Do people still care about opera? An insider raises some doubts
- Written by Peter Tregear, Principal Fellow and Professor of Music, The University of Melbourne
In a now notorious interview, actor Timothée Chalamet declared he only wanted to work in a creative field people valued. He was not keen on an art form like opera, “where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this anymore’.”
His comments predictably triggered a backlash across the opera industry – and some say they contributed to him losing this year’s Best Actor Oscar race. What should the rest of us make of the fuss?
This is the kind of question Melbourne-based opera expert Caitlin Vincent sets out to help answer in her new book, Opera Wars.
Review: Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for its Future – Caitlin Vincent (Scribner)
Her declared target audience is “the opera curious” as well as “opera lovers”, but the book is no mere operatic primer. Vincent, too, harbours serious doubts about the ongoing relevance and importance of this once venerable European art form.
The book’s driving narrative comes from her exploration of the grounds for such doubts. It examines two broad areas of concern. One is the challenges facing anyone considering an opera career today. Her informed and wide-ranging discussion of them accounts for the more successful and informative parts of the book.
The other is more philosophical, and raises questions like: what is opera good for? What is – or should be – its meaning and value for us today?
The opera industry
Vincent is able to draw extensively on her industry experience: as a professionally trained singer, then an opera producer, and most recently as a librettist.
She is surely right that opera production has never before been as fraught as it is today. Starkly differing views on how opera should be staged are, she suggests, where its “trouble really begins”.
Those views can be encapsulated by two German terms: Regietheater (director’s theatre) and Werktreue (true to the work). In essence, they reflect
disagreement about what a staged opera actually is. Is it a reenactment? A reconstruction? An attempt to recreate the original as closely as possible? (Nods in Werktreue.) Or is it an adaptation? A kind of artistic offspring that’s based on the original but also something new? (Winks in Regietheater).
This pithy and useful description gives you a hint of Vincent’s bouncy, casual writing style. Sometimes, however, her penchant for the literary flourish leads to more tendentious claims. One is her declaration that the Werktreue camp (the opera traditionalists)
aren’t just defending nineteenth-century corsets, grimy cravats, and Parisian garrets. They’re also defending more insidious staging traditions.
Opera and race
What are those “insidious staging traditions”? Vincent quotes opera librettist Mark Campbell: “Why are you even trying to save this racist story? Why are you trying to save this sexist story?”
To be sure, opera has had a longheld interest in exotic settings. In more recent times, this has inevitably raised questions about cultural appropriation and misrepresentation.
For instance, Vincent claims that when Puccini came to write his last opera, Turandot (set in ancient China), “he relied on a Chinese music box and a book written by a Belgian customs officer”. It was “not exactly a recipe for a fleshed-out portrayal”.
Puccini likely first encountered the tale, however, in a later rendering by German poet Schiller, who had himself sourced it from the epic poem Haft Peykar – a work by the 12th-century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi. There, the princess of the opera’s title is not Chinese, but Russian.
This is why it is often instructive to explore an opera’s broader historical context. Notions of cultural authenticity (or the lack of it) can often be more complicated than appearances may suggest.
Vincent’s discussion of race representations in opera fails to clearly distinguish the unquestionably racist theatrical practices of blackface and yellowface (such as found in American minstrelsy) from a wider practice of stage makeup being used to represent non-white people.
Vincent herself later acknowledges that in some instances, “maybe makeup’s just makeup” (although whether that’s now possible is a whole other discussion). Nevertheless, an opportunity to provide the reader with a more nuanced historical context to this understandably fraught issue was largely missed.
Opera as a profession
Vincent is much more compelling and convincing, however, when she delves into the practical facets of an operatic career. I suspect much of this discussion will be unfamiliar to many readers. Some of it, for instance, deals with technical aspects of how an opera emerges from score to stage.
But Vincent also considers in detail just what it takes for a singer to “make it” today. One source puts the “total cost of trying to make a career as an opera singer at roughly $USD 1 million”. Vincent rightly asks: “where does all that money go?”. Perhaps the harder question, which she later considers, is: where does all that money first come from?
These days, the path to successfully launching an operatic career likely starts with being lucky enough to be born to wealthy parents.
It is little known that opera singers are usually paid per performance. This means they are not usually paid for the weeks of rehearsals beforehand. And there’s no sick pay. Much about these “industry norms” is ripe for reconsideration.
Opera singers are usually paid per performance – with no sick pay.
Bianca De Marchi/AAP
But that’s far from the worst problem a singer can encounter in the operatic workplace. Incidents of harassment, including sexual, are now more frequently reported. They have involved key opera industry figures, like the late music director of the Metropolitan Opera from 1976 to 2016, James Levine.
Nevertheless, I disagree with Vincent’s assessment:
It’s a well-known rationale in Opera Land, among their artistic realms, that genius is sufficient justification for abuse – and that the art that’s produced matters more than any harm caused in the process.
Such cases reveal, time and again, that it’s not any vaunted idea of genius, or the demands of making great art, that inoculate an abuser from moral and legal scrutiny. It is, rather, their access to institutional power: and in the case of opera, typically the power certain men have been allowed to have over the careers of younger women and men.
What (and who) is opera for?
Vincent’s book, however, reflects an underlying distrust in exploring what the idea of greatness in art (or artists) might actually mean.
Unless we are prepared to consider why we might decide to value certain forms of art over others, opera will indeed appear to reflect little more than a wasteful, unhealthy obsession with grandiose cultural objects from our (white, European, patriarchal) past.
Read more https://theconversation.com/do-people-still-care-about-opera-an-insider-raises-some-doubts-277234
