Is opera a standard-bearer or a pallbearer of the status quo?
It’s easy to assume the former: From its less-than-humble origins as a private event in Italian courts over 400 years ago, opera boasted 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. Before long, the equating of display and dominance seeped into opera’s DNA.
Today, opera still seems to many a reflection of a hierarchical and exclusionary society.
Thinking about opera as burying or at least challenging the status quo may seem antithetical to its nature. Yet opera always fares best when it goes against the grain: flaunting resistance to the beauty standards erected by mass media; fitting uneasily, if at all, with the rapid demands of the attention economy; feeling completely out of place with how we consume other art.
For every composer affirming authority in their work, opera’s history offers counterexamples: creators so committed to establishing a new world order in sound that they resisted all conventions and invented their own instruments, their own ensembles or their own theaters. Opera often appears to ratify the reigning ideology, but the art form is most exciting and viable when it is a subversive act.
The status quo in opera is elitism, and the art form’s elitist tendencies (viewing audiences in large swaths differentiated by class) all too easily eclipse its aspirational potential (the art form’s ability to speak to a single spectator and support their process of individuation). To nourish opera’s aspirational quality, its ability to serve as a mechanism for imagining a different world, we need to cultivate an anti-elite approach in the spaces where opera is performed and in the way the artists create the work.
Opera was not always perceived as elitist in the United States: It wasn’t so long ago that opera singers were featured on mainstream television, like on “The Ed Sullivan Show” or “The Muppet Show.” The “Looney Tunes” sendup of Wagner remains for many as much opera as they’ve ever experienced. The director Peter Sellars once 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.
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 after World War II. But when Leonard Bernstein and Maria Callas appeared on prime-time television, they did not reduce classical music to a mere signifier of economic advancement.
Instead, passionately performed music by the best interpreters of the time infiltrated households around the country at no cost. “The Ed Sullivan Show” — which, 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. We can speculate on what happened to opera as American culture has changed, but what about opera’s own culpability in the loss of its popularity? As opera became more marginal, the individuals and companies most invested in the genre seemed to take pride in its niche position. 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. More than a third of the seats at the Metropolitan Opera go for less than $100, while good seats to a Mets game can be $126. Some issue beyond ticket prices must make opera feel out of reach. I believe it’s the air of assumption, exuding from the opera house architecture, that attendees already belong to a certain class and a certain level of education.
My first time going to the opera made me feel like the only one not in on the joke; I felt judged for not knowing the right moments to clap. The theater was not yet equipped with supertitles, the simultaneous translation of the sung text, leaving those of us who didn’t already know the work or Italian in the dark. Even though supertitles are now the norm at most opera houses, I sympathize when friends tell me that, although they can afford tickets to the opera, the musicology and history degrees that seem a prerequisite make the experience feel out of reach.
But a deep experience of opera should not be predicated on any prior knowledge: of the art form, of a foreign language, of the work being performed or of how to behave at the opera, to take a few examples. Rather than expect education before the opera, I would see it as a sign of success if an audience member wants to learn more after the performance. A first-time operagoer may be so galvanized by the experience of an aria sung in Italian that they choose to start learning the language, or so captivated by the characters in Wagner’s “Ring” that they do a deep dive into Norse mythology. If they opt to see the performance a second time with their newfound knowledge, their experience will certainly be richer, but that initial encounter did not require anything but an open mind.
An elite approach to opera demands that everyone approach the work from the same level and scolds anyone who “doesn’t get it”; an anti-elite approach supports reactions and perspectives as multitudinous as the community it is performing for. If opera companies made that argument more forcefully, opera would quickly develop a more inclusive atmosphere and diverse audience.
A case in point is “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” composed by Anthony Davis to a libretto by Thulani Davis and a story by Christopher Davis. 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. “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 its complicity with systems of oppression.
Inviting this worldview into the narrow world of opera, into the hallowed halls of Lincoln Center, was a gutsy endeavor in 1986. Mounting a new production became my top priority when I became the 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 and predominantly white audience were challenged by the score. 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. (The Metropolitan Opera, one of our four co-producers, reported similarly high attendance during its 2023 performances.)
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.
Thinking about what an audience sees and how audiences are engaged is almost self-explanatory in the mission of eliminating elitism. But I don’t think that mission is fully possible without also reconsidering the process of making an opera — and, as a practitioner, it is my chief concern.
The traditional operatic process is rigidly hierarchical. At the top of that ladder is the composer, who (whether living or dead) is removed like a divinity from the artisans animating the work. Below them are the two primary leaders of an opera performance, the director and the conductor, too often pitted against each other by a system predicated on the achievement of the rugged individual. The ladder continues stepwise in levels of subordination until the artists’ backstage reality uncomfortably mirrors the disparities of our society.
With so many forces to wrangle, the authoritarian mode of production may seem the only way to ensure this insane act of coordination we call opera actually functions. But a model that works so well for armed forces is an imposition on opera’s true nature as a large-scale collaboration. Each artist in opera is inextricably linked to every other; no composer, librettist, director or conductor can create anything that doesn’t rely on the co-articulation of so many other voices. The right artist for opera embraces this tapestry, while the artist insisting on individual achievement will always struggle.
Collaboration can often be confused with the chaos of a free-for-all in which people vie for independence. But opera simply doesn’t happen without consensus and give-and-take, without interdependence. Ego must give way to the collective enterprise. If the elitist approach involves unquestioned authority and the mystification of a solo artist (a “diva” or “divo”), collaboration is fundamentally anti-elite. And if we consider it a social model, the collaborative nature of opera offers a bracing challenge to the status quo.
As the artist Marcel Duchamp famously said, the spectator completes the work. The audience is our final and most important collaborator. And in the artists’ communication with the audience, we can discover opera’s true anti-elite potential.
Will that audience find a confirmation of the values we currently see in our world? Will the performance follow predictable pathways and leave old ideas unquestioned? Or will that audience encounter a surprising act of imagination, one that pushes us to think differently and to listen in new ways? Will the strangeness and audacity of what they see spur them to imagine a different world? There’s no reason to expect any less of opera.
The post Opera Doesn’t Have to Be an Elite Art Form. Here’s Why. appeared first on New York Times.