Opera on the brink: Can new compositions return the art to its popular roots?

On January 2, 1958, a minor official at the Rome Opera House bore the thankless task of announcing bad news to the audience: Maria Callas had left the building. The legendary soprano, stricken by illness, would no longer perform in the title role of Vincenzo Bellini’s “Norma” before an esteemed assembly that included the President of Italy.

The audience responded with a cascade of boos, jeers and whistles (skip to 7:40 in the video) that quickly overpowered the official’s entreaties for calm. Over the next several hours and into the next day, furious Romans scrawled “WE DON’T WANT CALLAS IN ROME!” or “VIVA TEBALDI!” over posters advertising the ruined opening night, in tribute to Callas’ great Italian rival. Outside Callas’ accommodation at the Hotel Quirinale, truncheon-wielding policemen tried in vain to disperse a mass of shouting demonstrators, while on the floor of the Parliament, government deputies proposed a motion that would ban Callas from singing in all state-owned theaters.

Opera houses today need not worry about setting off a riot — they’re too busy worrying about their performances not drawing enough attention among the public, even now with the inclusion of subtitles. In a time when opera companies need to generate new excitement over an art form whose audience is skewing old, white and rich, slumping ticket sales caused by that very demographic crisis ensure that they have to make increasingly difficult budgetary choices over what could amount to life-saving treatment.

The vast majority of opera performances and recordings in the last hundred years or so have been compositions from before that time — Giacomo Puccini, who died in 1924, is perhaps the last person to create operas that are performed nearly every season at large theaters. As performances outdistanced the date of composition with each passing year, opera began to resemble an attempt at historical preservation rather than a dynamic art form. The solution, then, to opera’s short reach might appear obvious: companies should commission and support new operas to recreate the same kind of excitement and anticipation that saw people humming “La donna è mobile” (from Giuseppe Verdi’s “Rigoletto“) in the streets, if perhaps just shy of provoking a riot.

But newness alone is not adequate, some leaders in the opera world would say, and the cautionary tales of past failed premieres seem to prove. They argue that to attract a wider audience and retain artistic value, new compositions should embody what operas always have been: moving, relevant, and at times, revolutionary.

Los Angeles Opera President Christopher Koelsch hates the word “relevant” (it’s so hackneyed, he says), so he phrased the idea without it. A good opera “speaks to something specific about the human condition, and isn’t just some dull, remote, inscrutable museum piece,” he told Salon. “There needs to be emotional immediacy.”

Koelsch found emotional immediacy in the works of Carla Lucero, a composer and librettist who wrote “La Tres Mujeres de Jerusalén” (“The Three Women of Jerusalem”) under commission by the Los Angeles Opera. The Spanish-language opera, which premiered at Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral in 2022, sees the Passion of Christ through the eyes of three unnamed, often ignored women who weep for Jesus on his way to crucifixion — an idea that sprung from conversations between Lucero and Stacy Brightman, then the company’s Vice President of Education and Community Outreach, about the traditional stations of the cross.

Jesus does not physically appear on stage, so the story’s focus is on the ordinary people sharing their compassion when confronted with the evil of empire, in the same vein as Puccini’s humble bohemians or Ruggero Leoncavallo’s commedia performers. But humanity need not be limited to mortal beings; operatic music is powerful enough to express soul-shaking despair and ardent ecstasy among the Germanic gods of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle as well.

“At its inception, opera was a work for the people — it reflected their everyday life, their challenges, their defiance of power and the social order. Even for the ones that were based on mythology, the characters that are mythological, there were situations and experiences that still resonated very strongly and reflected our own world,” Lucero told Salon. “Comedies like The Marriage of Figaro — especially comedies — were some of the most subversive pieces, and conveyed its messages in a very clever way that often barely escaped censorship.”

“Le Nozze di Figaro,” an opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, is based on an eponymous play that was indeed censored first in France and then in the lands of the Habsburg emperor. Both opera and play distill class warfare down to the aristocratic household, where two just-married servants foil the lecherous count’s scheme to exercise jus primae noctis — right of the first night — on the wife. The censors of Emperor Joseph II, an enlightened despot, approved the libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte only after he and Mozart removed all explicit political references that came from the play, including a climactic speech inveighing against the privileged nobility.

A couple of revolutions later (including one that claimed the head of Joseph II’s sister), the choral “Va, Pensiero” (also known as “The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves”) from Verdi’s “Nabucco” became a rallying anthem for nationalistic Italians, who sought to throw off the Austrian yoke and saw kindred spirits in the Jews under Babylonian captivity. Like with “Figaro,” the subject matter is not explicit, but even though composers nowadays do not face the same censorial challenges as Mozart and Verdi, Lucero deems it artistically wise not to get too didactic anyway.

“We can’t dumb down the audience. We have to continue as composers of opera in the 21st century to move people, and you don’t do that by forcing in things that don’t naturally fit into the story,” she said. “Once you get didactic, that’s it. You’ve lost them.”

Another potential mistake for composers is to create music driven purely by highbrow intellectualism or a desire to experiment past the point of viability. This tendency, which peaked in the second half of the 20th century, found little headway with audiences, according to Metropolitan Opera General Manager Peter Gelb. “Opera and classical music as a whole seemed to hit a kind of dead end with music that was too academic and not able to strike a chord emotionally or intellectually,” he told Salon. “They didn’t provoke the kind of questions that people were looking for in their circumstances.”

Not striking a chord is perhaps a better-case scenario for an intellectual/experimental opera gone wrong — in 1964, an audience in Florence found the dissonant music of Alois Haba’s “Matka” so painful, like someone “spitting out a mouthful of rusty nails,” that they began walking out by the end of the first scene.

The discomfort wrung out by clashing sounds and uneven pitches can effectively convey moments of tension, distress or violence in an opera. But it has often been overdone, Lucero explained. “I believe there’s a place for dissonance in all kinds of music. I use it myself. But if it’s consistently dissonant, and there seems to be really no connection with the story and the singers and the orchestra, it just becomes a mental exercise. It’s like mental masturbation,” she said.

Some operas from the late 20th century, like “Peter Grimes,” “The Rake’s Progress” and “Dialogues of the Carmelites,” have survived in 21st century repertoires. But many others with more abstract storytelling and unconventional musical structures “often alienated those who loved the traditional stories and sounds,” said Cory Lippiello, the Director of Artistic Programs at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. “It’s not like there was a lot of community outreach to teach people and prepare them for what they were about to hear. On top of that, many of these operas were both extremely difficult to sing, and extremely difficult to produce technically.”

On the other end of the spectrum is the perception that an opera doesn’t mean anything at all. In 1966, the Met premiered Samuel Barber’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” a Shakespeare-inspired spectacle that was panned by the New York Times as an “artifice with a great flourish masquerading as art,” producing music that “abounded in declamation and pageantry” but failed to explore the subject — love between a man and woman — and couldn’t be saved by Leontyne Price singing at the peak of her powers.

Barber’s “Antony and Cleopatra” never saw the light of the Met’s starry chandeliers again, but under Gelb’s leadership, the venerable opera company has been reserving an increasingly spacious part of its seasonal repertoire for newly composed and commissioned operas. While some older operas are considered timeless, Gelb, who has already pushed the envelope on non-traditional (some might say groundbreaking) productions early in his tenure, stressed the need for newer works to help “provide stimulating, artistic answers and offer solace and relief from the troubled world in which we live.”

“Puccini and Verdi and Mozart were writing operas that dealt with the issues of their time,” he said. “The same principle exists for newer operas that we commission and put on stage.”

In its 2023-2024 season alone, the Met featured four operas that had never been performed there before, and two — “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and “The Hours” — that had their world premieres in 2019 at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis and in 2022 at the Met, respectively.

“Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the work of jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard and writer-director Kasi Lemmons, was the first opera by a Black composer or librettist to reach the Met stage. It’s also adapted from a 2014 memoir by a Black author, Charles M. Blow, who retold his upbringing in rural Louisiana fraught with emotional turmoil, largely devoid of parental affection and tormented with the harsh echoes of sexual molestation. The story, conveyed from an adult perspective but described as if it was being lived in the moment, needed a composer and librettist who could command the powers of the operatic art to fully capture its audience.

By most accounts, they succeeded. Adult Charles and 7-year-old Charles (“Char’es-Baby”) are performed by different singers, who sometimes share scenes as the former attempts to warn his younger self of dangers yet unperceived. Blanchard and Lemmons also revive an old operatic device by creating a dual spirit-like character — Destiny and Loneliness — to accompany the corporeal roles and haunt Charles wherever he goes. The music itself blends jazz, blues and gospel music, creating a compositional voice the New York Times described as “dominated by lushly chromatic and modal harmonic writing, spiked with jagged rhythms and tart dissonance.”

A similar kind of narrative-chronological challenge accompanied the Chicago Lyric Opera-commissioned “Proximity,” which is actually a collection of three one-act operas in the style of Puccini’s “Il trittico“ (“The Triptych”) that each deal with an illness in society — gun violence, environmental destruction and alienation induced by technology. Rather than the operas following each other in sequence, the scenes are interspersed like a revolving door to convey them as interconnected facets of the modern existence.

“A piece about alienation might feel very trifling next to a piece about gun violence in some ways,” said Yuval Sharon, who directed the original production. “The pieces are all much stronger when they are shuffled around, not treated like separate, discrete issues. It’s all meant to be a little bit looser and a little bit less reliant on an argument spanning 30 to 45 minutes at a time.”

Sharon also directed a diptych: “The Comet / Poppea,” a juxtaposition of Claudio Monteverdi’s 1643 opera “L’incoronazione di Poppea“ (“The Coronation of Poppea”), which dramatizes the ascent of a debauched Roman empress to the top of a debauched society, and the world premiere of “The Comet,” an opera composed by George Lewis and based on W.E.B. Du Bois’ eponymous short story about a Black man and white woman who seem to be the only survivors of a comet crash. Both stories end with a downer — Poppea and Nero get everything they want, and it turns out that even a catastrophic cosmic event that destroys most of Earth can’t quite destroy racial segregation.

The two doomed, cynical worlds begin divided by a turntable, but unfold simultaneously as the stage’s rotation draws the stories together, evoking the “double consciousness” Du Bois described as Black individuals simultaneously perceiving how they view themselves and how society views them.

“‘The Comet’ and ‘Poppea’ are stories about power, the former about white power, the latter about the power of Rome and the potential power of women, but also the power of deception and intrigue and plotting,” Lewis told Salon. “The opera, in structuring itself around America and Rome, invites a dialogue between those two societies that are often compared to each other in decadence and decay.” In promotional materials for the diptych, Sharon writes that the “unexpected harmony to be discovered in juxtaposition” and “its ability to invite a contemplation of both timely and timeless struggles” provide a justification of opera’s “radical potential.”

Adherents of opera say that a great opera is unlike any other kind of art. The music, flowing between the words and beyond them, and the unamplified voice, pushed to the edge of its range, heightens the storytelling and “envelops the audience with a very visceral kind of consciousness, where there’s a symbiotic connection to the characters on stage,” said Lippiello. “You can lose yourself and live vicariously through the characters, and yet also connect deeply with the emotions you carried into the theater and are now being shared with the music and the story.” Unlike musical theater, Lucero added, most operas after the 18th century feature continuous music without the interspersed dialogue, helping people “remain fully embedded in the performance.”

Lippiello acknowledges that opera can be “a little surreal” for first-time listeners and watchers — after all, the performers are singing their thoughts and feelings to one another, which people don’t usually do in real life. But even if it’s not the most naturalistic art form at first glance, she argues, “an art form like opera is more true to life because it surfaces the very real interior lives of human beings in music and song . . . with that human element in mind, I think that — regrettably — people sometimes aren’t prepared to hear operatic voices because they are accustomed to popular music that is produced and corrected and amplified.”

The consciousness of an audience weighs heavily on directors and production designers who frame operas new and old with their stage instructions, sets and costumes. In the Met’s production of “Grounded,” a 2023 opera about a female fighter pilot who is forced by pregnancy to operate a drone remotely, the production team led by dramaturg Paul Cremo and producer Michael Mayer used projections to convey the surveillance of a drone, making a specific decision to avoid photorealism.

“There’s something about watching projected video that can disengage you or make you passive as an audience member to some degree, whereas if those projections are slightly more abstract, then you have to have to be engaged a little more,” Cremo told Salon. “It gets you to focus on the live performers and the human story that’s being told, because the technology is really just there to serve, not overpower.”

The bulkiest and most elaborate productions typically require the space offered by an opera house’s main theater, and operas often do provide spectacle on a grand scale. But an increasing number of opera houses are now organizing productions in smaller venues, especially newer operas that have not yet been grafted into the audience’s imagination as something destined for the biggest stage. Part of it comes down to raw financial calculation — the economics of maximizing the possibility for revenue dictate that the most reliably popular productions remain in the big theater, while the newer prospects that are yet untested or draw a more selective crowd begin on the alternative stages.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Those fledgling operas, of course, are staged with the hope that they will eventually soar to a greater height — many works now deemed classics, Lippiello noted, only became popular several decades after they premiered, even when few expected them to become popular. In the case of Georges Bizet’s “Carmen,” the composer died thinking his creation was a dismal failure; now it is one of the most-performed operas in the world. American bass Samuel Ramey performed a version of its Toreador Song on “Sesame Street.”

For some productions like “Factotum,” a smaller venue is not only suitable, but artistically preferable. The Chicago Lyric Opera staged this commissioned work, which updates Giaoachino Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia” (“The Barber of Seville”) to a Black barbershop in Chicago’s South Side, at the 1,500-seat Harris Theater, less than half the capacity of the Lyric’s auditorium.

“It’s a more intimate space, where the action is right up close and the audience can feel like they’re in the barbershop and neighborhood,” said Lippiello. “The story and the music itself was great for the Harris Theater, and honestly might have been dwarfed by this big gold proscenium with 3,500 seats.”

More pertinent to the need to expand audiences is the simple fact that more venues create more room for people to watch the opera live. And many people open to watching opera but also intimidated by the old-age magnificence of an opera house might be more comfortable starting their journey in a theater free of elitist connotations.

“I would go into these classrooms, and these kids and their families were very reluctant to even step foot in an opera house, because they felt like they didn’t belong.” Lucero recalled. “It’s really important that the curtain is pulled back from opera, demystifying what the process is and the many talented people who put so much time and energy and their talents into making an opera.”

Some now-famous operas were originally made for the “common” theater and for common people, including Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte“ (“The Magic Flute”), a fantastical “sing-play” that was also the composer’s last completed work. And now, people anywhere can watch recorded operas on their computer screen, or for a more thrilling experience, at a movie theater that broadcasts The Met Live in HD (with subtitles, of course.)

The relative obscurity of this kind of information compared to dominant narratives of opera as an inherently elite and inaccessible diversion, and Lippiello’s earlier allusion to the lack of outreach stunting the potential of some promising operas, is why most large companies have now set up education and community outreach programs. “Not a lot of people have sustained contact with an opera company, and so the desire is to really scramble the message about what opera is and who it’s for and what stories it tells,” said Koelsch, the Los Angeles Opera chief.

Many of those programs help obtain discounted or free tickets for students and other groups who might not otherwise have the means to attend a performance, part of a “de-elitification” of opera that Lippiello says is essential for the art to thrive. “If we stop being precious about who gets to tell the stories we produce and where and for whom, stop policing how people should behave when they attend a classical concert, be more open to what kinds of sounds constitute opera, we can see the future of opera is right here waiting for us,” she said.

There’s evidence that new operas are overturning old conceptions and drawing in a wider audience. For the 2023-2024 season, the Met saw an influx of 85,000 first-time ticket buyers, a record for the 141-year-old company, with 25% of those tickets being purchased for one of the six newer operas featured alongside a dozen older, more established and usually more well-known colleagues. If the Met data is an indication that those operas are team players in drawing revenue, ticket buyer data from the Los Angeles Opera paints an even more favorable picture — 36% of their first-time buyers attended a “contemporary” opera, and 45% (with some overlap) went to “off-Grand” performances that took place outside the main auditorium at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

But what those statistics represent is just one encouraging step in the arduous, decades-long effort to bring opera back to the people where it belongs, if they will have it. An equally difficult task to spreading the gospel is, in Gelb’s phrasing, “converting” first-time audience members into full-time opera lovers who come to performances again and again, stan for their favorite “barihunks” and argue over which Rigoletto sang the best high A (or in Sherrill Milnes’ case, high B) in the opera’s final, tortured notes. Or, perhaps, several years from now, they’ll instead be arguing over which baritone/barihunk had the best high A in an opera no one knows about yet.