney’s “hyper-opera” Crescent City (2012).
I spearheaded workshops of this brilliant and original piece twice at
New York City Opera’s laboratory for new operas called Vox. But the
work-in-progress, with its electronica-driven score (for amplified
voices, naturally) and a manic, fragmented narrative, resisted
everything associated with operatic institutions and the proscenium
arch. The operatic field didn’t know how to engage with the
amorphous, undefinable entity Anne and Douglas were creating.
That reluctance gave me the impetus to start a company in Los
Angeles for developing precisely the kind of work that otherwise
would not find a home. And the sprawl of the music and text made it
clear to me that the new work did not belong in a conventional
theater.
Site-responsiveness was not yet an idea I had fully developed when I
started The Industry. The non-proscenium site for Crescent City was
a fairly straightforward “non-place,” a temporarily vacant 15,000-
square-foot warehouse in Atwater Village. In some ways, the space
took a backseat to the art that filled it—not drastically different
from the drab auditoriums that draw no attention to themselves.
There was no responsiveness to the warehouse, and the result was
much more in line with Schechner’s environmental approach to
Cherry Orchard. But right from the beginning, my goal was to escape
the proscenium arch and change opera’s spectator-artist
relationship. So the audience had to choose between four distinct
ways of seeing the work: a fixed seat on the perimeter of the
warehouse, each one offering a unique perspective and with video
relays filling in what was happening out of sight; a fixed seat on an
elevated platform looking down on the whole performance from a
zone we jokingly called the “Skybox”; a fixed seat on custom-made
beanbags that were part of the set/environment; and a walking path
that let you move freely during the performance, continuously
changing your relationship to it. The performance was the same for
everyone, but a spectator’s experience ranged from most detached
(in the Skybox) to most immersive (on the beanbags). There was no
true hierarchy to the experiences; no seat could really be considered
better or worse than any other. In our non–opera house, each
spectator had a partial view and a wholly individual access point.
The audience became collaborators in their own experience.
The production was excitingly chaotic, but the results were not
entirely satisfactory. The modes of spectatorship still felt prescribed,
even if simultaneous and multiplied. I began to think of spreading
opera across multiple spaces; to offer even more indeterminacy in
the audience’s engagement possibilities; and to let a different
location truly shape the work, not merely serve as an alternative to
the opera house.
That exploration began with Christopher Cerrone’s Invisible Cities
(2013), based on the 1972 novel by Italo Calvino. As with Crescent
City, I had championed this work at Vox and again witnessed the
operatic field struggle to place Cerrone’s intimate and haunting
work in the context of an opera house. Calvino’s novel takes the
reader on an imaginary travelogue through fantastical places, like
cities built on seashells or stilts, framed by a series of dialogues
between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. Their conversations involve
philosophical and often cryptic musings on semiotics, the
shortcomings of language, and a mistrust of external reality. With
only a trace of narrative, Invisible Cities traverses a circuitous route
with endlessly forking paths; it’s as concise as ancient wisdom but
contemporary in its worldview.
Like the novel, Cerrone’s adaptation resists operatic treatment in all
the obvious ways. My immediate impulse was to situate the work in
Los Angeles’s Union Station, with the opera hidden among the
comings and goings of normal citizens. Rather than surrounding the
audience in the constructed world of Crescent City, Invisible Cities
immersed us in a heightened awareness of the everyday.
All train stations have an air of romance about them, but the best
and most beautiful ones transcend their functionality and become
an existential expression of life’s transience. Union Station possesses
a grandeur defying any charge of irrelevance in the ultimate Car City
that is Los Angeles. (It’s not unusual to meet Angelenos who aren’t
even aware that a train station exists in their city.) Unlike LA’s other
Art Deco gems built by John and Donald Parkinson—City Hall,
Bullocks Wilshire, and the Memorial Coliseum—the station’s
elegance feels charged with nostalgia. It’s easy to imagine yourself a
traveler from the East Coast in 1939, pulling into Los Angeles as if it
were the end of the world, and feeling like you’ve arrived at Shangri-
la: Spanish architecture, tessellated tiles, vast space, palm trees. It
was the city of the future, with the largest network of public
transportation in the country offering its citizens unbound freedom.
The optimism in 1939 for what the city might become still speaks in
the tiles and archways. It’s a perfect site for illuminating one of
Calvino’s thoughts: “Futures not achieved are only branches of the
past: dead branches.”
Union Station is nevertheless hardly an anachronistic holdover. It’s
still used as a transit hub, and public transportation is becoming an
increasingly viable and environmentally necessary option for a city
in need of alternatives to clogged freeways. Ambitious plans for
expansion, including high-speed rail, had moved the station back to
the forefront of the city’s imagination when I decided to do
Cerrone’s opera there. Union Station at an important moment of
transition reminded us that Los Angeles itself is in a constant state
of becoming. Cities are not fixed images but fluid entities that morph
according to their inhabitants. We must believe that the time we
invest in a city shapes its very geography, in both tangible ways
(building a house, skyscraper, or freeway) and intangible ways (acts
of kindness, crimes, fashion statements, car accidents) that over
time become tangible. Spending time in the station allows us to
meditate on and perhaps even perceive this fluidity.
This, ultimately, is what a site-responsive work seeks to do: to put
the aura and identity of a location in direct relationship with the
ideas explored by a work of art. A production of Cerrone’s opera for
a proscenium theater would require the creation of designs and
mechanisms to realize and communicate the work’s themes; in
Union Station, the building itself just spoke.
Like Crescent City, amplification was a requirement for Invisible
Cities—but this particular site allowed us to take a step beyond
straightforward miking. The entire opera would be heard through
individual wireless headphones, untethering the audience from any
one seat or perspective. Directionality of sound was no longer an
issue: the headphones allowed the audience to move among various
spaces, inside and outside the station, and always remain connected
to the live performance happening around them. Sometimes a
spectator might “find” the singers among the crowds at the station,
and sometimes they would ascribe singers’ voices and their stories
to the faces surrounding them. Who was a singer or dancer, and who
was merely waiting for their train? Headphones made possible a
new experience of opera.
I loved the use of headphones for being so commonplace; I use them
nearly every day, and certainly anytime I am traveling. Headphones
have made the detachment of sound from its source a familiar
occurrence. Music that only we can hear detaches us halfway from
the physical space we inhabit and opens a private doorway into
reality. As you move through your environment, you’re
simultaneously somewhere else—inside a cocoon of sound,
supernaturally close to its heartbeat. Your personal soundtrack
transforms the space around you. A train station is a radically
different place for the commuter listening to the blunt dread of Carl
Orff’s Carmina Burana than it is for the passenger listening to the
cool complexity of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. Any potential meaning
they glean from the interplay of private soundtrack and public space
is no less truthful for being purely coincidental. Headphones thus
offered an exciting solution to the problem of representing Calvino’s
cities: they allowed the imaginary cities to live as images in an
audience’s imagination.
I’ve had some unforgettable experiences with headphones as an
artistic tool: Janet Cardiff’s haunting walk around Central Park,
where prerecorded memories coexisted with the present-day life of
the park; Merce Cunningham’s EyeSpace, where each audience
member was given an independent MP3 player to hear an
individually randomized selection of Mikel Rouse pieces to
accompany a choreography that was the same for everyone; and
Back to Back Theatre’s play Small Metal Objects, where a drug deal
takes place among unwitting commuters and headphones let the
audience in on their real-time conversations. When you factor in the
“silent disco” phenomenon—headphone-wearing ravers dancing to
music no one else can hear—it’s clear that headphones have been
disrupting trends in all forms of artistic experience for some time.
For opera, a genre where the human voice is so essential, the
possibilities opened up by the headphone experience are limitless.
When I called Cerrone to pitch the idea, I half expected him to hang
up on me, but he responded, “Funny enough, I’ve been thinking of
myself more and more as a composer for headphones.” I was
relieved but on reflection not surprised: the beauty of his music
depends on an almost impossible intimacy. You truly want Kublai
Khan and Marco Polo to be whispering in your ear to achieve the
magic of Cerrone’s pianissimo vocal lines.
Thinking in a site-responsive way expanded our understanding of
opera. A thematically resonant space spurred us to reexamine all the
art form’s most central tenets, such as voice, vocal production,
technological intervention, and audience experience. My subsequent
projects for The Industry have sought ever new forms of
responsiveness. In Hopscotch (explored in depth in the next
chapter), the story was splintered into thirty-six different chapters,
many of them experienced in cars and on the streets of Los Angeles.
In War of the Worlds (2017), a co-production with the Los Angeles
Philharmonic that adapted the notorious Mercury Theatre radio
play by Orson Welles, voices from Walt Disney Concert Hall were
broadcast to three defunct air-raid sirens near parking lots in
downtown Los Angeles—with voices from those locations streamed
back to the hall, creating an uncanny two-way communication inside
and outside the auditorium. (A project I could have never conceived
of before experiencing the detached orchestra at the Bregenzer
Festspiele.)
These productions offered every audience member a freer sense of
spectatorship, one of drifting attention and making choices. Outside
the traditional theatrical space, they resisted the framing supplied
by so much other media. There is no single path, and spectators can
let their imaginations wander. Out in the open, where frameworks
don’t exist, a sense of activity becomes a precondition. It’s a spur
that can generate endless new routes for opera to take.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
THE ELITIST AND THE AFICIONADO will likely scoff at what I’m
describing: “That’s not opera, that’s just gimmickry.”
I’m all too familiar with the accusation. Any time I’ve tried to do
something different with a production, it’s been routinely dismissed
as an attention-getting stunt. But I have never undertaken an
experiment or deployed a technological novelty without considering
it an essential contribution to a poetic reading.
Every artist exploring new terrain has a bigger picture they are
pursuing, beyond the aesthetic result. Artaud, in the preface to his
essential collection The Theater and Its Double, claims his theater is
a form of Nietzschean protest: “A protest against the senseless
constraint imposed upon the idea of culture by reducing it to a sort
of inconceivable Pantheon . . . A protest against the idea of culture as
distinct from life. . . . This leads to the rejection of the usual
limitations of man and man’s powers, and infinitely extends the
frontiers of what is called reality.”
The Living Theatre’s experiments, more socially and politically
driven, were rooted in an anti-authoritarian vision for American
social and political life. The group started, according to their
website, as “a company of actors who want to bring about the
Beautiful Non-Violent Anarchist Revolution.” Julian Beck, a painter
and one of the company’s founders, articulated the organization’s
mission as a poem: “To call into question / who we are to each other
in the social environment / of the theatre . . . / to set ourselves in
motion / like a vortex that pulls the spectator / into action, . . . / to
cry ‘Not in my name!’ / at the hour of execution, / to move from the
theatre to the street / and from the street to the theatre.”
Allan Kaprow likewise emphasizes the bigger picture that drove him
to create Happenings: “They are a moral act, a human stand of great
urgency, whose professional status as art is less a criterion than
their certainty as an ultimate existential commitment.” Best of all,
perhaps, is Schechner’s ultimate aim. “What we have done, in a
certain sense, is what modern science and modern philosophy have
tried to do,” he explains in the India International Centre Quarterly.
“In other words, extend the horizon of what we can see—not to
deny that there is more than we can see, but to put as much as we
can see into our consciousness—literally to expand our
consciousness.”
I deeply resonate with Schechner’s aim, and I find myself pursuing a
similar extension of the sensorial in opera. In our everyday lives, we
are reduced to one viewpoint—the world we see, hear, and relate to
our inner life—and the conventional theater space mostly
reproduces that mode. Environmental and site-responsive stagings
expand the “horizon of what we can see,” sometimes making it
impossible to experience the work as a complete world. The partial
view of a site-responsive performance can bring about a reckoning
with reality, along the lines of our experience with Sweet Land; or it
can point to a much larger world beyond what we know. We stretch
our concept of a single vision of reality; we never lose our
subjectivity in the process, but we are made aware (sometimes
painfully) of its limitations.
I have felt first-hand how challenging it is to make the proscenium
arch feel unexpected and multidimensional, especially in
comparison with the much freer work I’ve done with The Industry.
If the hierarchical architecture of the theater prescribes a social
contract, that contract is ripped up when we perform outside a
theater space. In new experiences, the audience must figure things
out for themselves rather than relying on what they’ve come to find
familiar. Suddenly, so much more is possible.
As my directing work oscillates between theater-based and site-
responsive productions, I must admit to feeling more at home
outside the theater. The work that I believe most fully represents my
worldview offers alternatives to the vanishing point of our
perspective. I nevertheless endeavor to bring what I learn “offsite”
back to the apparatus of opera, to explore how this old
infrastructure can still welcome new ideas. That seems to be the
way to question the old social contract. The architecture can remain
intact; it’s our expectations that will need to be blown up.
 9

CASE STUDY: HOPSCOTCH IN LOS

ANGELES
I want to live life like a book you can start anywhere,
that you find has no beginning
and no end.
—SARAH LABRIE , from the libretto for Hopscotch
César died four months before hopscotch opened in 2015. He was a
loyal friend and a trusty companion in my first five years in Los
Angeles and accompanied me on so many journeys. He carved out a
personal space for me to think or sing, never judging how badly. And
when we were alone, like on the open road that stretches through
Joshua Tree, he gave me a sense of freedom and possibility. He was
my first car—a silver 2003 Mini Cooper.
I acquired him from a couple who nearly cried when I drove him off.
He got his name from the guy I was infatuated with at the time.
When the car’s power steering died five years later, I also felt like
crying when I faced trading him in, in such a diminished state. It
sounds like the ultimate example of fetishistic materialism, but I
couldn’t help but identify with César the Car. Like a mechanical
spirit animal, he reflected me and framed my vision of my adopted
city. Saying goodbye was closing a chapter in my life; five years of
memories and emotional journeys were shedding their material
shell.
Maybe it’s only in Los Angeles that cars feel like an extension of your
being. I learned to drive in Chicago, but it was in LA that the state of
driving struck me as compelling. The fluidity between your inner
world and outer reality creates a surreal state not dissimilar to the
one induced when you listen to music: external stimuli internalized
into something completely personal, where the event in the present
moment and the field of individual associations interpenetrate.
Site-responsive stagings can make us aware of our limited
perspective, and could there be any better symbol of a limited
perspective than the protective bubble of your vehicle? When we
view the city through a windshield, there’s a constant danger of
dissociation from our environment. The philosopher Paul Virilio
claimed that “what goes on in the windshield is cinema in the
strictest sense”—a sentiment that implies an unnaturally detached
view of the world around us. That confusion of real and virtual
worlds, the tension between freedom and myopia centralized in the
experience of driving, became one of my fascinations and led to the
creation of Hopscotch as an opera taking place in cars. On the heels
of Invisible Cities, where the music in our headphones transformed
our perception of the train station’s reality, I wanted to continue
exploring how music in real time could subvert an alienated
experience of our everyday.
Hopscotch also began as a kind of dare. I was sitting in the atrium of
the Cleveland Museum of Art with my friend and close collaborator
Jason H. Thompson, taking a break from technical meetings for a
2014 production of Janáček’s Cunning Little Vixen with the Cleveland
Orchestra. This was six months prior to Invisible Cities, which was in
a bad way: we had much more money to raise, and more important,
we were undergoing an arduous process of trying to secure the use
of Union Station from LA’s Metro Transit Authority. Their
willingness to allow this indescribable project to proceed—
instigated by a company with only one other project under its belt—
was anything but certain. And even if we won them over, many
technical uncertainties had yet to be tested. Was the project even
possible?
Jason and I decided to hit a reset button. What could we imagine
doing that was more difficult than Invisible Cities and would allow us
to gain some perspective on the train station experience? No sooner
had he suggested, “What about cars?” than we had drawn a ring of
arrows on a napkin indicating the opera’s structure: cars that travel
from point A to point B, shuttling the audiences on discrete journeys
that formed a loop within the city. At the center of the ring was a
circle—a central axis for the entire project.
Invisible Cities, occupying only one location, suddenly seemed so
much easier. I could go back to Metro with renewed energy because
I had one-upped that challenge. During the final stages of the opera
at Union Station, the car concept took hold in a way I knew I would
have to see through to its completion. Two and a half years later,
Hopscotch took place on the streets of Los Angeles, with twenty-four
cars zigzagging a path around the city and shuttling four audience
members at a time through a nonlinear experience.
I’m sure that if I’d merely heard about Hopscotch, I would have
written it off as a gimmick. Whenever I emphasized the logistics, the
enterprise came across as a superficial stunt. In a career of projects
that resist definition, I still have never created anything so “hard to
explain” or reduce to an elevator pitch. Which I take to mean that it
is the fullest realization of the ideas of opera outlined in this book.
Hopscotch involved more disciplines—from architecture to
animation and actual life on the street—than any other project I’ve
worked on. It remains my most complicated experiment in
destabilizing the relationship between artist and spectator. And to
my surprise, it ultimately became a genuine spiritual exercise,
holding out the hope that somewhere there is a center where
everything connects.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
SINCE THE EXPERIENCE OF HOPSCOTCH is nearly impossible to explain, let
me try and re-create the perspective of a ticket buyer.
You are given GPS coordinates of where to go, and at the appointed
time a car pulls up to meet you and three other audience members
there. A stage manager opens the door for you and announces a
chapter number. You climb into the car and proceed into one
moment of a larger narrative. The cars are various types of
limousines, allowing for four passengers to share a space with
singers and instrumentalists, who themselves are always interacting
with singers and sounds positioned outside the car.
After driving for ten minutes, you arrive at a destination
simultaneously with another car carrying four other passenger-
spectators. The doors are opened for you, and the two sets of
audiences swap cars. Your new chapter is announced with numbers
as your guide—if your first drive was Chapter 18 and the new one is
Chapter 2, you could position both experiences in the story’s
chronology. New artists, performing music and text by a different
composer-librettist team, bring a new segment of the story to life as
you continue to move through the city.
A performance consisted of eight “transfers”—six drives and two
sites—until, roughly ninety minutes later, you end where you began,
completing one route of a possible three that made up the full piece.
An audience could travel just one route and experience the entire
piece in microcosm; “completists” needed to attend three times to
see all three routes.
The audience was intentionally not in the driver’s seat, partially
because the city looks completely different to a passenger than it
does to a driver. But also because each chapter required a
renegotiation between the audience and the work. As they entered
some cars, passengers would find themselves sitting next to singers
performing as if they were alone—a “fourth wall” view that ignored
the presence of onlookers, despite the strange intimacy of sharing a
confined space. The spectator was an observer, not necessarily a
participant. But in other cars, there was direct interaction. (In one
scene, for example, a fortune teller asked the audience members to
pull a tarot card, and based on their choice, the singer and violinist
in that car instantly called up one of eighteen possible short musical
portraits.) If you entered a car and found yourself submerged in the
environment of the drama, it wouldn’t be long before everything
changed, and you were forced to find your footing all over again.
Perhaps the most serious disruption to the conventional
understanding of opera was the multiplicity of composer-librettist
voices. Each time you got into a car, the musical/dramatic treatment
would shift, as the baton was passed to different voices. The
composers, all Angelenos, were Veronika Krausas, Marc Lowenstein,
Andrew McIntosh, Andrew Norman, Ellen Reid, and David
Rosenboom; the librettists were Tom Jacobson, Mandy Kahn, Sarah
LaBrie, Jane Stephens Rosenthal, Janine Salinas Schoenberg, and
Erin Young. Even with so many authorial voices, we featured
additional music by Philip King, Odeya Nini, Lewis Pesacov, and
Michelle Shocked. We never aimed for a cohesive unity subsuming
these authors; instead, each voice was allowed to behave
interdependently, aware of what others were doing but carving out
their own identity within the larger framework.
Musically, sonically, experientially, the performance was one of
constant disruption and disorientation. While a loss of familiar
bearings was the basis of exploration for my first two projects for
The Industry, Hopscotch pushed the idea to an extreme with its
constant repositioning between artist and spectator. I have since
attempted to bring this sense of disorientation to opera houses. In
Bohème, for example, in addition to its reverse order, a newly
created character would occasionally interrupt the musical flow (see
Chapter One). For the Lyric Opera’s Proximity in 2023, a triptych of
three independent composer-librettist teams, I opted to “shuffle” the
works: a scene from one work gave way to a scene from an entirely
different musical-dramatic universe. In Comet/Poppea (2024), two
different operas separated by nearly 400 years, with music by
George Lewis and Monteverdi, perform simultaneously—clashing,
overlapping, interrupting each other, and sometimes even
harmonizing. But all those experiments seem a contained
microcosm compared with the commotion of Hopscotch.
When I consider why I strive to achieve such disorientation, I have to
resort to an automotive analogy: to dismantle the autopilot. I’ve
spent a good portion of this book attacking an autopilot approach to
opera, from the thoughtless repetition of how operas are
traditionally performed to the machine-like operation of houses that
mitigate risk at the expense of new creative expression. I’ve also
looked at how audiences have been conditioned to attend opera in
search of confirmation for what they already know, from familiar
music, familiar stories, and a familiar experience. The entire field
can seem to operate on some form of autopilot, resulting in a
numbing mindlessness that prevents us from taking unfamiliar
paths or scenic routes, or activating our own agency.
“Living on autopilot” has become a common metaphor for a
detachment from self-awareness. We can (uncannily) drive
ourselves home safely even while more directly engaged in talking
or listening to the radio. But psychologists, therapists, and
philosophers fear that contemporary society encourages us to spend
the majority of our day on some form of autopilot; some
neuroscientists even believe that such an approach to life has
shrunk our capacity for self-awareness to a duration of only seven
seconds at a time. To expand that duration, we need to escape the
daily habituation of autopilot behavior—and for opera, that means
constantly disrupting an automatic way of experiencing the work.
No single artist involved in Hopscotch could ever lapse into
autopilot. We all had to negotiate changing conditions, especially
those that were beyond our control—like how unexpected traffic
might require some improvisation! Each one of us was pushed to
achieve something we weren’t entirely sure was even possible—and
this uncertainty, which crystallized for me in Hopscotch, has become
a goal for any project I now undertake. Whether it’s asking singers
to fly through the air singing Mozart or to interact within a green-
screen environment while performing Wagner, I find opera exciting
only when singers are asked to discover places they never imagined
they could go, regardless of the repertoire being performed. For
Hopscotch, artists performed the same ten-minute scene twenty-
four times a day while undertaking some audacious stunts: singing
while standing up in the back of a Jeep driving down a dirt road;
rappelling down the concrete bank of the Los Angeles River; playing
the violin while crossing a busy street; or climbing a tall chimney to
perform a solo trumpet line hundreds of feet away from the
audience. In each case—even those that didn’t involve daredevil
activity—the rehearsal process required us to work through
uncertainty and doubt to a place of mastery. It’s awe-inspiring to
watch a performer surmount something they imagined impossible,
to the point where it becomes an integrated part of their performing
selves. It may be the most inspirational aspect of experiencing opera,
which (when not on autopilot) can be the most audacious and
superhuman artistic activity we humans have yet come up with.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
“THIS BOOK CONSISTS OF MANY BOOKS, but two books above all. The first
can be read in a normal fashion and it ends with Chapter 56. . . . The
second should be read by beginning with Chapter 73 and then
following the sequence indicated at the end of each chapter.”
This is how the Argentinian author Julio Cortázar recommends that
his readers navigate his great 1963 “anti-novel” Rayuela
(Hopscotch). If you read Cortázar’s narrative in nonchronological
order, you shuttle from Chapter 73 to Chapter 1, then 2, 116, 3, 84,
4, and so on. The last two chapters, 58 and 131, end up pointing to
each other, creating a closed circuit in place of any kind of
conclusive ending. The physical act of reading, where linear front-to-
back thinking is reinforced by the book’s weight gradually shifting
from your right hand onto your left, and by your bookmark as
guidepost to where you are in the novel’s trajectory, is disrupted in
a way that I find enjoyable. You’re at a permanent midpoint, never
seeming to advance or retreat. No beginning, no conclusion, but
endlessly in the middle. Rayuela prefigured Choose Your Own
Adventures, my favorite books as a kid, where young readers are
confronted with a choice at the end of each chapter that takes them
through a maze of narrative permutations.
My original plan was to adapt Rayuela for Los Angeles and for cars—
an impulse that had everything to do with its playful,
nonchronological approach and almost nothing to do with its plot,
which follows bohemian Latin American artists living in Paris. The
one plot point that intrigued me in considering an adaptation of the
novel was a game played by the two central characters, Oliveira and
La Maga. In a resolutely pre–cell phone era, the two wandered
separately on “roundabout routes” through “the tangled ball of yarn
which is Paris,” to see if they could serendipitously find each other.
Inevitably, improbably, they always do manage to meet, hardly a
surprise to either of them, since they both professed a belief that
“casual meetings are apt to be just the opposite.” The rest of the
novel is comprised of dialogues and “nonaction,” or the refusal of
action, which would have made opera an uncomfortable fit. But a
drift through Paris of two lovers, testing the boundaries of chance
and fate, held the kernel of a beautiful idea for an operatic
experience.
The hide-and-seek Cortázar’s lovers play resembles what the French
philosopher and artist Guy Debord developed as a dérive, or a “drift.”
A dérive became a strategy to shake habitual patterns of urban
living, as a small group of inhabitants take an unpredictable, rapid
journey through terrain routinized by regimented social passage.
Their hope is to somehow get lost in a city that has become too
familiar, to discover what is alien in the terrain or what patterns
invisibly control the flow of citizens. Along the way, a “possible
rendezvous” with someone they don’t ordinarily encounter becomes
part of the game. But the most important factor is a “letting go” of
those predetermined goals that create a tunnel view of our
surroundings. Focusing on destination over journey cuts us off from
the myriad possibilities that surround us at every street corner.
Although the dérive originated in a Paris on the brink of the major
social unrest of the 1960s, Debord’s strategy seems tailor-made for
twenty-first-century Los Angeles. LA living hinges on a point-A-to-
point-B habit, with the fear of soul-crushing traffic keeping people
within a confined radius of comfort. Debord was apparently inspired
to create the dérive after studying the predictable pattern of a young
woman’s movement through the 16th Arrondissement; a map of her
daily life formed a triangle between only three points on any given
day. It’s easy to imagine countless Angelenos never straying from a
similarly closed circuit. Even those of us who love the city must deal
with the consequences of an urban plan built on the exclusive
reliance of cars. It becomes hard to resist the deadening isolation of
a life on autopilot when we experience so much of life this way. In
his essay “Theory of the Dérive,” Debord leans on a quote from Karl
Marx, who observed that “humans can see nothing around them that
is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves.
Their very landscape is alive.” Driving can offer freedom and
connection (at least the physical connection of two geographically
distant points), but it can all too easily alienate us from our own
surroundings, turning vibrant centers of communal possibility into a
sun-filled backdrop for narcissism.
And so, even more than Cortázar’s novel, the dérive became the
major inspiration for Hopscotch. By suppressing destination and
routes—forcing drivers into the passenger seat and allowing
audiences, four at a time, to experience “unexpected rendezvous”
along the way—the elaborate mechanics of opera boiled down to a
twenty-first-century “drift.” For Debord, a new relationship between
an individual and the city could emerge through the dérive. An
increased awareness of artificial borders might “give rise to new
objective conditions of behavior that bring about the disappearance
of a good number of the old ones.”
What might happen to our experience of Los Angeles after engaging
the city with this kind of fluidity and potentiality? And how could
music and opera participate in coaxing such a change of
perspective? Could it draw even hardened audience members
toward a transfigured vision of our communal lives?
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
JULIO CORTÁZAR’S ESTATE REFUSED US the rights to Rayuela without
giving a reason. This actually came as a relief: other than the dérive-
like game the two lovers play, the rest of the novel would stubbornly
resist adaptation. But then the question became “Okay, but what
story? And would we need a story at all?”
Hopscotch is a case in point of an opera with a de-centered narrative,
where plot becomes secondary to the totality of the experience. In
fact, that totality became the narrative—in this case, an open-ended,
jumbled, sprawling one. Spectators could not resist creating their
own narratives built on the impressions around them. What was
real, and what was part of the production? How would personal
associations with individual streets or neighborhoods intersect with
the chords, the concepts, the characters presented in each chapter?
Achieving this level of openness was my principal goal, even as
narrative still played an essential supporting role.
A light trace of narrative encouraged an audience to seek out
connections from chapter to chapter. There was something to hold
on to, even if the scrambled chronology made the story seem more
like a Rubik’s Cube. Disparate scenes in and out of cars that weren’t
pointing to something larger—that is, without thematic cohesion
and without dots to connect—would never have made for a
satisfying artistic experience, neither for us nor for the audience.
Hopscotch without a narrative span would have likely turned into an
art-adjacent stunt—a pleasant (and sometimes unpleasant) lazy
river ride through the city. Quickly forgotten upon completion.
To develop a narrative distinct from Cortázar’s, writer and
dramaturge Josh Raab gathered the creative team together for a
series of exploratory exercises over several months. We started to
define what the opera would explore, and then extrapolate
situations (in a nod to Debord) that could bring those ideas to life.
Through those conversations, we drew up a thematic map, which
had three major hubs: “Life experienced as continuous or
disjointed”; “The changing relationship between inner life and
external world”; and, maybe most directly connected to Cortázar,
“The search for a center.” Each theme offered offshoots—but all
three pointed to the center, toward a box labeled “LOVE.”
We all wanted to make sure each scene (or chapter) was influenced
directly by the streets the audience would be traveling—without
ever resorting to simple historical illustration. Landmarks,
neighborhoods, street names, and histories became “givens,” found
subjects rather than found objects, shaping the story. A statue of the
legendary Mexican singer Lucha Reyes in Mariachi Plaza, for
example, inspired the name of our main character—and Reyes’s
most famous song, “Por un amor,” ended up weaving through the
score of Hopscotch, as a kind of talisman for her circuitous destiny.
 A thematic map preceded the writing of Hopscotch, with three cycles and a
central axis establishing the form of the performance.
The Lucha of Hopscotch is a performer—a singer like Lucha Reyes,
but also a puppet maker who performs with her best friend,
Orlando. Lucha’s car crashes into the motorcycle of Jameson, a
brooding and brainy scientist, which marks the ominous beginning
of a catastrophic marriage. After the two are married, Jameson drifts
further and further away, obsessively researching the location of
consciousness in the brain. Troubled by her husband’s erratic
behavior, Lucha receives a phone call from an unidentified old
woman who offers mystifying advice: “A thousand streets lead to
one great road, and no gate blocks your way.” Jameson eventually
vanishes under unknown circumstances, leaving Lucha to careen
through nightmarish states of loss—until she recalls the woman’s
message, which sets her on a path toward larger acceptance.
Orlando, having suffered his own painful losses, reunites with Lucha,
and the two fall in love. They resume their artistic collaborations,
now brilliantly successful, and live out peaceful days. On the
precipice of death, Lucha finds her way to a phone and sings to her
younger self: “A thousand streets, a thousand streets . . .”
 The three routes of Hopscotch: Red, Yellow, and Green.
Even a simple story like this one was bound to be challenging to
comprehend, and the confines of a car severely limited the range of
possible actions. Although some chapters involved key plot points—
usually taking place at sites, where audiences left the car and
explored a part of the city—the drift through the city lent itself
better to emotional or psychological states of being than to
narrative. (The same can be said, of course, for many of the best
operas!) Traditional opera uses recitative to move the plot forward
between the more reflective and musically memorable arias; for
Hopscotch, ten short, animated chapters (created by five different
animators) were made available online to audiences in advance. On
a practical level, these videos provided audiences a baseline
understanding of the story. But on a more interesting, conceptual
level, the various styles of animation prepared them for an
experience that was not going to be homogenous: style, language,
and aesthetic varied wildly, with our three characters and their
interwoven stories as the only through lines. The animated chapters,
numbered like the other chapters (1, 3, 5, 10, 13, 16, 23, 27, 30, and
34), served as narrative tent poles. Attentive, sleuthing spectators
could position what they were experiencing live through the
number chronology.
(A perspicacious/obsessive audience member might realize that
Hopscotch was incomplete. One number was missing: Chapter 21,
the point in the story where Jameson’s disappearance would have
been explained. Not many people caught this particular trick—but it
allowed us to ensure that the narrative stayed open-ended.)
Legibility was additionally challenged by the inconvenient fact that
performers could only be in one place at any given time. To trace the
trajectories of the three characters through multiple stages of their
lives—from childhood to old age and death—we would need
multiple singers portraying them. Costume designer Ann Closs-
Farley used colors to help us identify them: Lucha always appeared
in a yellow dress no matter her age, and Jameson always rode his
motorcycle through LA in a black leather jacket and white T-shirt.
I’ve seen this tactic work brilliantly in film—hilariously in Luis
Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire, where a Frenchman’s
mercurial love interest is portrayed by two different actresses; or
profoundly in Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There, where four different
actors portray seemingly irreconcilable sides of Bob Dylan’s
identity. To the question of whether audiences would understand
that every performer they saw in a yellow dress was playing the
same character, I pinned my hopes on a theory that underpins all my
productions: If you can state the rules of your particular game,
accepting them becomes an audience’s agreement to play along.
Having multiple performers depict our three characters, while
pragmatic, was also core to the concept: each character “contained
multitudes,” and they were portrayed by singers of different cultural
backgrounds, ages, and genders. All of us contain myriad versions of
ourselves, a sentiment that became part of the libretto. Lucha
increasingly falls in love with an expansiveness she finds within
herself, while an anxious Jameson wonders, “How do you know you
are in love with me, when there are so many you’s and so many
me’s?” For Jameson, his split personalities indicate a continuously
fractured reality, full of disjointed chaos; he obsesses over T. S.
Eliot’s line “Hell is the place where nothing connects with nothing,”
and likens that place to Los Angeles. For Lucha, lack of continuity
doesn’t mean an absence of center; she rewrites Eliot to claim, “Love
is the place where everything connects with everything.”
In the disjointed experience of the narrative—which may have
begun with a heartbroken Lucha, followed by an older, wiser Lucha
in love with Orlando, followed by Lucha as a young artist, and so on
—the audience had to take a leap of faith that Jameson could not: the
belief that there was a center to everything. And, at least for
Hopscotch, there actually was a center: a bespoke pavilion
equidistant from all three routes that we called the Central Hub. An
audience could visit the Central Hub for free and experience all
twenty-four live performances simultaneously: a live feed from each
car, in some cases manipulated by an audience member, was
beamed back to this location on individual monitors. With
headphones and an individual remote control, audiences could tune
in to whichever chapter they wanted and jump freely around the
narrative on their own.
As a practical matter, the Central Hub guaranteed the work was not
limited to an exclusive car ride. Any audience member who only
attended one route could see the missing chapters (or rewatch
chapters they’d experienced) with a free visit to the Hub. But the
pavilion also served as an aspirational center of the work, where its
various sprawling strands intersected. The Hub was the place where
“everything connected with everything,” or as our thematic map
preferred it, LOVE.
At the end of each performance day, we performed Chapter 36,
titled “To Find a Center,” as a Finale. Singers and instrumentalists
from each chapter began an incantation of daily rites (“To get the
transmission looked at, to get the hair trimmed, to listen to the
messages . . .”) in their isolated cars as they drove toward the
Central Hub. As each car arrived, they joined the other performers,
improvising on the various modes that wove throughout the
performance. If you were watching the piece at the Hub, the singers
you were seeing on screens out in the city suddenly began sharing
space with you one by one, until you were immersed in cascading
waves of sound. Passengers emerged from an encounter with a
solitary voice into a harmonically dense field, waves of sound
punctuated by the chimes of crotales. The very disparate, sometimes
lonely, sometimes scary, sometimes exuberant rides that had been
happening in individual cars converged and made one circle: a
center.
The Central Hub embodied another recurring theme of the piece:
escape from a physical sense of time. The pursuit of a circular rather
than linear experience of time echoed throughout the narrative.
When Lucha and Jameson are fully in love, they experience time “not
as a river but as a web.” In a later chapter, on her own, Lucha
wonders with a quiet anxiety, “Is all time simultaneous?” And the
chapters depicting the elder Lucha calling her younger self enact a
supernatural loop in time. Yet the route taken by each car, which felt
contiguous and sequential in real time, was actually a circular path,
ending exactly where it started. The linear experience was the
illusion, the result of not knowing where you are going, while your
true movement through the city traced a circle.
At the (circularly constructed) Central Hub, time really was
simultaneous. Narratively, the entire story was happening in the
same instant; experientially, twenty-four different situations around
Los Angeles could be viewed at once. (This is why I chased the
company offering zero-latency transmission, as described in Chapter
Six, in an attempt to outsmart our illusion of time. I don’t, however,
think that would have satisfied the representative’s question of
“why I was doing this.”)
The Hub was no small logistical feat on its own. Everywhere else in
Hopscotch, we worked with the city’s existing architecture and
infrastructure; but we had to build the Hub and invent its
infrastructure. That task was taken up by Constance Vale and
Emmett Zeifman, two young professors at the Southern California
Institute of Architecture—the experimental school in downtown’s
Arts District that enthusiastically lent us their large parking lot to
house the project. Constance and Emmett engaged their students in
designing the temporary pavilion, clad with discarded billboard
material, and ensured its functionality.
The Central Hub’s artificiality was a reminder that a unified state
was always an aspirational one. But to me, this was like opera. With
its high level of artifice, its distance from our perception of reality,
opera is best suited for conceiving and speculating on sounds,
images, and ideas of another way of being. The more outlandish the
work, the more powerfully it inspires spectators to be that change.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
FOR A PIECE THAT BEGAN as a dare, Hopscotch pushed us to the brink of
the possible. With Jason as production designer, we kept imagining
more and more challenging situations. What if we projected images
onto downtown’s 2nd and 3rd Street tunnels—but only for the
audiences in the cars, not for anyone else in the tunnels? Or
traversed the narrow dirt path by the Los Angeles River and then
had the singers venture into the river’s apocalyptic concrete
channel? How about placing a lone trumpeter on the top of an old
water tower for the audience to hear (and see) off in the distance,
playing in time with a scene happening on a different rooftop? The
first person we hired to manage the production suggested we delay
the project to make time for a feasibility study. “There’s no point in a
feasibility study,” I responded, “because I can already tell you the
project is not feasible. That’s the whole point.” (Unsurprisingly, she
didn’t stay on the job very long.)
There was a kind of lunacy involved in the making of Hopscotch, an
over-the-top obsession that I think is characteristic of opera itself.
Artists pursuing opera push themselves and their colleagues to
preposterous lengths—for “the beauty of the act,” as the protagonist
of Holy Motors put it. Yet that sort of madness is missing in a lot of
the opera I see, where respectability and good manners are points of
pride. Opera would do better to cultivate more foolishness, more
anarchy, more unruliness.
Every aspect of our production required audacity, especially in
pursuit of the sites we wanted to include: iconic LA locations like the
Bradbury Building, Mariachi Plaza, and Million Dollar Theater as
well as nondescript spaces like an abandoned parking lot in Boyle
Heights, unused loading docks in the Arts District, and a vista point
in Elysian Park. The line between fiction and reality was constantly
blurred for people we dubbed “unexpected audience members.” But
in a movie town like Los Angeles, where every corner is a backdrop
for filming, our situations were rarely disruptive or alarming to
bystanders. In most cases, they were written off as “just another film
shoot.” In a scene depicting Lucha and Jameson’s marriage, for
example, the performers ran up or down the grand stairway of City
Hall with the audience watching from the car. At one performance,
the singers made it to the top of the stairs and found Mayor Eric
Garcetti addressing an assembly of staff members. He stopped his
address to publicly acknowledge the couple: “Look at those two
getting married in our building. Let’s congratulate them with a
round of applause!”
I constantly looked for ways to blur the line of inside-outside—
letting the life of the streets infiltrate the seemingly hermetic sphere
of the car. With antennae mounted on top of the cars and
microphones on our singers, passengers found themselves
“eavesdropping” on scenes taking place outside. In the accident
scene, for example, where Lucha’s car hits Jameson’s motorcycle, the
two actors played the scene intimately while the audience’s car
slowly circled them. The passengers inside could hear every word,
“underscored” by live improvisation in the car by a beatboxing
harpist I happened to see perform at the Hollywood Farmer’s
Market. In another scene on a different route, the spectators sat with
an unnamed stranger who struck up a conversation with Jameson,
riding alongside the car on his motorcycle. Jameson continuously
circled the car as they navigated LA streets in real time, and at one
point even “threw” his red notebook, a critical object in the plot, into
the hands of the stranger in the car. (And mind you, like every other
performer, the actors repeated this nail-biter on the open road
twenty-four times a day.)
Because the text and score were written specifically for Hopscotch’s
unusual parameters, each chapter influenced the music as it was
being composed. For the entire operation to be synchronized, each
piece had to run exactly ten minutes. In one scene that traversed
Elysian Park, the drive took only five minutes, so we let the audience
take a short stroll outside toward a vista point. Composer Andrew
McIntosh wrote the scene in the car for two sopranos—one playing
Lucha and one Jameson—and saxophone. But on the stroll to the
vista, the saxophone merged with three other saxophones, creating
a bewitching short quartet that remains, to me, one of the musical
highlights of the entire work.
In every aspect, the project demanded a give-and-take attitude from
each participant. What was available to us shaped everything we
did, and nothing was used that wasn’t in some way connected to the
ideas. And all those ideas needed to find harmony with
unpredictable forces: traffic, road closures, demonstrations,
weather, flat tires . . . the list goes on.
Artists (especially directors) are often viewed as control freaks. The
theater might seem to provide a haven of control from a world in
flux. You can dictate the ideal light, the exact shade of yellow, the
perfect choreography of humans in and out of the space. But people
often fail to account for the wild card of live performance, where
cues misfire, actors forget their staging, or someone gets sick.
Despite those “risk factors” (to my mind, the very factors that make
up theater’s electricity), many artists are drawn to the theater to
exercise a sense of control over time and space—perhaps as a refuge
for how little we control our everyday reality. Hopscotch is a
nightmare scenario for that kind of artist; there was no way to
control much of anything. Precisely for that reason, I found it a
profound exercise for living. We all had to seek joy in the limits of
our control.
Since I could only be in one place at a time, I would never know how
things were running beyond what was broadcast at the Central Hub.
I had to fundamentally trust the flow of what we had constructed,
which meant trusting each participant. The level of cooperation
required was staggering. My partner in the building of that
cooperation was Elizabeth Cline, Executive Director of The Industry
at the time, who was not just a great thought partner artistically but
an expert overseer of the entire operation, from ticketing to
permitting to post-show parties. Elizabeth and I forged relationships
with organizations that offered the best chances for success,
including government entities like LA’s Parks and Recreation and
the Department of Transportation (which generously agreed to
biweekly meetings in the months leading up to the project);
neighborhood associations like the Business Improvement Districts
for downtown and Chinatown and the East LA Community
Corporation in Boyle Heights; real estate developers who authorized
the use of their properties for a project I’m sure they didn’t quite
understand; colleges like the Southern California Institute of
Architecture and the University of Southern California, where
students helped us think through the opera’s thornier logistics; and
commercial firms like Sennheiser, the sound technology company
that donated their equipment to help us realize the inside-outside
scenes.
Elizabeth called Hopscotch a “micro-economy” of Los Angeles artists,
artisans, and technicians. Working closely with Elizabeth and me
was Ash Nichols, the perfect person to take on the outsized role of
production manager: Ash devised the chain of communication and
oversaw the structure for making the performances run like
clockwork. One technical director was not going to suffice for the
project’s myriad challenges, so we had two ingenious ones: Edward
Carlson and Danielle Kaufman. Working under Ash was an army of
stage managers (who oversaw the routes) and assistant stage
managers (who supervised individual chapters). And then, of
course, there were the twenty-four drivers.
In the early days of Hopscotch, I imagined our cars would be the
classic Volkswagen Bus. We obviously needed a car large enough to
house a group of audience members and artists, and the beloved
’60s van symbolized the freewheeling spirit that I imagined this
project embodying. “The VW bus had become the iconic image of the
counterculture,” wrote Jill Lepore in a 2022 New Yorker article. “You
could go to concerts in it, or to protests. You could smoke pot in it, or
fool around. You could sleep there, on the cheap. You could plot a
revolution, or you could store your surfboard.” But even for a
project where nothing seemed too daunting, the idea of finding
twenty-four of those now rare cars was a bridge too far. After much
research (and frequent “Why are you doing this?”–style rejections),
we managed to secure a partnership with a private firm called
Wilshire Limousines. The request to their general manager, Michael
Kushner, was formidable: we would need the same twenty-four cars
every weekend throughout the fall, as well as for the rehearsals in
the weeks leading up to the performances. We somehow made a
deal that fit within our budget, and the company proved a
trustworthy and dedicated partner—even after watching us mount
projectors to the top of one of their limos.
At first I was concerned that limousines would signal the kind of
elitism and exclusivity my company was founded to overturn. But
Michael helped me come to terms with them when he explained that
he rarely gets requests for limos anymore. His clients now consider
them outdated, preferring to show up to red carpet affairs in a “real”
status symbol like a large SUV. Limousines have surprisingly
become a more accessible way to mark a social rite of passage, most
frequently for teenagers celebrating proms, bar mitzvahs, and
quinceañeras. Something about an out-of-time car as the vessel for a
mobile, guerrilla opera had a paradoxical logic. And since it was
truly our only viable option, we simply had to make it work.
It may seem hypocritical of me to advocate for opera to be less
wasteful of natural resources and then initiate a project that could
be considered a celebration of car culture. Yet in some ways, the
“carpool” effect of the piece—riding alongside strangers,
experiencing the city in a group—could be seen as promoting the
kind of mass transit Los Angeles used to enjoy before infamously
dismantling it all to pave the way for cars. Likewise, Debord’s group
of Situationists advocated in the 1960s for a system of free taxi
shuttles around the city to facilitate mobility while counteracting
private transportation—an idea way ahead of its time, emerging
again now as a possibility in smaller communities with the rise of
self-driving vehicles. Compared with operas requiring huge sets to
be shipped internationally, Hopscotch’s use of the available city
infrastructure likely created a much smaller footprint. On the other
hand, ours were twenty-four “use-less” cars that didn’t “need” to be
on the road, with gas and oil burning just “for the beauty of the act.”
So, as was the case for Sweet Land, if I try tallying up the
environmental impact versus efforts in resourcefulness, the best I
can hope for is a mixed result.
Then again, look at the massive assembly of artists, institutions, and
organizations who gathered around the vision for Hopscotch. Even
in fractured times, we sometimes succeed in finding ways to co-
create together and to problem-solve collaboratively. Without
restricting the opera to a “use,” I believe there are lessons here that
transcend the realm of aesthetics. Some people may have been
attracted by the stunt of it all, but most everyone seemed devoted to
this project because they were inspired to explore ways to live our
lives differently.
Much of traditional opera revolves around the notion of diva
worship. Hopscotch offered an alternative: what if it’s the collective,
rather than the individual, that can inspire us to awe?
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
WHILE HOPSCOTCH WAS OBVIOUSLY A huge departure from anything that
could be accomplished in an opera house or with a conventionally
organized opera company, I have nevertheless tried to deploy
similar tactics in the traditional environment. The most prominent
example was Twilight: Gods, a drive-thru adaptation of the last part
of Wagner’s Ring cycle as a response to the Covid lockdown. While
Detroit Opera’s theater could not be used, its parking garage could.
Audiences in six to eight cars at a time heard live performances of
Wagner’s epic (condensed into an hour-long exploration of
dissolution and conflagration) as they slowly ascended the levels of
the garage, by changing the dial on their FM radios. In the open-air
top level, Brünnhilde was driven off to her suicide by a Ford
Mustang. (What could be more Detroit than that?) The project was
co-produced by Lyric Opera of Chicago, which presented the work
six months later in the more foreboding and labyrinthine
underground garage in Millennium Park. The work had completely
different implications depending on the space (a vertical ascent with
a constant view outside as opposed to a lateral movement through
darkness) and time (at the heart of the pandemic and weeks before
the 2020 election, versus the time of the cautious first vaccine doses
and in the wake of an attempted insurrection). And the work itself
was also different in the two locations: poetry written by two poets
embedded in their community (Marsha Music in Detroit and avery r.
young in Chicago) wove the piece together, contextualizing the same
music in completely distinct ways. Twilight: Gods adapted to reflect
the place where it was performing as shaped by local artists—a
hallmark of what Hopscotch was all about.
Otherwise, experiences like Hopscotch are rare, both shamelessly
unsustainable (the elements barely held together until the last
performance) and brazenly unrepeatable (the chance of
reassembling this behemoth seems ludicrous and unlikely to
satisfy). It was not designed to leave behind deep footprints. A
recording exists that preserves selections from its spectacular music
—well worth hearing and performing in other contexts. But no
video could truly encapsulate the experience. In place of any
conventional visual documentation, we assembled an online
scrapbook (www.hopscotchopera.com). The exact routes, a chapter-
by-chapter breakdown of what happened and who participated, and
the ten animations are all still there at the time of this writing.
Beyond that digital archive, Hopscotch has essentially ceased to
exist. It was a work of the moment, and as such, follows in the
footsteps of the very earliest operas: spectacular works defying
genre divisions, written for a specific occasion, for specific artists,
and with no eye toward posterity or preservation. They were
provisional acts of collective imagination. In the end, you just “had to
be there”—a phrase I’ve often heard from people trying to explain
their experience of Hopscotch to others.
As an overture to this book, I imagined a future where opera as we
know it no longer exists. When opera houses are converted into
shopping malls, what would a reborn opera look like? What would
emerge from the unruly and barely explicable impulse to collectively
create? If opera is the art of rebirth, works like Hopscotch could help
us imagine what the art form might look like in that future. It
obviously doesn’t need to be performed in cars; that would be
taking the opera’s superficial aspects as the key ingredient. Instead,
Hopscotch attempted to escape everything, in every way, that has
kept opera fixed in well-worn patterns. If I were to enumerate those
characteristics of Hopscotch that could point to a reborn and anti-
elite future, the list would look like this:
•Opera as temporary, ephemeral, and provisional rather than
eternal and unchanging.
•Opera as embedded in the city and communities that it performs in
and for—as evidenced in the actual work being produced, rather
than supplementary activity around the art-making.
•Opera as syncretic, investigating what is of the moment, such as
technological possibilities.
•Opera beyond the framework and expectations of the proscenium-
bound theater.
•Opera with an expansive sense of form.
•Opera as an adventure—consistently awe-inspiring and never-
before-seen. Wherever the work is difficult, the creators and
producers provide testimony to the idea that the challenge is the
pleasure.
 10

UNRESOLVED PARADOXES
WHERE OPERA SPEAKS SPIRITUALLY
The unseen things are our masterpieces
The seen things are merely by-products.
—BEN OKRI
A paradox: while listening to John Coltrane’s “The Father and the
Son and the Holy Ghost,” I almost failed to notice that the needle of
the record player was stuck in a groove. The loop was perfect, so I
let it play on for nearly an hour. I traveled far in that moment, as
chance allowed the infinite to appear in finite time.
We describe our experience of time as an arrow, moving in one
direction. All our communication and coordination rely on our
agreeing to a measure of time divided into regular intervals: twenty-
four hours a day, sixty minutes per hour, sixty seconds per minute.
But music holds out a proposition: what if a group of artists decide
to escape that regularity and commit to another experience of time
—one that decelerates, or one that gradually speeds up?
All music, ultimately, is an organization of time, building off our
personal metronomes: the beating of our hearts, the cadence of our
steps, the ebb and flow of our breath. And through elongation or
acceleration, music shows us how easy it is to slip out of a linear
experience of time. Even if art is inextricably bound to the world and
its materiality, music can shed light on hidden dimensions of reality,
like those exposed by an infinitely looping record.
In opera, the illusionistic sense of progression—a beginning and an
end, a “drama” of causality and forward motion—coexists with a
cyclic experience of time: repetition, recall, a spiral motion. This is
the core conflict of our perception of existence: a linear “tragedy”
that runs from birth to death, and the spiritual potential of being,
infinitely more profound than that superficial story. (Talk about a
“time-curve!”)
When we view opera as suspended time, we arrive at its proximity
to ritual. The superficial and dispirited aspects of ritual, like the rote
repetition young Parsifal witnesses, are often, so to speak,
downstage—being the most immediately apparent. They can bury
the powerful and often subconscious aspects of ritual focused on
transcendence: those choreographed and communal actions that
invite us to look beyond our narrow understanding of life.
What the elderly knight tells the baffled young Parsifal—“Here time
becomes space”—should be true of opera. It should help us break
out of our limited perspective on the world, which, like a flashlight
in the dark, misses the vast majority of reality. If everyday life
requires us to narrow our focus, art momentarily broadens that
focus. Sometimes gently, sometimes irrevocably. Opera, working in
many dimensions at the same time, is the art form best suited to the
irrevocable mode—all the more so when we experiment with
bending the seemingly most fixed elements of our reality: time and
space.
When opera escapes time, we get to the heart of theater’s
metaphysical potential. The human voice, raised beyond everyday
speech into singing, carries with it a communion with the realm of
the spirit. Gary Tomlinson, in Metaphysical Song, refutes the long-
held assumption that the earliest operas required excuses to justify
characters’ singing their thoughts (the characters needed to be
singers like Orpheus, or the scene had to depict celebratory events
where singing and dancing were expected, and so on). He argues
that premodern operas, rather than attempting to make singing
seem like a natural thing to do in a scene, depicted the sung human
voice as capturing an otherworldly quality. The unnaturalness of
singing opens up other realms beyond what we perceive in our daily
lives. Orpheus and other mythological musicians were not the
obvious choice of protagonists for this new form of music drama
because it “made sense” that they would sing; instead, music
allowed characters to traverse the border of this world and the next.
“They affirmed the existence of higher orders of expression that are
a supersensible part of the natural order itself,” Tomlinson writes.
The nature of a drama at the threshold of perception requires
something other than speech. The rigor of musical training pushes
our most intimate instrument to become a tool for connecting to
other dimensions. “The voice could create correspondences, through
the soul, to the harmonic concord of the cosmos.”
In other words, a single human voice contains multitudes. Place that
single voice into a theatrical space teeming with other voices and
you have a dizzying, large-scale feat of materiality: bodies, objects,
and lights in space, coordinated by a mutually agreed upon
chronology. An enormous physical vessel to capture an experience
of what Tomlinson calls the “supersensible”—that is the central
paradox of opera, the immaterial expressed through entirely
material means.
Thinking about ritual and the spiritual dimension of the live arts is a
potentially sacrilegious notion for those conditioned by dogma. But
theater as a metaphor for an illusionistic experience of reality is
common in many spiritual traditions. Reading the Shvetashvatara
Upanishad, I was struck by a reference to the creator of the world as
“the great magician.” This magician creates the entire material
world as a series of images, sensual illusions that we need to look
past to get to the true Self inherent in every creature. Only then do
we realize that the material world is a distraction from the authentic
reality inside each of us.
The theatricality of “the great magician” made me consider whether
“the great director” wouldn’t be just as appropriate: directors, like
magicians, expend much energy on employing artificial elements to
seduce the audience. But a magician’s showmanship is not the
director’s end point: stagecraft is in service of the immaterial, the
content that will hopefully be revealed through the artificial
elements. Every new production confronts the director with the
challenge of illuminating the indefinable inner life of a work through
things coarse enough to be perceptible.
This is one reason opera can seem so utterly absurd. As long as
there are singers, instruments, sets, and costumes that attempt to
depict characters and dramatic situations, opera is imprisoned in
the material world. Outside the theater, music can seem to speak
directly to the soul. But as a component of opera, music’s power is
harnessed as a garb for theatrics—uncomfortably saddled with the
narrative demands of drama. Doesn’t opera ultimately rob music of
its power, by reducing it to the servitude of some other master? In
becoming material, music can often seem to calcify before our eyes.
You notice the singer struggling for breath, the heaviness of the
material set, the effort being made to enter into dialogue with a
music that seems able to accomplish everything on its own. The
Turn of the Screw problem discussed in Chapter Four isn’t limited to
Britten’s opera but is a fundamental paradox of the entire operatic
enterprise.
Even more challenging to inflect than Britten’s opera are those that
make the ineffable their subject matter. Take Wagner’s Tristan und
Isolde (1865), the ultimate work about the unresolvable tension
between what is visible and what remains invisible. Ostensibly the
story of an illicit affair between a king’s vassal and the new queen,
Wagner’s three-act, five-hour epic is finally an expression of love as
a cosmic force that obliterates any trace of ego. In Act II, an hour-
long love duet examining the philosophical possibilities of
individuals melting into some new entity gives way, almost
comically, to action dispatched in thirty seconds. It’s as if Wagner
can’t really be bothered with the narrative and prefers to focus on
the way his music chisels out of air the most subtle gradations of a
transcendental experience. I don’t think Tristan should even be
called an opera, since so much transpires that can never be
expressed by the singers or production. This is what makes it the
single hardest work in the traditional repertoire to stage: in the
demand to find physical form for what the music expresses,
performances inevitably revert to the material and the inescapable
experience of traditional opera.
A similar paradox faces Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, with a
libretto by the Symbolist poet Maurice Maeterlink. It’s less an opera
than a piece of poetry full of symbols and images, much of it rotating
around Mélisande’s voluptuous hair. Her lover Pelléas sings an
ecstatic aria while losing himself in her hair, and in the next act her
jealous husband uses that same hair to violently pull her in the four
directions of the cross. On paper (as a libretto and as a score), these
dreamy scenes are completely convincing, even devastating. But put
yourself in the place of the poor stage director, who is charged with
finding a visual realization for Mélisande’s hair! Pierre Boulez, in his
essay “Reflections on Pelléas,” put it best: “The poetic themes in
Pelléas often remain imaginary in character and their representation
on the stage is marked by a heavy realism that contradicts their
dream-like quality. . . . It proves in practice extremely hard to make
this symbolism of hair-as-river, hair-as-erotic-symbol visually
acceptable, even plausible. The poetic, imaginary vision is difficult to
combine with a girl leaning out of a window and hair that is quite
obviously a wig.”
Especially in the case of operas like Tristan and Pelléas, staging an
opera can seem like a losing proposition. Why do we foolishly
continue inflecting works that can never reach a true inflection
point? Yet that might be what I love most about opera: there is no
such thing as a final, perfect production of any work. The gulf
between the idea and its possible realization is fundamentally
unbridgeable; it’s precisely that tension between what can and
cannot be depicted, between the material and the immaterial, that
makes opera infinite and always incomplete. The quixotic struggle
to make the immaterial material becomes the touchstone of opera’s
aspirational quality.
Yet here is the same paradox that religious communities face: having
to invoke the invisible through purely visible means. Spirituality
would be easy if we could get rid of material reality. In the case of
opera, nothing happens without the wood of a violin, the breath of a
performer, the metal that produces the exact bell-like sound the
composer is imagining, and of course the organic tissue of each
human participant. As much as we might wish we could escape into
a purely abstract world where ideas alone can become searing
events, we can’t ever banish the theater’s thingness. In fact, in an
irony that can sometimes feel tragic, that materiality must be the
messenger of the spiritual.
In Chapter Three, I argued that the emotional life of opera does not
reside in the music per se but in the interpretation of that music,
primarily through the singing actor. I believe the same is true of the
spiritual life of opera, which does not reside in the music but only in
the music as it’s being made. Nevertheless, the first uneasy
transposition from an immaterial realm to material reality begins
with the composer. Before a piece can be performed, it must be
notated—much to the dismay of many a composer, working under
intense deadlines to deliver a tiny bit of access into the invisible
arena they are attempting to articulate. In that process of notation,
the composer takes the first steps toward transporting thoughts that
resist all form into something performers can learn and reproduce.
In the liner notes for a recording of Arnold Schoenberg’s music, the
great conductor Daniel Barenboim sets up the perfect framework
for appreciating the excruciating act of pinning music down to
paper:
Like all works of music, Schoenberg’s pieces were initially present
only in the imagination, in the mind of the composer. It had nothing
to do with anyone else or indeed with the real world. When the
composer has written it down it is already a reduction, and before
one can talk about a performance at all, one has to consider the
orchestra and the conductor who introduce these pieces into our
physical world. . . . I can think of a sound in my mind, and it can last
forever. But when I play the same sound on the piano, it dies away.
For this reason, transferring it from the cosmos, where it only exists
in the imagination and the mind of the composer, to the real world is
a decisive and complicated process.
What Barenboim conveys so beautifully is the art of translation at
the heart of all expression. Interpretation is not only left to
performers; the score itself is already an interpretation, the
composer’s—of something much vaster than our visible world. The
music defies getting pinned down, but a composer wrestles with it
anyway.
The conventional view of musical masterpieces considers the score
a perfect realization, not the distillation of a larger vision. Thus, “as
it is written, so shall it be done”—the interpreters become obedient
servants of the handed-down scripture. The score is not a prompt
for further investigation but a holy text to be painstakingly re-
created. But there is so much more excitement, energy, and even
profundity in considering the score an approximation at best—as
Barenboim put it, a “reduction” of a work’s true spirit.
Composers have used different tactics in trying to bridge the abyss
between their immaterial ideas and the incompleteness of the
notated score. On one end of the spectrum is Gustav Mahler, whose
elaborately orchestrated symphonies are accompanied with
idiosyncratic instructions: “duftig” (filmy, hazy); “ersterbend” (dying
away); “gesangvoll hervortretend” (emerging full of song); “immer
fern und ferner” (farther and farther away); “bis zur Unhörbarkeit
abnehmen” (decrease to the point of inaudibility). His directions
reveal Mahler to be something of a control freak, flailing against the
impossibility of fixing ideas to a page. But as an artist more
renowned in his lifetime for his conducting than for composing,
Mahler must have known how much is lost once the music is offered
to someone who doesn’t share the same brain as the person who
struggled to write it. That epic resistance at the outset of all his
symphonies shows a man wrestling with how little of what he
experiences can actually be expressed. The titanic soundscapes he
still managed to create push as hard as possible against the
limitation of a written language’s communicability.
On the other end of the spectrum are the scores of Monteverdi—the
open matrix of L’Orfeo and moments like “Addio Roma” from The
Coronation of Poppea, which leave everything open to
interpretation. Monteverdi’s scores reveal a worldview where his
role as composer was less central, where the oral tradition still
mattered and the ephemerality of music was a given. Mahler’s
worldview considers the composer a creative god and the score his
granite tablets, awaiting the interpreter prophets. The
incompleteness of the score is clearly a matter of frustration for
Mahler, recalling Moses’s final line in Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron:
“Oh Word, you Word that I lack!”
Yet incompleteness is embraced by Monteverdi—the mark of his
greatness, humbly viewing humanity as a cooperative condition.
Rather than handmaidens for a composer, interpreters are a
composer’s collaborative partners. That notion has inspired the
most interesting contemporary composers, even if it places their
work in a precarious circumstance. Meredith Monk’s ATLAS was
written on the voices and the bodies of her original cast, and until
my production in 2019, a fully notated score did not exist. Making a
score was an essential part of ensuring the work’s longevity, but the
process wasn’t easy for Monk, since the act of pinning down a
performance in notation is antithetical to the spirit of her work.
The published score of ATLAS now, similar to Monteverdi’s, consists
of a set of spare instructions to facilitate future discovery. A
performer who treated the musical lines with the kind of
unwavering reverence Mahler demanded will not produce a
satisfying performance. Robert Ashley’s operas lacked fully notated
scores as well, as he expected his performers to improvise large
sections. Ashley considered this kind of openness the cornerstone of
his work, according to his website.
The collaborative aspect of the work follows principles I have used
for many years in search of a new operatic style. The collaborators
are given almost absolute freedom to develop characterizations
from the textual and musical materials I provide. . . . The
collaborators in all aspects of the work are free to interpret,
‘improvise’, invent and superimpose characteristics of their own
artistic styles onto the texture of the work. In essence, the
collaborators become ‘characters’ in the opera at a deeper level than
the illusionistic characters who appear on stage.
In that spirit, we can draw a connection between Ashley and the
origins of opera—a fact that was not lost on the writer Kyle Gann,
who reviewed his work for the Village Voice: “When the 21st
Century glances back to see where the future of opera came from,
Ashley, like Monteverdi before him, is going to look like a radical
new beginning.”
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
THINKING ABOUT MUSIC’S HOLINESS and the spiritual dimension of
theater, I find myself returning to an image from José Ortega y
Gasset’s book Meditations on Quixote: “The individual cannot get his
bearings in the universe except through his race, because he is
immersed in it like the drop of water in the passing cloud.” This is a
profound skyscape that has haunted me ever since first reading it.
The drifting cloud represents the nebulous aspects of our
personality that we have no chance of outrunning, so formative in
shaping our perception of the world that they become inextricable
from our identity. Culture, race, nationality envelop us even in exile.
Such notions have led me to consider how the Jewish heritage I
carry in my DNA has shaped my philosophy of opera. Even more
profoundly than a national identity, my religious upbringing has
colored every aspect of how I approach my work. It surrounds me
like a cloud, one that I ignore at my peril.
In Jewish tradition, the essence of God is so far beyond the scope of
human comprehension that any act of representation is an affront to
that sublime truth. Therefore, in stark relief to lavish cathedrals
with the noblest representations of the Word made flesh,
synagogues are for the most part pure architecture. No imagery for
risk of idolatry, no architectural ostentation for risk of distraction
from the human. And yet, somehow, so many Jews rush to
participate in activities like theater, film, and opera. (Go figure!)
Perhaps this is because Jewish thinking is rich in metaphor and
emanation. Those qualities are ultimately what theater is all about.
Any pretense of “direct representation,” an event interchangeable
with reality as we know it, is either hubristic or naive. The stage
transforms something recognizable and commonplace into
something strange and unfamiliar—what Brecht called theater’s
capacity for Verfremdung, or alienation. What we see exhibited
before us is fundamentally unrealistic, but not untrue, or at least not
inauthentic. (“Lying,” as Oscar Wilde said, or “the telling of beautiful
untrue things, is the proper aim of art.”) Art can reflect life but not
by mimicking realism. Symbol, metaphor, and abstraction offer an
indirect and poetic path to a true essence.
Although Jews are often considered “people of the book,” oral
tradition played a major role in the creation of our sacred texts. The
transition from oral to written tradition in Judaism was a
controversial move in BCE times because it threatened to turn
sacred teaching into something reified and fixed—the same anxiety
faced by composers grappling with notation. In Judaism, the Talmud
emerged: a massive collection of reflections and interpretations of
the Mishnah text. The essence of the Talmud is the spirit of debate
and discourse, and the dizzying flurry of voices that make up the
Talmud allow the original text to remain a living and open-ended
document. (The original “open work,” if you will.) If anything could
possibly embody the evolutionary and dialogic essence of Judaism,
the Talmud would be it.
My study of Jewish scripture remains limited, but a lifetime of
experiencing the world from the perspective of my heritage has
naturally shaped my perspective of all texts. It’s the cloud that
surrounds the little drop of rain of my life. So it is, perhaps,
inevitable that my view of opera is fundamentally Talmudic,
involving the inexhaustible rereading and discussing of texts that we
consider incomplete. Engaging with the Talmud means entering into
a centuries-long, never-ending dialogue—and engaging with opera
should feel the same. Even as the original libretto remains exactly as
it is, there’s always something new to be gleaned. The act of
interpretation never obliterates the original but aims to unlock it.
Our purpose is not novelty, nor do we expect to exhaust the
possibilities with a final word. No ultimate reading exists.
Just as there are few definitive statements in the Talmud, I imagine
my own transitory work on profound older texts to be at best a link
in a long chain of dialogue. I’m picking up on a conversation, not at
its beginning and not at its end. I’m inviting the future to participate.
My work is done not for my own sake, but to perpetuate a line of
inquiry that helps us grapple with the visible and the invisible.
The Talmud as the essence of dialogue must have impacted the
influential twentieth-century Jewish existentialist Martin Buber.
Next to Ortega y Gasset, probably no other writer has influenced my
thinking as deeply as Buber, whose poetic 1923 treatise Ich und Du
(often translated I and Thou) considers the loving encounter of two
people a microcosm for a bond with a living divine presence. Instead
of considering our surroundings as a world of opaque objects, Buber
asks us to change our perspective and think of everything and
everyone as a subject yearning for connection. He rewrites Genesis
to proclaim, “In the beginning, there was relationship.” But clear and
direct expressions like that are rare in Buber’s writing, which favors
prismatic and elusive language. Rhyme or the related sounds of his
words create unexpected possibilities of meaning rather than logical
sense. Like the best poetry, Buber’s writing resists translation and
demands a Talmudic discussion of what his original text may or may
not mean.
In one passage of Ich und Du, Buber draws a direct comparison
between his ideas and the world of artistic expression. “Das ist der
ewige Ursprung der Kunst, dass einem Menschen Gestalt
gegenübertritt and durch ihn Werk werden will. Kein Ausgeburt seiner
Seele, sondern Erscheinung, die an sie tritt und von ihr die wirkende
Kraft erheischt. Es kommt auf eine Wesentat des Menschen an.” Or, in
Walter Kaufmann’s translation, “This is the eternal origin of art, that
a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work
through [them]. Not a figment of [their] soul but something that
appears to the soul and demands the soul’s creative power. What is
required is a deed that a man does with his whole being.” This is
true of both the artist creating and the spectator receiving: both
need to show up as “whole beings” to engage in dialogue with a new
form. No one can do it alone, or half-heartedly.
Beyond the sheer beauty of his writing and the potency of his simple
but profound ideas, Buber has affected me greatly because he
embodies the essence of what I believe theater strives to achieve.
What Buber later called “the dialogic principle,” the world of
relationships, represents the most important element of all in
theater: collaboration. It is here, in collaboration—the ineffable
meeting place of “I” and “Thou,” wherever two or three are
assembled—that the spiritual dimension of opera resides.
But isn’t a director’s role all about taking the lead? A hierarchical
view of art-making is something our society can’t seem to shake. The
labor of many artists, artisans, and associates gets subsumed under
the single name of the lead artist, an objectifying move at the
opposite end of the Buberian dialogic. We applaud artists for a
vision we call “uncompromising”—which might mean an
unshakable resolve but could also refer to a stubborn ignoring of
everyone else’s experience. Opera, which can be the most tyrannical
in its love of hierarchical structures, is perhaps the least appropriate
platform for this kind of authoritarianism. The ground holding opera
up is so unstable that no artist can possibly stand alone; each artist
is inextricably linked to every other. No composer, librettist,
director, or conductor can create anything that doesn’t rely on the
co-articulation and collaboration of many other voices. The right
artist for opera embraces this tapestry, while the artist insisting on
individual achievement will always struggle.
True collaboration, in the Buberian sense, requires a sense of
spiritual strength. Artists must approach a work with both an
extraordinary capacity for empathy and a determined discipline to
express themselves. It was hardly a surprise, in my early
conversations with the great writer and actor Anna Deavere Smith
as we started to work together on Proximity, to discover how much
Buber’s work meant to her. After creating scripts from interviews
representing different perspectives on a topic, Smith embodies
those people she interviewed onstage, a solitary Black woman who
takes on their language and idiosyncratic speech patterns. Smith’s
appearance as an individual reenacting a myriad of other individuals
creates a panorama of shared humanity. She describes her work as
an act of “radical hospitality”—extended to her often-traumatized
dialogue partners but also, ultimately, to the audience. In theater,
the spectator is our final and most important collaborator.
Collaboration is often confused with the chaos of a free-for-all,
independence being the primary virtue. But the live arts simply
don’t work without consensus and give-and-take. We require
interdependence, a word John Cage adopted as a principal
methodology. Collaboration may present itself as a leaderless
utopia, but in fact it requires a leader in order to avoid anarchy and
incoherence. Collaboration needs to be nourished; it involves
mutual trust and a patient chipping away at a work that is larger
than any one artist. Collaboration is fundamentally anti-elite.
Interdependence has always been the most important aspect of my
work as a director. The visual aspects of my productions of The
Magic Flute and Hopscotch are examples of the most outward
demonstration of a director’s work. The more important aspect is
invisible: mobilizing, activating, and inspiring the many forces
participating in the production. Beyond the concept, designs, and
characterizations, a director generates the collaborative atmosphere
that enables everyone to unlock their very best work. Hand in hand
with the conductor, who oversees the musical performance, a
director coordinates all the elements, and leaves an undeniable yet
undefinable fingerprint on the transformational process of coming
together.
A rehearsal room full of fear, doubt, or obedience doesn’t
necessarily mean the resulting work will be poor. The archetype of
the harsh teacher whose love of discipline sometimes tips over into
abuse is deemed acceptable if the outcome is successful, especially
in the rigorous field of music. Many directors, conductors, and
impresarios, believing that the ends justify the means, thrive by
instilling an atmosphere of terror, where exactitude reigns. If their
“uncompromising” methods achieve miraculous results and
showers of accolades, they are free to punish further. But that
increasingly unacceptable approach fundamentally misses the
higher purpose of bringing to life a work of art—which is not result-
based but process-oriented. An environment of belonging and
support transcends the final product. Any particular production
disappears after the last performance, but an encounter with a
symbiotic environment can change whoever participates in it,
whether as performer or spectator. The work of collaboration is
invisible and therefore spiritual—but it follows no dogma, and it
resists all manipulation.
While anyone can learn the material craft of directing, there’s no
way to teach this crucial immaterial aspect. Directors reveal their
authentic selves in the pressurized rehearsal room, and if
collaboration is a posture, the other artists will always see through
it. The director who wants to create a true space of belonging needs
to fundamentally believe that the act of making theater is a
rehearsal for living. Just as ritual is communal, theater is dialogic.
It’s an act of coordination in the midst of chaos, requiring focus and
determination and just the right application of force. Intuiting when
to push and when to let go, when to radically alter and when to
accept, when to revise and when to recognize something can no
longer be changed. Directors set the intentions toward greatness,
toward the new, toward unseen horizons—and ultimately make the
best of what they’ve got to work with.
My time in Los Angeles must be rubbing off on me, because I’ve
come to view surfing as the best analogy for performance. Surfers
have an instinctual understanding of large natural processes at work
in their environment. To ride a wave, they learn to shift, listen to the
water, and seek a path for beautiful and temporary harmony. They
also know full well that they can never fully predict what will unfold
beneath their board. Theater likewise provides a space for
meditative thinkers who are also flexible doers. Or, in a less
Californian metaphor, for those adept at harvesting, who allow time
to ripen and nurture what has not yet emerged. Nature will take its
course, but cultivation and discipline matter. The best fruit will soon
be eaten, but the nourishment of both soil and soul sends limitless
ripples into the future.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
IN WHAT I HAVE DEFINED as a dialogic, Buberian art form—an
emerging art form, an art form of unlimited paradoxes, an art form
of multiplicity and potentiality—the self-satisfied artist will be
doomed to eternal dissatisfaction. You are never self-sufficient in
opera: everything you do is contingent on every other human being
involved in your project, not to mention the contingencies of time
and space.
If life is the sometimes harmonious, sometimes dissonant blend of
different voices and meanings, we should see that multiplicity
reflected in the art we create. No singularity of perspective or
meaning, but instead richness, depth, and complexity.
How do you achieve that richness, depth, and complexity?
Through layering, by embracing diverse perspectives
simultaneously. Letting paths unfold in all directions rather than
restricting traffic to one direction.
And chiefly, by recognizing the collaboration that’s at the center of
all creation, engaged in a profound dialogue with the invisible.
Meeting together in rehearsal rooms, in design studios and
workshops, and in the theater—day in and day out, giving and
taking, exploring what happens when one element is added and
another removed. It doesn’t always work. Collaboration is a
challenge to the ego. In an American culture conditioned on rugged
individualism, collaboration can seem antithetical. So the work
requires patience above all, from all parties, as the right consensus
slowly takes shape.
So have patience with the musician, dedicated to sound, constantly
questioning the authenticity of a vibration in the air that evaporates
into memory.
And have patience with the opera directors and conductors, who are
only as good as the artists they are working with. When they’re
bringing to life the work of living authors, they face the impossible
comparison between reality and the sound the authors have in
mind. And when they’re articulating the work of dead authors, they
face the impossible comparison between reality and the idea of the
work the audience has in mind.
And have patience with the singing actors, whose livelihoods
depend on the successful vibration of tiny muscles in their throats.
As if the superhuman demands of their musical craft weren’t
enough, they are also required to be better actors than Hollywood
stars and stay flexible in their understanding of a character, so that
they can adapt to the interpretations of directors and conductors.
Have patience with the composer: how awful it must be to chase a
sound in your head, try to pin it down on paper, and grapple with so
much that isn’t music, that isn’t sound, to articulate and realize that
idea. As soon as composers announce they are writing an opera, an
imposing gallery of divine geniuses start passing judgment, as if to
say, “What temerity to think that you belong in our pantheon . . .”
The poets need our patience, too: their artistic autonomy, like the
composers’, melts into a collective work. They face the indignity of
seeing their name listed under the composer’s . . . if it’s listed at all.
And the designers—whether shaping the space, clothing the singers,
or illuminating the space—face the pressure of a director trying to
articulate a concept, invariably in a condition of too-little-time and
too-little-money. They, too, see their work subsumed under the
name of the director.
As individuals, none of these artists can succeed unless they
acknowledge that their pursuit is inextricably linked to each one of
their fellow artists. In the limited duration of the rehearsals and
performances of an opera, they are bound to one other. And when
the next job starts, all the dynamics are reset and reconfigured, for
an equally limited time. The whole operation could not be more
absurd—nor could the unresolvable paradoxes of life find a more
appropriate mirror.
Even more than the emotional dimension, the spiritual dimension of
opera, with its core mechanism of collaboration, is essential and
ineffable. It would wilt under the heat of too strong a spotlight. And
so, rather than fumble for words to encapsulate what can’t be
expressed, let me instead offer my gratitude for all that is
unreachable
undefinable
ambiguous
indeterminate
transcendent
and multitudinous
in this paradoxical art form, which,
(despite everything),
can illuminate our inner lives.
 Illustrations Insert

The Overworld and Underworld in Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo at Santa Fe Opera

(2023). Set design by Alex Schweder and Matthew Johnson; costume design
by Carlos Soto; lighting design by Yuki Link. (RICHARD BARNES )
A fairy tale that becomes a nightmare: Wagner’s Lohengrin at the Bayreuther
Festspiele (2018). Sets and costumes by Neo Rauch and Rosa Loy; lighting
design by Reinhard Traub. (© BAYREUTHER FESTSPIELE / ENRICO NAWRATH )
 Exploring unknown territory: Meredith Monk’s ATLAS at the Los Angeles
Philharmonic (2019). Set design by Es Devlin; costume design by Emma
Kingsbury; lighting design by John Torres; video design by Luke Halls. (CRAIG
T. MATHEW / MATHEWIMAGING / LAPHIL )
Tamino at the tree of knowledge, Papageno at his suicide tree: Mozart’s Magic
Flute at the Staatsoper Berlin (2019). Set design by Mimi Lien; costume design
by Walter van Beirendonck; lighting design by Reinhard Traub. (MONIKA
RITTERSHAUS )
 Childhood as the ultimate divinity: the Three Boys come to Pamina and
Papageno’s rescue; in the Finale, we discover that children have been pulling
the strings all along. (MONIKA RITTERSHAUS )
Two scenes from The Industry’s Hopscotch in Los Angeles (2015) that blur the
boundary between inside and outside a car. (above: CASEY KRINGLEN ; below:
DANA ROSS)
 The Central Hub, a bespoke pavilion created to experience the simultaneous
performances of Hopscotch. Designed by Constance Vale and Emmett Zeifman.
(JOSH LIPTON )
Christopher Cerrone’s Invisible Cities with The Industry and L.A. Dance Project
(2013). (NIM SHARON )
Christine Goerke in Twilight: Gods in Detroit (2020). (Mitty Carter )
 GRATITUDE
I CAN’T SAY WHY MY DAD STARTED TAKING ME TO THE opera. But why he
kept taking me even after I showed no enthusiasm for the art form
still baffles me. If he had given up instead of pushing through my
resistance, who knows where life would have taken me. There
would most certainly be no book in your hands.
My dad, Ariel, died suddenly in 2011, never having seen any of my
major projects and before The Industry’s first full project in 2012.
Even as my biggest fan, he admitted needing to see my productions
more than once, because the first time was too overwhelming for
him to make sense of what was happening. I have yet to do a project
since he passed where I don’t imagine him in the audience on
multiple occasions, imagining the questions he would ask afterward.
Since he’s passed, my mother, Mali, my sister Yael, my brother Nim,
his wife Pam, and their kids Naomi and Skyler all have picked up my
dad’s mantle and cheer me on wherever I go. I am so grateful to all
of them for their support—and I’m sure they would understand why
this book is dedicated above all to my dad, whose memory is a
blessing for all of us.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
SINCE EVERYTHING I DO ISrooted in collaboration, the solitary act of
writing has taken some getting used to. Robert Weil at Liveright first
approached me to write a book after I wrote a review for the Los
Angeles Review of Books for a book of Brecht poetry translations that
he published. We met in New York the week after The Magic Flute
opened in Berlin, and from that moment on, the conversations have
been rich and rewarding. He’s guided this process with care,
patience, and honesty. He also connected me to Lynn Nesbit,
ostensibly to serve as my literary agent, but probably knowing we
were destined to become fast friends. Both of them were
indispensable confidantes for me during this process. The rest of the
Norton/Liveright team, especially Rebecca Homiski, Julia Druskin,
and Ingsu Liu, have all made this process so rewarding. I am also
grateful to Sean Burpee for his design of the Time-Curves; Rebecca
Karamehmedovic for her help securing photography permissions;
and Jacob Bird for last-minute research support.
So many excellent readers have helped me refine and clarify my
ideas from their earliest stages. David Levin, whose book Unsettling
Opera is a kind of North Star for me, convened a reading group for
an incomplete manuscript at the University of Chicago’s Neubauer
Institute for the Humanities. It was intimidating to present the
work-in-process to some of the sharpest minds I’ve encountered—
David; Mary Ann Smart, the professor of an opera class I took at UC
Berkeley in the late 1990s; Martha Feldman; Elspeth Carruthers;
Tara Zahra; and a host of other musicologists and performance
scholars from the school. Their feedback and reactions invigorated
me in the final leg of writing. My longtime friend Gundula Kreuzer
also assembled an excellent group at Yale University to respond to
select chapters. My boyfriend, Jeffrey Seller, turned out to be my
perfect reader and offered crucial advice. My friends Bernd
Feuchtner, Julian Petri, and Alexandre Caruso offered crucial
corrections and guidance.
Since my projects are never exclusively mine, I must thank the many
collaborators who have worked with me to realize the projects
discussed here—the composers, the librettists, the designers, the
singers, the dancers, the choreographers, the producers, the artistic
administrators, the assistant directors, the stage managers, the
stagehands, and on and on. . . . I could fill up another book with the
names of people who have made my work possible, so I will limit
myself to thanking the individuals who have been involved at the
three companies where sustained relationships have been so
crucial.
As a “start-up” opera company, The Industry relied on everyone
always going “above and beyond.” I am most grateful to my first
partner at the company, Music Director Marc Lowenstein, who
embodies that ethos. My managerial partners have also been model
leaders, starting with Laura Kay Swanson as the first Producing
Director; our first General Manager, David Mack; our first Executive
Director, my friend Elizabeth Cline; and our current Executive
Director, Tim Griffin. Ash Fure and Malik Gaines joined me as
Artistic Co-Directors in 2021 and have expanded the company’s
artistic ambition in inspiring ways. Our current staff—Director of
Production Tony Shayne; Producer Brian Sea; and Institutional
Development Manager Lindsey Schoenholtz—could not be more
committed or accomplished. We have had the most loving and
supportive board I can imagine, starting with Mary Ann O’Connor as
our first board chair, later succeeded by Mark Hoebich, Christine
Adams, and our current chair, Ruth Eliel. Along the way, the
wonderful individuals of the board have all expended time, money,
and love onto every project we have undertaken: Stephanie Barron,
Hyon Chough, Kyle Funn, Edgar Garcia, Fariba Ghaffari, Betsy
Greenberg, Suzanna Guzman, Chohi Kim, Caroline Mankey, Dr. Erika
Marina Nadir, Adam S. Paris, Ed Patuto, Maurice Singer, Debra
Vilinsky, and Lucy Yates. We have had many open-hearted and
generous individuals who have supported our work and who have
since become my friends; I am so grateful to all of them, but our
projects would not have been possible without the extraordinary
advocacy of Lenore and Bernard Greenberg.
One of my most transformative professional experiences was as an
Artist-Collaborator of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 2016 to
2019. Working on nine projects in three seasons is a daunting
proposition for any organization, but the LA Phil team always raised
the bar on ambition. The invitation came from the great Deborah
Borda, who coined the term “Disrupter in Residence,” while Chad
Smith encouraged me to always dream bigger. I got to work closest
with Meghan Martineau Umber and Taylor Saleeby Comen, who
truly were a dream team. And the enthusiasm that Gustavo Dudamel
brought to the company impacted all the work I undertook there,
regardless of whether or not he was conducting.
Finally, the team at Detroit Opera took a big risk in engaging me as
their Artistic Director, knowing that things would no longer be
“business as usual.” I wrote this book simultaneously with my
efforts to realize a new artistic identity for the organization in the
wake of Covid-19, and my experiences in Detroit have certainly
shaped what this book has become. My friend Gary L. Wasserman
first advocated for me to take on this role, and when I accepted the
job, he never flagged in his hospitality and love. Other board
members—Ethan Davidson, Barbara Kratchman, Ruth Rattner, Mary
Kramer, Ankur Rupta, Don Manvel, Fern Espino, Ali Moiin, Naomi
André, Bharat Gandhi, and Lisa DiChiera in particular—have been
enthusiastic champions for the changes I proposed, and I am
grateful to call them all friends. Wayne Brown first brought me on
board and navigated the turbulent waters of Covid with grace; his
successor as President and CEO of the organization, Patty Isacson
Sabee, has been unwavering in her commitment to breaking ever
higher ground. I am so grateful to the whole staff of Detroit Opera,
especially those navigating the 180-degree change in approach I was
pushing for. I want to especially thank my friend Julie Kim for her
transformative partnership as the company’s Chief Artistic Planning
Officer; her successor, Shawn Rieschl Johnson, has taken on the role
of Director of Production superbly. And I want to thank the Artistic
Department team, who collaborated with me on instituting the
highest possible quality without sacrificing care for all our guest
artists: Christine Goerke, Associate Artistic Director; Roberto Kalb,
Music Director; Elizabeth Anderson, Artistic Administrator and
Production Coordinator; Nathalie Doucet, Chief of Music and
Director of the Resident Artist Program; Suzanne Acton, Assistant
Music Director and Chorusmaster; and Matthew Principe, Director
of Innovation.
I finally want to thank the other members of my own team, past and
present, starting with my friend Amanda Ameer—if you heard about
me at all prior to this book, it’s thanks to her tireless advocacy and
press savvy. Her partner at First Chair, James Egelhofer, has also
been a caring advocate for my work. I am so fortunate to be working
with my current manager, Sharon Zhu, who has been tireless in her
support; but I’d also like to thank Phillippa Cole and the Askonas
Holt team, Matthew Horner and the IMG team, and Scott Levine for
all their previous guidance and efforts to help me achieve my
potential.
⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄ ⁄⁄
ONE OF THE MOST PROFOUND pleasures I experienced writing this book
was rereading the books I consider formative. Returning to texts I
had devoured and absorbed in college or just out of school from my
position now felt like an archeological study of my mind. So many
concepts I’ve long since claimed as mine are rooted in someone
else’s explorations. I couldn’t help but think of what Susan Sontag
wrote about her books: “A library is an archive of longings.” Ideas
are always links in a chain, stretching back and ideally also
stretching a hand forward.
The writings that have had the strongest effect on this book are
highlighted as further reading, but simply listing out these cherished
books strikes me as an unloving form of acknowledgment. I’d
therefore like to close by acknowledging my debt to and gratitude
for one of those sources, which shaped me in ways I am still trying
to understand, and which offers a perfect expression for what I am
feeling at the end of this writing:
As you read this book, it is already moving out of date. It is for me an
exercise, now frozen on the page. But unlike a book, the theater has
one special characteristic. It is always possible to start again. In life
this is a myth; we ourselves can never go back on anything. New
leaves never turn, clocks never go back, we can never have a second
chance. In the theater the slate is wiped clean all the time.
—PETER BROOK, The Empty Space
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OVERTURE: AN ART FORM WITHOUT A FUTURE
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CHAPTER ONE: “DON’T YOU GET IT?”
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Cage, John. “2 Pages, 122 Words on Music and Dance.” In Silence:
Lectures and Writing, 96–97. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 1961.
Marshall, Gary, director. Pretty Woman. Touchstone Pictures, Silver
Screen Partners IV, Regency International Pictures, 1990. Film.
Wagner, Richard. Parsifal. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1914.
———Siegfried. Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1901.
CHAPTER TWO: THE FUTURE IN OUR PAST
Aeschylus. Oresteia. Edited by Christopher Collard. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2017.
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Translated by Bernard
Frechtman. New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 2018.
Böhme, Madelaine, Rüdiger Braun, and Florian Breier. Ancient
Bones: Unearthing the Astonishing New Story of How We Became
Human. Translated by Jane Billinghurst. Vancouver and Berkeley:
Greystone Books, 2020.
Eagleton, Terry. Hope Without Optimism. Charlottesville: University
of Virginia Press, 2015.
Goodman, Alice. History Is Our Mother: Three Libretti. New York:
New York Review of Books, 2017.
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, and Emanuel Schikaneder. Die
Zauberflöte: eine deutsche Oper in zwei Aufzügen, KV 620. Kassel:
Bärenreiter, 1970.
Ortega y Gasset, José. Meditations on Quixote. Translated by Evelyn
Rugg and Diego Marín. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by Stephanie McCarter. New York:
Penguin, 2022.
Pratchett, Terry. Maskerade. London: Corgi, 2005.
Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. Translated by C. K.
Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. New York: Vintage Books,
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CHAPTER THREE: “THE POWER PLANT OF FEELINGS”
Caldara, Antonio, and Pietro Metastasio. Il Temistocle. Gallica—Open
Access, 1780.
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10074816b/f5.item.
Coppola, Francis Ford, director. The Godfather Part III. Paramount
Pictures, American Zoetrope, Paramount, Zoetrope Studios, 1991.
Film.
Darabont, Frank, director. The Shawshank Redemption. Castle Rock
Entertainment, Columbia Pictures, 1994. Film.
Descartes, René. “The Passions of the Soul.” In Descartes: Selected
Philosophical Writing. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert
Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 218–38. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1988.
Dylan, Bob. The Philosophy of Modern Song. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2022.
Edwards, Jonathan. “7-Eleven Store Owner Uses Classical Music to
Drive Away Homeless People.” Washington Post, January 17, 2023.
Kluge, Alexander, director. Die Macht der Gefühle. Kairos, ZDF, 1983.
Film, available at https://youtu.be/ToosY-53zB4?
si=g_BgRdIBX_InURH2.
Metropolitan Opera. Aida. Accessed on April 10, 2024.
https://www.metopera.org/season/on-demand/opera/?
upc=811357011799.
Monteverdi, Claudio, and Giovanni Francesco Busenello.
L’incoronazione di Poppea. London: Faber Music, 1968.
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, and Lorenzo da Ponte. Il dissoluto punito:
ossia, il Don Giovanni: dramma giocoso in zwei Akten, KV 527. Kassel:
Bärenreiter, 2005.
———Le nozze di Figaro: Opera buffa in quattro atti, KV 492. Kassel:
Bärenreiter, 2016.
National Endowment for the Arts. “NEA Opera Honors: Interview
with Leontyne Price.” Washington, DC, 2008. YouTube video,
https://youtu.be/EqVu_wlxTzM?si=Xt-nBMdjoUlHpf_8.
Proximity. Operas by Daniel Bernard Roumain, Caroline Shaw, John
Luther Adams, composers; Anna Deavere Smith, Jocelyn Clarke, John
Haines, librettists. Yuval Sharon, director. Lyric Opera of Chicago,
2023. https://www.yuvalsharon.com/proximit-gallery-1/.
Rice, John. “Leopold II, Mozart, and the Return to a Golden Age.” In
Opera and the Enlightenment, edited by Thomas Bauman and Marita
Petzoldt McClymonds, 271–96. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1995.
Talk Classical. “Should We Expect Opera Singers to Act?” Accessed
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Tomlinson, Gary. Metaphysical Song. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999.
Verdi, Giuseppe, and Antonio Ghislanzoni. Aida: opera in quattro atti.
Milan: Ricordi, 1913.
Zeami. “A Mirror Held to the Flower (Kakyō).” In On the Art of the Nō
Drama, translated by J. Thomas Rimer and Yamazaki Masakazu, 74–
110. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
CHAPTER FOUR: A STRANGE FORM OF STORYTELLING
Abbate, Carolyn, and Roger Parker. A History of Opera: The Last Four
Hundred Years. London: Penguin Books, 2015.
Adams, John, and Peter Sellars. Doctor Atomic. New York: Boosey &
Hawkes, 2012.
Art Hive. “Pablo Picasso’s Quotes on How to Be an Artist, Draw
Wildness and Love a Doorknob.” Published April 1, 2019.
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how_to_be_an_artist_draw_wildness_and_love_a_doorknob.
Ashley, Robert. Private Lives: An Opera. San Francisco: Burning
Books, 1991.
Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
Bauer, Thomas. Die Vereindeutigung der Welt: Über den Verlust an
Mehrdeutigkeit und Vielfalt.
Stuttgart: Reclam Universal-Bibliothek, 2021.
Brecht, Bertolt. “The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre.” In Brecht
on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, edited by John Willett,
33–42. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964.
Britten, Benjamin, and Myfanwy Piper. The Turn of the Screw.
London: Boosey & Hawkes, 2008.
Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. New York: Touchstone, 1968.
Budner, Stanley. “Intolerance of Ambiguity as a Personality
Variable.” Journal of Personality 30, Issue 1 (April 2006): 29–50.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1962.tb02303.x.
Debussy, Claude, and Maurice Maeterlinck. Pelléas et Mélisande:
drame lyrique en 5 actes et 12 tabl
Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1989.
Eötvös, Peter, and C. H. Henneberg. Tri Sestri. Munich: Ricordi, 1997.
Felsenstein, Walter. The Music Theatre of Walter Felsenstein. Edited
by Peter Paul Fuchs. London: Quartet Books Limited, 1991.
Glass, Philip, and Robert Wilson. Einstein on the Beach: An Opera in
Four Acts. London: Chester Music, 2006.
Handel, Georg Friederich. Arminio: opera in tre atti, HWV 36. Kassel:
Bärenreiter, 2011.
James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw, and Other Stories. Edited by T. J.
Lustig. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Janáček, Leoš. Přihody Lišky Bystroušky: opera o 3 jedáních dle R.
Têsnohlídkovy. London: Universal Edition, 1924.
Jung, Carl Gustav. The Undiscovered Self. London: Routledge, 2014.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Oxon: Routledge, 2006.
Messiaen, Olivier. Saint François d’Assise: scènes franciscaines: opéra
en 3 actes et 8 tableaux. Paris: Leduc, 1991.
Okri, Ben. Starbook: A Magical Tale of Love and Regeneration.
London: Rider, 2008.
Olson, Brad, host. “The Functions of Rituals.” Pathways with Joseph
Campbell, podcast. May 1, 2021. Accessed on April 10, 2024.
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si=WvLZMvLlTPiCVdXzQx5fMg.
Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso, 2009.
Rockwell, John. “Robert Ashley’s Video Opera in Debut at Kitchen.”
New York Times, November 18, 1983.
Rodgers, Richard. Musical Stages: An Autobiography. New York:
Random House, 1975. Quoted in Raymond Knapp, “Canons of the
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edited by Cormac Newark and William Weber, 475–90. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2020.
Ross, Alex. “A Grand Tour of Germany’s Opera Paradise.” The New
Yorker, June 13, 2022.
Salieri, Antonio. Prima la musica e poi le parole: divertimento teatrale
in un atto. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2013.
Saturday Night Live. “Opera Man Cold Opening—SNL.” Accessed on
April 10, 2024. https://youtu.be/Ta4sbXme0z0?
si=qZTrQ2riYgAzW9cG.
Silverman, Mike. “Munich Production Adds New Depth to ‘Il
Trovatore’” The Spokesman-Review, July 5, 2013.
Swafford, Jan. “Learning to Love Mozart.” Slate, April 10, 2012.
Swed, Mark. “MUSIC: Grand Sitcom: Robert Ashley’s Operas Are for
TV but Prime Time Isn’t Quite Ready for Them Yet So They Are
Performed Live.” Los Angeles Times, March 22, 1992.
Tomlinson, Gary. Metaphysical Song. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999.
Verdi, Giuseppe, and Salvatore Cammarano. Il trovatore: dramma
lirico in 4 parti di Salvadore Cammarano. Milan: Ricordi, 1913.
Verdi, Giuseppe, and Luigi Illica. Tosca: melodramma in tre atti.
Milan: Ricordi, 1963.
CHAPTER FIVE: CASE STUDY: THE MAGIC FLUTE IN
BERLIN
ATLAS. Opera by Meredith Monk, composer and librettist. Yuval
Sharon, director. LA Phil New Music Group, 2019.
https://www.yuvalsharon.com/atlas.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2018.
Aristotle. Poetics. Edited by D. W. Lucas. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2020.
Assmann, Jan. Die Zauberflöte: Oper und Mysterium. München: Carl
Hanser, 2006.
Bergman, Ingmar, director. The Hour of the Wolf. SF-Produktion,
1968. Film.
———The Magic Flute. SF-Produktion, Sveriges Radio, Swedish Film
Institute, 1975. Film.
Campbell, Joseph, with Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth. New York:
Doubleday, 1988.
Descartes, René. “The Passions of the Soul.” In Descartes: Selected
Philosophical Writing. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert
Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 218–38. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1988.
Janáček, Leoš, and Kerstin Lücker. Vêc Makropulos: opera ve třech
jednáních podle komedie Karla Čapka. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2019.
Kleist, Heinrich von. Über das Marionettentheater (Studienausgabe).
Stuttgart: Reclams Universal-Bibliothek, 2013.
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, and Caterino Mazzolà. La clemenza di
Tito. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2001.
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, and Lorenzo da Ponte. Così fan tutte:
ossia, La scuola degli amanti. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1991.
———Le nozze di Figaro: Opera buffa in quattro atti, KV 492. Kassel:
Bärenreiter, 2016.
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, and Emanuel Schikaneder. Die
Zauberflöte: eine deutsche Oper in zwei Aufzügen, KV 620. Kassel:
Bärenreiter, 1970.
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, and Giambattista Varesco. Idomeneo:
Dramma per musica in tre atti. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1972.
Neruda, Pablo. Book of Questions. Translated by Sara Lissa Paulson.
New York: Enchanted Lion Books, 2022.
Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de. The Little Prince. Translated by Irene
Testot-Ferry. Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2018.
Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Edited by
Sukanta Chaudhuri. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.
———The Tempest. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2004.
CHAPTER SIX: THE USE-LESS ART
Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. Translated by Mary
Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1994.
Carax, Leos, director. Holy Motors. Theo Films, Pierre Grise
Productions, Pandora Films, Arte France Cinema, WDR/ARTE, 2012.
Film.
Hopscotch: A Mobile Opera for 24 Cars. Opera by Veronika Krausas,
Marc Lowenstein, Andrew McIntosh, Andrew Norman, Ellen Reid,
David Rosenboom, composers; Tom Jacobson, Mandy Kahn, Sarah
LaBrie, Jane Stephens Rosenthal, Janine Salinas Schoenberg, Erin
Young, librettists. Yuval Sharon, director. The Industry, 2015.
https://hopscotchopera.com.
Mazer, Benjamin. “Stop Wasting COVID Tests, People.” Atlantic,
January 3, 2022.
CHAPTER SEVEN: TOWARD AN ANTI-ELITE OPERA
Abbate, Carolyn, and Roger Parker. A History of Opera: The Last Four
Hundred Years. London: Penguin Books, 2015.
Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life.
Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott. London and New York: Verso, 2005.
Alexander, Harriet. “Detroit Gives Tragic Classic Opera La Bohème a
Woke Reboot: City Will Stage Production in REVERSE Order to
Avoid Ending Where Main Character Dies So Audience Leaves
Feeling ‘Hopeful and Optimistic.’” Mail Online, March 31, 2022.
Baraka, Amiri. “The Changing Same.” In The LeRoi Jones/Amiri
Baraka Reader, edited by William J. Harris, 186–209. New York:
Thunder’s Mouth, 1991.
Berg, Alban. Wozzeck. Wien: Universal Edition, 2023.
Davis, Anthony, and Thulani Davis. X: The Life and Times of Malcolm
X. United States: Nani Press, 2022.
Duncan, Aja Couchois, and Douglas Kearney. “Two Writers in
Conversation: Aja Couchois Duncan and Douglas Kearney.” In Sweet
Land, 11-2, available at:
https://theindustryla.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IND-
SweetLand_digitalprogram_20-0320.pdf.
Rabkin, Nick, and E. C. Hedberg. “Arts Education in America: What
the Declines Mean for Arts Participation.” Accessed on April 12,
2024. Available at: https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/2008-
SPPA-ArtsLearning.pdf.
Reddit. “Why Is Opera Considered Elitist?” Accessed on April 12,
2024.
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opera_considered_elitist/#.
Rosenblum, Ira. “From Ed Sullivan, ‘Rilly Big’ Opera Stars.” New York
Times, August 17, 1997.
Schoenberg, Arnold. Moses und Aron: Oper in drei Akten. Mainz: B.
Schott’s Söhne, 1958.
———Style and Idea: Selected Writings. Edited by Leonard Stein. Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1986.
Sweet Land. Opera by Raven Chacon, composer; Douglas Kearney,
librettist. Yuval Sharon and Cannupa Hanska Luger, director. The
Industry, 2020. https://theindustryla.org/projects/sweet-land/.
Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots. Oxon: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1952.
CHAPTER EIGHT: BREAKING THE FRAME
Abbate, Carolyn, and Roger Parker. A History of Opera: The Last Four
Hundred Years. London: Penguin Books, 2015.
Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. Translated by Mary
Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1994.
ATLAS. Opera by Meredith Monk, composer and librettist. Yuval
Sharon, director. LA Phil New Music Group, 2019.
https://www.yuvalsharon.com/atlas.
Beck, Julian. “Mission.” Poem. Available at:
https://www.livingtheatre.org/about.
Botting, Gary. “The Living Theatre.” In The Theatre of Protest in
America. Edmonton: Harden House, 1972.
Boulez, Pierre. “Sprengt die Opernhäuser in die Luft!” Interview by
Der Spiegel. Der Spiegel, August 24, 1967.
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luft-a-ac664ef2-0002-0001-0000-000046353389?context=issue.
Cage, John. 4′33″. New York: Henmar Press, 1960.
Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Translated by William Weaver.
London: Vintage, 1997.
Crescent City. Opera by Anne-LeBaron; Douglas Kearney, librettist.
Yuval Sharon, director. The Industry, 2012.
https://www.yuvalsharon.com/crescent-city.
Field, Andy. “‘Site-Specific Theatre’? Please Be More Specific.”
Guardian, February 6, 2008. Goodman, Alice. History Is Our Mother:
Three Libretti. New York: New York Review of Books, 2017.
Invisible Cities. Opera by Christopher Cerrone, composer and
librettist. Yuval Sharon, director. The Industry and LA Dance Project,
2013. https://theindustryla.org/projects/invisible-cities/.
Kaprow, Allan. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Edited by Jeff
Kelley. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Miller, Ben. “Renée Fleming Adds a New Role to Her Repertoire: Pat
Nixon.” New York Times, March 24, 2023.
Schechner, Richard, Surekha Sikri, Nissar Allana, and Geeti Sen.
“Richard Schechner on Environmental Theatre.” India International
Centre Quarterly 10, Number 2 (June 1983): 237–48.
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default
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Tommasini, Anthony. “Meddling with Opera’s Sacred Human Voice.”
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Verdi, Giuseppe, and Antonio Ghislanzoni. Aida: opera in quattro atti.
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Verdi, Giuseppe, and Antonio Somma. Un ballo in maschera:
melodramma in tre atti. Milan: Ricordi, 1914.
Wagner, Richard. Götterdämmerung. Mainz: Schott, 1908.
War of the Worlds. Opera by Annie Gosfield, composer; Yuval
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The Industry, and NOW Art. https://www.yuvalsharon.com/war-of-
the-worlds.
CHAPTER NINE: CASE STUDY: HOPSCOTCH IN LOS
ANGELES
Buñuel, Luis, director. That Obscure Object of Desire. Greenwich Film
Productions, Les Films Galaxie, 1977. Film.
Cortázar, Julio. Hopscotch. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966.
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Marc Lowenstein, Andrew McIntosh, Andrew Norman, Ellen Reid,
David Rosenboom, composers; Tom Jacobson, Mandy Kahn, Sarah
LaBrie, Jane Stephens Rosenthal, Janine Salinas Schoenberg, Erin
Young, librettists. Yuval Sharon, director. The Industry, 2015.
Lepore, Jill. “The VW Bus Took the Sixties on the Road. Now It’s
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Twilight: Gods. Music by Richard Wagner, composer; Richard
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https://www.yuvalsharon.com/twilight-gods.
Virilio, Paul. “The Third Window.” In Global Vision, edited by Cynthia
Schneider and Brian Wallis, 185–97. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988.
CHAPTER 10: UNRESOLVED PARADOXES
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———“Productions: Perfect Lives.” Accessed on April 12, 2024.
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Boulez, Pierre. “Reflections on Pelléas et Mélisande.” In Orientations:
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Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New
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Monteverdi, Claudio. L’incoronazione di Poppea. London: Faber
Music, 1968,
———L’Orfeo: favola in musica in un prologo e cinque atti. Kassel:
Bärenreiter, 2012.
Okri, Ben. Astonishing the Gods. New York: Other Press, 2022.
Ortega y Gasset, José. Meditations on Quixote. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2000.
Proximity. Operas by Daniel Bernard Roumain, Caroline Shaw, John
Luther Adams, composers; Anna Deavere Smith, Jocelyn Clarke, John
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———Verklärte Nacht op. 4; Piano Pieces op. 11 & 19; Five Orchestral
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GRATITUDE
Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. New York: Touchstone, 1968.
Sontag, Susan. As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and
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 CREDITS
frontispiece: Photography by Dan Winters
page 26 : Culture Club / Bridgeman / Getty Images
page 26 : Culture Club / Bridgeman / Getty Images
page 27 : Pam Menegakis / UnSplash
page 27 : Fletcher Fund, 1940
page 28 : Stuart Wolfe
page 29 : Gift of George Blumenthal, 1941
page 32 : Playbill® trademark used by permission. All rights reserved, Playbill
Inc.
page 32 : © Marco Ravenna / Bridgeman Images
page 33: Jim Caldwell / Houston Grand Opera / Courtesy Meredith Monk /
The House Foundation for the Arts
page 68: Curtis Brown
page 71: Todd Rosenberg Photography
page 73: © Bayreuther Festspiele / Enrico Nawrath
page 133: Monika Rittershaus
page 146: Monika Rittershaus
page 154: Digital image by the Boston Public Library, licensed under CC by 2.0
page 155: © Carol Rosegg / Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public
Library for the Performing Arts
page 156 : Lorenzo Da Ponte Company
page 156 : Selwyn / Alamy Stock Photo
page 157 : Philippe Gras / Alamy Stock Photo
page 157 : licensed under CC by SA 3.0
page 158: Eugène Du Faget, restored by Adam Cuerden
page 159: Glasshouse Images / Alamy Stock Photo
page 231: Yuval Sharon
page 232: Yuval Sharon
page 244: Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo
page 245: Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Alamy Stock Photo
page 247: Beinecke Library, licensed under CC by SA 2.0
page 248 : Leopoldo Metlicovitz
page 248 : Emil Stumpp / Deutsches Historisches Museum
page 249 : © 2024 Artists Rights Society; credit: (ARS), New York
page 250 : Wilhelm Höffert
page 253 : Franz Hanfstaengl / Bibliothèque Nationale de France
page 253 : M. E. de Liphart
 INDEX
Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use
your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.
Page numbers in italic refer to illustrations.
Abbate, Carolyn, A History of Opera, 108, 174, 201
Academy of Music (New York City), 156
acoustics, 18, 101, 206–9, 250; see also microphones; sound (sound design)
action painting, 204–5
Adams, John
Doctor Atomic, 101–2, 117–18
Nixon in China, 40, 102, 152, 209, 211
“Addio Roma” (from The Coronation of Poppea), 59
Adorno, Theodor, 19–20, 21, 22, 106, 108, 245
Minima Moralia, 177
adventure, opera as, 227, 243, 247
Aeschylus, Oresteia, 26, 27, 36–38, 42
Africa, 38
Aida (Verdi), 44, 60–62, 64, 210
Alceste (Lully), 152
alienation (Verfremdung), 264
ambiguity, 10, 17, 58, 85–88, 90–92, 94, 95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 106, 113–21,
124, 126–27, 143, 148–50
ambiguity tolerance (AT), 87, 148
American culture, opera in, 183–84
Amistad (A. Davis and T. Davis), 15
amplification, 3, 138–39, 206–11, 216
Amsterdam, Netherlands, 180
Ancient Bones (Böhme), 38
Anderson, Laurie, “O Superman,” 156
Anderson, Marian, 244
anti-elite opera, 139, 179, 194–96, 198, 205, 243, 267
Apollo, 8, 38
Appia, Adolphe, Music and the Art of Theatre, 247
archetypes, 102, 267
architecture, 32, 92, 120, 126, 184, 202, 207, 211–12, 215, 220, 236, 250, 263
Arendt, Hannah, 129
arias, 8–9, 20, 43–44, 55–61, 65–66, 88–90, 129, 133, 137, 138, 140, 142, 144,
177, 180, 233
Aristotle, 131, 153
Arminio (Handel), 88–89
Artaud, Antonin, 212–13, 218
The Theater and Its Double, 218–19
“The Theater and the Plague,” 162, 203–4
Art Deco, 215
artists, 1–2, 6–7, 10, 62, 86, 155, 163, 168, 176–77, 190, 238–43, 266
Art Park (Moscow), 43
arts education, 164, 183–84
Ashley, Robert, 159, 262–63
Perfect Lives, 3, 90–91, 95
Assmann, Jan, 126
Associated Press, 111
Astro Boy, 136
Athena, 36, 38, 41, 128
Athens, 6, 26, 27
Atlantic, The, 161–62
ATLAS (Monk), 16, 33, 149, 208, 211, 262
Atwater Village, Calif., 214
audience(s), 3–5, 8–10, 21–24, 33, 80–81, 84–85, 90–91, 100–103, 106–11,
113–16, 119–20, 125, 144, 149, 165–67, 174, 182, 205–6
Auschwitz, 245
Austria, 210
Austro-Hungarian Empire, 56
authoritarian personality, 87
autopilot, dismantling the, 22, 226–27, 229
avant-garde, 101, 213, 244, 249
Avignon, France, 157
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 211
Back to Back Theatre, 217
Balanchine, George, 207
ballad opera, 154
ballo in maschera, Un (Verdi), 210, 244
Baraka, Amiri, “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music),” 178–79
Bardi, Count Giovanni de’, 6
Barenboim, Daniel, 260–61
“baritone claw,” 63
Baroque, 56, 69, 88–89, 201, 202
Barthes, Roland, 119
Image—Music—Text, 99
Battlefield Potemkin (film), 51
Bauer, Thomas, 87–88, 90, 91, 94, 113–16
“The Disambiguation of the World,” 88, 113–14
Bauman, Thomas, 58
Bavarian State Opera, 111
Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste, 74
Bayreuther Festspiele (Bayreuther Festspielhaus), 18, 72, 77, 202–3, 205, 244,
245, 250
Beauvoir, Simone de, Ethics of Ambiguity, 35
Beazley Award, 125
Beck, Julian, 219
Beckett, Samuel, 13
Beggar’s Opera, The (Gay), 154
Beirendonck, Walter van, 125, 136
bel canto, 158, 159, 183, 250
Beloved (Morrison), 179
Berg, Alban, 197
Lulu, 100, 197
Wozzeck, 175–78, 182, 248
Bergman, Igmar
The Hour of the Wolf, 131
The Magic Flute, 127–28, 136, 149, 157
Berlin, Germany, 73, 125–26, 248
Berliner Abendblätter, 134
Berlin Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 73, 124–25, 138, 147
Bernstein, Leonard, 183, 212
binding problem, 104–5, 107
birdsong, 103, 111–12
Birtwistle, Harrison, 28
Bizet, Georges, Carmen, 3, 106, 114
blackface, 44
bohème, La (Puccini), 20–24, 32, 72, 107, 176–77, 182, 187, 225
Böhme, Madeleine, 38, 39
Boito, Arrigo, 153
Bolshevik Revolution, 249
booing, 123–24
Boulez, Pierre, 157, 211–12
“Reflections on Pelléas,” 259
Bradbury Building (Los Angeles), 237
“Bravo!,” shouts of, 180
Braxton, Anthony, 253
Brecht, Bertolt, 108, 109, 162, 264
A Short Organum for the Theater, 105–6
Bregenzer Festspiele, Germany, 210
Britten, Benjamin
Peter Grimes, 245
The Turn of the Screw, 115–16, 119, 207, 258
broadcasting, of opera, 54–55, 159; see also radio(s)
Broadway, 32, 85, 164, 167, 180, 184
Brook, Peter, The Empty Space, 112–13
Buber, Martin, 265–66, 268
Büchner, Georg, Woyzeck, 248
Budner, Stanley, 87
Buñuel, Luis, That Obscure Object of Desire, 234
Burgtheater (Vienna), 153
Burns, Ken, 155
Bye Bye Butterfly (Oliveros), 158
Cage, John, 24, 156, 159, 199–200, 267
Europeras 1 & 2, 152
4′33″, 200
Caldara, Antonio, Temistocle, 56–57, 66
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 152
Callas, Maria, 159, 183
Calvino, Italo, 214
Camerata, 6, 10, 28, 29, 33
Cammarano, Salvatore, 93
Campbell, Joseph, 96, 144
capitalism, 14, 43, 88, 163
Carax, Leos, Holy Motors, 171
Cardiff, Janet, 217
Carlson, Edward, 239
Carmen (Bizet), 3, 106, 114
Carmina Burana (Orff), 217
Carnegie Hall, 184
Caruso, Enrico, 20, 183
causality, 36, 118, 256
Cavalleria rusticana (Mascagni), 49–52, 90
Central Park (New York City), 217
Cerrone, Christopher, Invisible Cities, 164, 169, 214–17, 222–23
Chacon, Raven, Sweet Land, 189–94
“Changing Same, The (R&B and New Black Music)” (Baraka), 178–79
charitable organizations, 163, 164, 167
Charles VI, 56
Chekhov, Anton
Cherry Orchard, 205, 210, 214
Three Sisters, 101
Chéreau, Patrice, 77, 80, 123, 157
Cherry Orchard (Chekhov), 205, 210, 214
Chicago, Ill., 69–72, 242; see also Lyric Opera of Chicago
childhood, recapturing, 127–29
Childs, Lucinda, 157
China, 38, 93, 101
Chinatown (Los Angeles), 239
Choose Your Own Adventures, 227
Cid, El (Massenet), 156
cities, 216
Clemenza di Tito, La (Mozart), 130, 141
Cleveland Museum of Art, 222
Cleveland Orchestra, 222
climate crisis, 188–89
Cline, Elizabeth, 239
Closs-Farley, Ann, 233
collaboration, 2, 29, 64–65, 68, 136, 190–91, 214, 262–63, 266–70
colonialism, 32, 37, 42, 43, 192
Coltrane, John
“The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost,” 255
A Love Supreme, 18
The Comet/Poppea (Lewis and Monteverdi), 225
comic strips (comic books), 96, 117–18
commercialism, 167
composers, 1–2, 9, 53, 59, 109, 153, 260–62, 269–70
conductors, 19, 20, 65, 267
Confederate soldiers, monuments to, 43
Conklin, John, 20, 21, 23
consciousness, 104
Constance, Lake, 210
Consumer Electronics Show (CES), 169–71
consumerism (consumer culture), 162, 167, 171
Coppola, Francis Ford, 49–52
Coronation of Poppea, The (Monteverdi), 9, 59–60, 70, 95, 225, 262
Cortázar, Julio
Hopscotch (opera), 21, 168–69, 171, 218, 221–43, 231, 232, 267
Rayuela (novel), 227–29
Così fan tutte (Mozart), 130
costumes (costume design), 23, 233–34
Covid-19 pandemic, 22–23, 27, 147, 161–62, 166, 189, 192, 241
Craig, Gordon, 246
Crescent City (LeBaron), 213–14
Crossroads, 190, 192–93
cultural xenophobia, 43
Cunningham, Merce, 217
Cunning Little Vixen, The (Janáček), 96–98, 148, 222
curtain calls, 123–24
da capo arias, 88–89
Dafne (Peri), 29
Daily Mail, 182
Daphne, 29, 92
Da Ponte, Lorenzo, 53–54, 156
Daughters of the American Revolution, 244
Davis, Anthony
Amistad, 15
X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, 155, 178–79, 194, 196
Davis, Christopher, 155, 178
Davis, Miles, Kind of Blue, 217
Davis, Thulani, 15, 155, 178
Debord, Guy, 228, 230, 241
“Theory of the Dérive,” 229
Debussy, Claude, Pelléas et Mélisande, 110–12, 259
decentralized (de-centered) narratives, 100–101, 111–12, 229–30
Delusions of the Fury (Partch), 158
dérive, 228–29
Descartes, Réné, 56, 129
design, see set design and designers
Detroit, Mich., 179, 242
Detroit Institute of Art, 180–81
Detroit Opera, 22–23, 107, 179, 187–88, 206, 241–42
deus ex machina, 36–38, 128
Devlin, Es, 149
Dialogues on Ancient and Modern Music (V. Galilei), 29
Dido and Aeneas (Purcell), 246
Didone abbandonata (Metastasio), 153
directors, 67, 110, 125, 266–68
“Disambiguation of the World, The” (Bauer), 88, 113–14
“dismantling the autopilot,” 22, 226–27, 229
di Stefano, Giuseppe, 90
Doctor Atomic (Adams), 101–2, 117–18
doctrine of passions, 56, 58
domino rally game, 35–38, 46
Don Giovanni (Mozart), 65–66
Donizetti, Gaetano, 166
Lucia de Lammermoor, 159
donors, 165–66
Dresden uprising (1848), 251
Duchamp, Marcel, 100
“dumbing down,” 185, 195
Duncan, Aja Couchois, 190
Dylan, Bob, 54, 234
The Philosophy of Modern Song, 53
Eagleton, Terry, 46–47
Eastman, Julian, 159
Eco, Umberto, 100, 119
economics of opera, 161–71
Ed Sullivan Show, The, 159, 183
education departments, 164
Einstein on the Beach (Glass), 3, 94, 157
Eisenstein, Sergei, Battlefield Potemkin, 51
electronic music, 158
Elektra (R. Strauss), 73, 74, 153
Eliot, T. S., 234
elitism, 33, 174, 176, 179–82, 184–85, 187–88, 188, 196–98
Elizabeth, Queen of England, 40
Elysian Park (Los Angeles), 237, 238
Emancipated Spectator, The (Rancière), 98–99
Emancipation Proclamation, 42
emotions, 52–54, 65, 67, 70–72, 76, 78, 80
Empty Space, The (Brook), 112–13
enchanted space, opera as, 85, 120–21, 129
English language, 84
Enlightenment, 58, 139–40
environmental theater, 205–6, 213, 213–14
Eötvös, Péter, 101
ephemerality, 30
episodic television, 21, 85
Erwartung (Schoenberg), 116
Ethics of Ambiguity (Beauvoir), 35
Euridice (Peri and Rinnunci), 29, 31
Europeras 1 & 2 (Cage), 152
Eurydice, 7–10, 67, 97–98
exclusivity, 155, 195, 198, 240
Exodus, 96, 97
expressionism, 177
Falstaff (Verdi), 250
Farnese, Duke Ranucci, 32
“Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, The” (Coltrane), 255
Faust (Gounod), 3
Felsenstein, Walter, 108
feminism, 46
fetishization, 20
Field, Andy, 213
first law of motion, 36
Fleming, Renée, 209
fliegende Holländer, Der (Wagner), 17
Flora (ballad opera), 154
Florence, Italy, 6, 28, 29, 33
folk music, 69
4’33” (Cage), 200
framing, 201, 206, 218
France, 152, 201
Francis of Assisi, Saint, 40, 102
Frankfurt, Germany, 152
free will, 132
Frenkel-Brunswik, Else, 87
furies, 37
Futurism, 249
Galilei, Galileo, 29
Galilei, Vincenzo, 29
Gann, Kyle, 263
Garcetti, Eric, 237
García Gutiérrez, Antonio, 93
García Lorca, Federico, 40
Gay, John, The Beggar’s Opera, 154
Gellad, Walid, 161–62
Genesis, 265
Gere, Richard, 14
German language, 84, 114, 149
Germany, 15, 114–15, 123–24, 126, 157, 244, 251
Gesamtkunstwerk, 251, 252
Glass, Philip, 159
Einstein on the Beach, 3, 94, 157
Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 154
Godfather Part I, The (film), 51
Godfather Part III, The (film), 49–52, 60, 63
Goodman, Alice, 40, 152
Götterdämmerung (Wagner), 37, 38, 207, 252
Götz Friedrich Prize, 118
Gounod, Charles, Faust, 3
Greece, ancient, 6, 26, 27, 36–37, 92
Greek poetry, 186
Greek tragedy, 131; see also Oresteia, The (Aeschylus)
Grétry, André Ernest, Sylvain, 155
Grey, Mark, 209, 210
Grüber, Klaus-Michael, 76
Guardian, The, 213
Guillaume Tell (Rossini), 158
Guth, Claus, 107
Hamilton (musical), 168
Hamlet (Shakespeare), 9, 106, 246
Hammerstein, Oscar, 107
Handel, George Frideric, 154
Arminio, 88–89
Handlungen, 251
Hansa Gallery, 204
Hanson, William, 249
Happenings, 205
Harrison, Lou, 159
Hartman, Phil, 84
Haynes, Todd, I’m Not There, 234
headphones, 216–17, 222, 234–35
Hegel, Georg W. F., 25, 36
Hey Dude (television show), 108
history, concept of, 25, 36–40; see also past, the
History of Opera, A (Abbate and Parker), 108, 174, 201
Hitler, Adolf, 245
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 153
Holland, Charles, 156
“Hölle Rache, Der” (aria from The Magic Flute), 57–58, 131
Hollywood, 108, 164, 165, 167, 269
Hollywood Bowl, 211
Holy Motors (film), 171, 237
Homer, 28, 252
Hope Without Optimism (Eagleton), 46–47
Hopscotch (Cortázar), 21, 168–69, 171, 218, 221–43, 231, 232, 267
Hour of the Wolf, The (Bergman), 131
Houston Grand Opera, 33, 152, 208–9
Huillet, Danièle, 157
hybrid producing model, 167–68
Ich und Du (Buber), 265–66
Idomeneo (Mozart), 130, 145
image, as substitute for narrative, 94
Image—Music—Text (Barthes), 99
imagination, 3–4, 44, 46–47, 71, 81, 260–61
immersive experiences, 193, 205–6
I’m Not There (film), 234
inclusivity, 184, 195
India, 205
India International Centre Quarterly, 205, 219
individualism (individuality), 8, 17, 269
Industry, The, 164–65, 168–69, 189, 189–94, 212–20, 225, 239
inner rhythm, 69
In Search of Lost Time (Proust), 38–39
Instagram, 162
Inszenierung, 104
integrated aesthetic, 107
interdependence, 153, 267
interruption, 20–22
interstitiality, 120
Invisible Cities (Cerrone), 164, 169, 214–17, 222–23
Iphigenia, 36
Islamic cultures, 87
Italian language, 84
Italy, 4, 6, 174, 245
Jahn, Jessica, 23
James, Henry, The Turn of the Screw, 115
Janáček, Leoš
The Cunning Little Vixen, 96–98, 148, 222
The Makropulos Case, 148–49
Japan (Japanese culture), 44, 63–64, 78, 102, 118, 137, 158
Jaroussky, Philippe, 57
Jesus, 96, 213
Joplin, Scott, Tremonisha, 249
Journal of Personality, 87
Judaism (Jewish tradition), 96, 245, 263–66
Jung, Carl, 95–96
kabuki theater, 102
Kafka, Franz, 131
kaleidoscope analogy, 86, 120, 127, 163
Kaprow, Allan, 204–5, 219
Karlsruhe, Germany, 117–18
Kaufman, Danielle, 239
Kaufmann, Jonas, 111
Kaufmann, Walter, 265
Kearney, Douglas, 190–91, 213–14
Kellogg, Paul, 207–8
Kim, Hana, 193
Kind of Blue (Davis), 217
King, Philip, 225
Kleist, Heinrich von, “On the Marionette Theater,” 134–36
Kluge, Alexander, 52, 80
Knights of the Holy Grail, 11–18, 185
Konsequenz, 115, 117, 118, 132, 144
Krausas, Veronika, 225
LaBrie, Sarah, 221, 225
Lada, Krystian, 136, 137, 146
La Scala (Milan), 248, 250
Las Vegas, Nev., 169–71
LeBaron, Anne, Crescent City, 213–14
Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 94
Lepore, Jill, 240
Lewis, George, Comet/Poppea, 225
librettos, 53–54, 98, 105, 106, 153–54
Lichtmusik, 246
Lien, Mimi, 125, 136, 137, 146
lighting, 77, 78, 110, 244, 246, 247
Lincoln, Abraham, 42
Lincoln Center, 179, 184, 207–8
Lincoln Memorial, 244
Little Prince, The (Saint-Exupéry), 126–27
“Live in HD” initiative (Metropolitan Opera), 30
Living Theatre, 204, 219
loges grillées, 201
Lohengrin (Wagner), 17, 72, 73, 75–78
London, England, 4–5, 245, 246
London Design Museum, 125
Looney Tunes, 183
Lord of the Rings (Tolkien), 94
Los Angeles, Calif., 98, 156, 158, 164–65, 169, 170, 192–93, 212–18, 221–23,
227–29, 234, 236, 237, 268; see also Industry, The
Los Angeles River, 226, 236
Los Angeles State Historic Park, 191
Los Angeles Times, 91
Louis XIV, 152
Louvre Museum, 80
Love Supreme, A (Coltrane), 18
Lowenstein, Marc, 225
Lucia de Lammermoor (Donizetti), 159
Ludwig, King, 252
Luger, Cannupa Hanska, 190, 192, 194
Lully, Jean-Baptiste, Alceste, 152
Lulu (Berg), 100, 197
Lyric Opera of Chicago, 15, 69–72, 71, 225, 242
Ma, Yo-Yo, 211
macrocosm (macro level), 92, 110, 150
Madama Butterfly (Puccini), 44, 158
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 259
Maghirang, Carlo, 191
magic, 87, 94, 95, 120–21, 126, 129–30, 137, 146, 257–58
Magic Flute, The (film by Bergman), 127–28, 136, 149, 157
Magic Flute, The (Mozart), 3, 43–44, 57–58, 92, 95, 123–50, 133, 146, 155, 267
Magritte, René, The Treachery of Images, 97
Mahler, Gustav, 246, 253, 261, 262
Makropulos Case, The (Janáček), 148–49
Malcolm X, 40, 93
Malevich, Kasimir, 249
manga, 136
“Manifest Destiny,” 189
Mantua, Italy, 7, 31, 33
Mariachi Plaza (Los Angeles), 230, 231, 237
marionette theater, 132–34, 133, 144–45
marketing (market research), 14, 123–24, 165–68, 185
Marriage of Figaro, The (Mozart), 53–55, 141
Marx, Karl, 229
Marxism, 157, 251
Mascagni, Pietro, Cavalleria rusticana, 49–52, 90
Maschinenkomödien, 137
Mask of Orpheus, The (Birtwistle), 28
Massenet, Jules, El Cid, 156
mass media, 85, 167
McCarter, Stephanie, 45–46
McIntosh, Andrew, 225, 238
meaning and meaninglessness, 17, 85, 86, 94, 98, 105, 108–10, 112–15, 117,
120, 121, 126, 132, 145, 150, 162, 171, 265, 269
Medici, Margherita, 32
Meditations on Quixote (Ortega y Gasset), 263
Meier, Waltraud, 72–81, 73, 80
Meistersänger von Nürnberg, Die (Wagner), 17, 244, 245
Meninas, Las (Velázquez), 86
Mercury Theatre, 218
Merrill, Robert, 159
Messiaen, Olivier, 253
Saint François d’Assise, 102–3, 111–12
Metamorphoses (Ovid), 45–46
metaphor, 38, 42, 81, 257, 263, 264
Metaphysical Song (Tomlinson), 55–56, 116, 257
Metastasio, Pietro, Didone abbandonata, 153
Metropolitan Opera, See New York Metropolitan Opera
MGM Films, 164
Mickey Mousing, 66, 107, 109, 114, 141–42
microcosm (micro level), 31, 92, 110, 133, 150, 224, 225, 265
microphones, 206–10, 237
Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 143
Millennium Park (Chicago), 242
Million Dollar Theater (Los Angeles), 237
Minima Moralia (Adorno), 177
“Mirror Held to the Flower” (Zeami), 64
mise en scène, 104
Mishnah, 264
Mislan, Patricia, 69
misogyny, 43–44, 46, 140–42
“Mizaru, Kikazaru, and Iwazaru” (Japanese myth), 137
Mohammed, Elijah, 196
Monk, Meredith, 16, 159
ATLAS, 33, 149, 208, 211, 262
Monteverdi, Claudio, 55, 261–62, 263
The Coronation of Poppea, 9, 59–60, 70, 95, 225, 262
L’Orfeo, 7–10, 31, 38, 63–64, 67–69, 68, 97, 154, 262
The Return of Ulysses to His Homeland, 9
Morrison, Toni, Beloved, 179
Morrison, Whitney, 69–72, 71, 80, 81
Mortier, Gerard, 167
Moscow, Russia, 43
Moscow Art Theatre, 246
Moses und Aron (Schoenberg), 100, 157, 196–98, 248
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 99, 156, 226
La Clemenza di Tito, 130, 141
Così fan tutte, 130
Don Giovanni, 65–66
Idomeneo, 130, 145
The Magic Flute, 3, 43–44, 57–58, 92, 95, 123–50, 133, 146, 155, 267
The Marriage of Figaro, 53–55, 141
Requiem, 54
Munich, Germany, 111
Muppet Show, The, 183
Murrihy, Paula, 67–69, 68, 80, 81
Music, Marsha, 242
Music and the Art of Theatre (Appia), 247
Nabucco (Verdi), 245
narrative fiction, 98
narrative(s), 8, 39, 91–92, 94, 94–98, 100–101, 109, 111–12, 120, 132, 229–
30, 233–36; see also storytelling
decentralized (de-centered), 100–101, 111–12, 229–30
National Endowment for the Arts, 61, 183–84
National Folk Theatre of Ireland, 69
National Institutes of Health, 104
natural acoustics, 206–8
naturalism, 8, 40, 63, 64, 88, 90–91, 96, 244, 246
natural resources, 189, 191, 195, 240
Naturmensch, 139–40
Nazi Germany, 244
Need for Roots, The (Weil), 185–86
Nero, 40
Neruda, Pablo, 146
“New Bayreuth,” 244
New Orleans, La., 155
Newton, Isaac, 36
New World, 32
New York City, 32, 156, 167–68, 184, 204, 217, 244, 249
New York City Ballet, 207
New York City Opera, 155, 167, 178–79, 207–8, 213
New Yorker, The, 114, 240
New York Metropolitan Opera, 30, 61, 156, 183, 196–97, 208, 209, 244
New York Opera Company, 156
New York Philharmonic, 211–12
New York Public Theater, 167–68
New York Theatre Workshop, 167–68
New York Times, 91, 183, 207–9
Nixon in China (Adams), 40, 93, 102, 152, 209, 211
Noh theater, 63–64, 66, 78, 158
nonlinear approaches, 20–23, 25, 149, 223
nonprofit organizations (nonprofit status), 163–70
Norman, Andrew, 225
novelty, demand for, 4–5
“Odessa Steps” sequence (Battleship Potemkin), 51
Odysseus, 65
O’Hara, Robert, 179
Okri, Ben, 255
Starbook, 86–87
Old World, 41
Oliveros, Pauline, 158, 159
On the Art of Theatre (Craig), 246
“On the Marionette Theater” (Kleist), 134–36
open works, 100, 264
opera aficionados, 24, 173, 180, 182, 185, 206, 212, 218
Opera and the Enlightenment (Bauman), 58
opera houses, 1, 2, 13, 15–18, 27, 80, 121, 155, 161, 195–96, 206–7, 212, 243;
see also specific opera houses
“Opera Man” (Saturday Night Live routine), 83–84, 90, 92
Opera News, 208
Opera Philadelphia, 23
opera(s)
absurdity of, 84
as adventure, 243
in American culture, 183–84
anti-elite, 139, 179, 194–96, 198, 205, 243, 267
and antiquity, 92
broadcasting of, 54–55, 159
business model for, 163–68
contemporary, 93–94
definitions of, 2–3, 29
as a dying art, 2
economics of, 161–71
as embodiment of pure presence, 24
as enchanted space, 85, 120–21, 129
ephemerality vs. immortality of, 30
first, 7, 26–29
future of, 1–10, 243
histories of, 25–28
humanity of, 97–98
and imagination, 3–4
immortality of, 30
incomplete, 100
as marionette theater, 132–34, 133
nonlinear approaches to, 20–23
as popular entertainment, 4, 32, 33, 154, 159, 183, 201
progressive view of, 39–41
recordings of, 1, 18–21
re-creation of, 4, 40–41, 187
spiritual life of, 260
as suspended time, 256
as symbol of luxury, 14
use-lessness of, 162–63, 171, 173–74
as verb, 194
opera seria, 153
Oppenheimer, Robert, 101, 118
orchestrations, 107, 154, 209
Oresteia, The (Aeschylus), 26, 27, 36–38, 42
Orestes, 36
Orfeo, L’ (Monteverdi), 7–10, 31, 38, 63–64, 67–69, 68, 97, 154, 262
Orff, Carl, Carmina Burana, 217
originalism, 45
original sin, 42
Orpheus, 7–10, 31, 38, 67, 92
Ortega y Gasset, José, 41
Meditations on Quixote, 263
“O Superman” (Anderson), 156
Otello (Verdi), 44, 153
Ovid, Metamorphoses, 45–46
Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon, 4
Pacino, Al, 51, 60, 63
painting(s), 86, 97, 180–81, 204–5
Palais Royal (Paris), 152
Palazzo Corsi, 29
Paris, France, 80, 107, 123, 152, 158, 177, 228
Paris Opera, 75, 209
“park and bark,” 15, 206
Parker, Roger, A History of Opera, 108, 174, 201
Parkinson, John and Donald, 215
Parma, Italy, 32
Parsifal (Wagner), 11–19, 22, 72, 75, 174, 185, 244, 250, 256
Partch, Harry, 159
Delusions of the Fury, 158
Pascal, Blaise, 185
Passions of the Soul, The (Descartes), 56
past, the, 2, 35–47, 190, 215, 244
pasticcios, 4
Pathways (podcast), 96
patience, 269–70
patriarchy, 43, 46, 129
Pears, Peter, 245
Pelléas et Mélisande (Debussy), 110–12, 259
Perfect Lives (Ashley), 3, 90–91, 95
performance art, 7, 205
Peri, Jacopo, 30
Dafne, 29
Euridice, 29, 31
peripeteia, 131–34, 137, 145
Pesacov, Lewis, 225
Peter Grimes (Britten), 245
Phantom of the Opera, The, 3
Philadelphia, Pa., 23
Philosophy of Modern Song, The (Dylan), 53
Picasso, Pablo, 86, 187
plot-character, 108
poetic readings, 98–100, 110–12, 117, 132, 218
Pollock, Jackson, 204
polyphony, 6, 8, 50
popular culture, 85, 86, 159, 184
popular entertainment, opera as, 4, 32, 33, 154, 159, 183, 201
“Por un amor” (Reyes), 230, 231
post-dramatic theater, 94, 118
poverty, 163, 176–77
Pratchett, Terry, 36
Prégardien, Julian, 146
Pretty Woman (film), 14, 15, 20, 21, 173, 183
Price, Leontyne, 61–62, 64, 66, 183
Prima la musica e poi le parole (Salieri), 104–6
production-character, 108
progress, idea of, 25, 36
Prohaska, Anna, 133, 146
proscenium arch, 32, 128, 196, 201–3, 205, 206, 210, 212–14, 216, 220, 243,
252
Proust, Marcel, In Search of Lost Time, 38–39
Proximity (trio of operas), 69–72, 71, 225, 266
Public Theater (New York City), 167–68
Puccini, Giacomo, 99, 197
La bohème, 20–24, 32, 72, 107, 176–77, 182, 187, 225
Madama Butterfly, 44, 158
Puccini, Giacomo, (continued)
Tosca, 89–90, 96, 159
Turandot, 100, 248
Purcell, Henry, Dido and Aeneas, 246
purposeful inclusiveness, 86
púrpura de la rosa, La (Torrejón y Velasco), 152
Py, Olivier, 111
racism, 37, 43–44, 142, 144, 149, 178, 189, 244
radical hospitality, 266
radio(s), 19–20, 106, 183, 218, 226, 242
rage arias, 56–58, 137
Rancière, Jacques, 119
The Emancipated Spectator, 98–99
Rayuela (novel by Cortázar), 227–29
realism, 88, 90–91, 98, 138, 259, 264
recitative, 8–9, 54, 55, 233
reconsideration (by audience), 119
recordings, musical, 1, 18–21
re-creation of opera, 4, 40–41, 187
Reddit, 179, 197
reference points, 187
“Reflections on Pelléas” (Boulez), 259
Regietheater, 114–15, 117, 157
rehearsals, 20, 77, 106, 124
Reid, Ellen, 225
reification, 18–19, 168
relational artists, 113
religious fundamentalism, 88
Renaissance, 32, 201
Renzi, Anna, 60
Requiem (Mozart), 54
Requiem (Verdi), 211
Return of Ulysses to His Homeland, The (Monteverdi), 9
reverse chronology approach, 20–23
Reyes, Lucha, “Por un amor,” 230, 231
Rheingold, Das (Wagner), 252
Ring des Nibelungen, Der (Wagner), 17, 18, 37, 94, 123, 157, 241–42, 250, 252
Rinnunci, Ottavio, 30
Dafne, 29
Euridice, 29
Rite of Spring, The (Stravinsky), 123
ritual, 11–16, 24, 158, 249, 256–58, 268
Roberts, Julia, 14, 21
Rodgers, Richard, 107
Roller, Alfred, 246, 247
Rome, ancient, 26, 59, 88–90, 96
Rosenthal, Jane Stephens, 225
Ross, Alex, 114
Rossini, Gioachino, 4, 99, 155
Guillaume Tell, 158
Roumain, Daniel Bernard, 69–72
Russia, 249
Ša, Zitkala, 249
Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, The Little Prince, 126–27
Saint François d’Assise (Messiaen), 102–3, 111–12
Saint Petersburg, Russia, 249
Salieri, Antonio, Prima la musica e poi le parole, 104–6
Salzburger Marionettentheater, 138–39
Sandler, Adam, 83–84, 90, 93
San Francisco, Calif., 184
San Francisco Opera, 174–76
San Francisco Tape Music Center, 158
Santa Fe Opera, 67–69, 68
sarugaku, 64
Saturday Night Live, 83–84
Schechner, Richard, 205–6, 210, 213, 214, 219
Schikaneder, Emanuel, 139, 155
Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 126
Schoenberg, Arnold, 21, 253, 260–61
Erwartung, 116
Moses und Aron, 100, 157, 196–98, 248
Schulz, Matthias, 124–25, 147, 150
Schweder, Alex, 193
self-awareness, 70, 226
self-congratulation, 181, 182
self-examination, 45
self-identity, 32
Sellars, Peter, 101–2, 152, 183
Sennheiser, 169, 239
set design and designers, 20, 23, 33, 104, 125, 126, 137, 149, 191–92, 201–2,
246, 247, 249, 270
7-Eleven convenience stores, 55, 58
Seville, Spain, 114
sexism, 141; see also misogyny
Shakespeare, William
Hamlet, 9, 106, 246
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 143
The Tempest, 142
Shawshank Redemption, The (film), 54
Shirley, George, 22
Shocked, Michelle, 225
Short Organum for the Theater, A (Brecht), 105–6
Shvetashvatara Upanishad, 257–58
Siegfried (Wagner), 15, 17
Silence of the Lambs, The (film), 166
Sills, Beverly, 183
Silverman, Mike, 111
singing actors, 58, 62–67, 72, 74, 80–81, 132, 148, 260, 269
Singspiele, 137, 155
Sioux people, 42, 249
site-responsive staging, 212–14, 216–20, 222
Sixth Sense (film), 148
Slate, 92–93
slavery and slave trade, 32, 43–44, 154
Smart, Mary Ann, 16
Smith, Anna Deavere, 69, 266
social hierarchies, 174
social media, 79, 183
sound (sound design), 55, 59, 74, 102, 105, 107–8, 138–39, 158, 177, 206–11,
210, 216–17, 235, 250, 260–61, 269; see also acoustics; amplification
Southern California Institute of Architecture, 236, 239
Sparta, 27
spatial microphones, 207
spatial relationships, 120
spectacle, 32, 112, 174
spectatorship, 92, 99, 195, 200, 214, 218
Sprechstimme, 248
stagecraft, 258
standing ovations, 123–24
Stanislavski, Konstantin, 63
Starbook (Okri), 86–87
Star Wars (film), 136
State Theater (Lincoln Center), 207–8
status quo, 173, 174, 176, 179, 195
stereotypes, 44
Stockhausen, Karl-Heinz, 253
storytelling, 8, 84–85, 92–96, 100, 108–10, 120, 138; see also narrative(s)
Strasberg, Lee, 63
Straub, Jean-Marie, 157
Strauss, Richard, 253
Elektra, 73, 74, 153
Stravinsky, Igor, The Rite of Spring, 123
Striggio, Alessandro, 7
“Style and the Flower” (Zeami), 66
supertitles, 21, 84
Swafford, Jan, 92–93
Sweet Land, 189–94, 213, 241
Sylvain (Grétry), 155
symbolism, 95–98, 259
Symbolist movement, 259
TalkClassical.com (blog), 63
Talmud, 264–65
Tannhäuser (Wagner), 17, 108
tax laws, 163, 165
Teatro San Cassiano (Venice), 33
technology, 40, 118, 169, 210–12, 218, 243
Teichtmeister, Florian, 133
telescope analogy, 85–86, 107, 109, 114–16, 119–20, 163
television, 21, 85, 90, 91, 107–8, 113, 159, 169, 183
Temistocle (Caldara), 56–57, 66
Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 142
Tezuka, Osamu, 136
That Obscure Object of Desire (film), 234
Theater and Its Double, The (Artaud), 218–19
“Theater and the Plague, The” (Artaud), 162, 203–4
Theater auf der Wieden, 139
“Theater of Cruelty,” 203–4
Théâtre St. Pierre, 155
theatrical magic, 129–30
theatrical representation, 32
“Theory of the Dérive” (Debord), 229
third track, 109–10, 116
Thompson, Jason H., 222–23, 236
Three Sisters (Chekhov), 101
time, 2, 13, 21, 25, 101, 119, 235–36, 255–57
Tolkien, J. R. R., 94
Tomlinson, Gary, Metaphysical Song, 55–56, 116, 257
Tongva people, 191
Torrejón y Velasco, Tomás de, La púrpura de la rosa, 152
Tosca (Puccini), 89–90, 96, 159
totalitarianism, 87
traditionalism, 111, 165–66, 209
tragédie lyrique, 152
translation(s), 15, 45–46, 84–85, 185–87, 195, 198, 261, 265
Traub, Reinhard, 136
traviata, La (Verdi), 14–15, 44, 46
Treachery of Images, The (Magritte), 97
Tremonisha (Joplin), 249
Tristan und Isolde (Wagner), 72, 246, 258–59
trovatore, Il (Verdi), 93, 98, 111, 112
Turandot (Puccini), 100, 248
Turn of the Screw, The (opera by Britten), 115–16, 119, 207, 258
Turn of the Screw, The (novella by H. James), 115
Turn of the Screw problem, 115–20
Twilight: Gods, 241–42
UC Berkeley, 174
uncompromising approach to art-making, 179, 185, 266, 267
understanding (understanding art), 16, 44, 86, 87, 95–97, 105, 113, 171, 174,
181–82, 225
“Undiscovered Self, The” (Jung), 95–96
Union Station (Los Angeles), 215–16, 223
Universal Studios, 107–8
University of Southern California, 239
unlearning, 181
U.S. Constitution, 45, 163
usefulness, 164–65, 167, 171
use-lessness, 162–63, 168, 171, 173–74
Usual Suspects, The (film), 148
Utah, 249
Vale, Constance, 236
Valkyries, 37
van Gogh, Vincent, 180–81
Velázquez, Diego, Las Meninas, 86
Venice, Italy, 4, 9, 33, 56
Verdi, Giuseppe, 99
Aida, 44, 60–62, 64, 210
Un ballo in maschera, 210, 244
Falstaff, 250
Nabucco, 245
Otello, 44, 153
Requiem, 211
La traviata, 14–15, 44, 46
Il trovatore, 93, 98, 111, 112
Verfremdung, 264
verismo, 49, 88, 90, 250
Vick, Graham, 197, 210
Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy, 245
Victory Over the Sun (Futurist opera), 249
Vienna, Austria, 56, 135, 137, 153–55, 246
Village Voice, 263
violence, 36–38, 42, 45, 69, 143
visual evolution, 112
vita activa, 129
voice-character, 108
Vox, 213
Wagner, Cosima, 252
Wagner, Richard, 105, 183, 202–4, 211, 226, 244, 250–53
Der fliegende Holländer, 17
Götterdämmerung, 37, 38, 207, 252
Lohengrin, 17, 72, 73, 75–78
Die Meistersänger von Nürnberg, 17, 244, 245
Parsifal, 11–19, 22, 72, 75, 174, 185, 244, 250, 256
Das Rheingold, 252
Der Ring des Nibelungen, 17, 18, 37, 94, 123, 157, 241–42, 250, 252
Siegfried, 15, 17
Tannhäuser, 17, 108
Tristan und Isolde, 72, 246, 258–59
Die Walküre, 17, 37, 72, 73, 211
Wesendonck Lieder, 80
Wagner, Wieland, 244, 247
Wagner, Winifred, 245
Walküre, Die (Wagner), 17, 37, 72, 73, 211
Walt Disney Concert Hall (Los Angeles), 218
War of the Worlds (2017), 218
Wasileski, Hannah, 136
Webern, Anton, 21
Weil, Simone, The Need for Roots, 185–86
Welles, Orson, 218
Werktreue, 106, 157
Wesendonck Lieder (Wagner), 80
Western culture, 26, 87, 158
White American Theater, 43
white supremacy, 44
Wilde, Oscar, 264
Wilshire Limousines, 240
Wilson, Robert, 94, 157, 247
women, role of, 111, 140–42
wonder, 56, 128–30, 132
world premieres, 30, 147, 187
Wotan, 37
Woyzeck (Büchner), 248
Wozzeck (Berg), 175–78, 182, 248
X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X (Davis), 178–79, 194, 196
xenophobia, 43
Xerxes, 56
Yaangna (Tongva village), 191
yellowface, 44
young, avery r., 242
Young, Erin, 225
Yun, Du, 148
Sweet Land, 189–94
Zeami Motokiyo, 64, 66
Zeifman, Emmett, 236
Zeppenfeld, Georg, 73
zero-latency transmission, 169, 170, 236
 Copyright © 2024 by Yuval Sharon
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