Luciano Pavarotti, Beverly Sills and Leontyne Price were national celebrities in the 1970s and 1980s. Opera singers would regularly appear on television, radio and movies. By 2022, the National Endowment for the Arts found, fewer than 1 percent of American adults have attended an opera in the past year. (Maybe you’re right, Timothée Chalamet.)
One thing that could help turn things around is if opera companies offered audiences works not just in the language that they speak, but in a musical language they can readily appreciate, recognize and enjoy. Memorable melodies and harmonies, arias that intuitively convey the feelings at the heart of a scene. Note: Music hardly needs to be simple or predictable for listeners to nevertheless be able to relate to it without strain. Listen to Stephen Sondheim or Michael John LaChiusa, whose weird and wonderful musical “The Wild Party” is playing in New York for a few more days.
Too often composers and producers reject music that audiences can easily appreciate as insufficiently sophisticated or original. But too often this means new American operas that inspire heady anticipation all but vanish after a quick run. Nothing from their scores is likely to become a staple for soloists or recitalists.
The music is rich and expert in Tobias Picker’s “An American Tragedy” — which I found so intriguing I went twice when it premiered at the Metropolitan Opera House in 2005. But when a character exults over her recent trip to New York, there is little in the musical or rhythmic setting that one would associate with someone having had a thrilling time in a bustling city. Oddly, it does more to convey foreboding — a kind of disjunction that infuses the whole opera’s musical grammar, as if Picker wants listeners to challenge how they associate emotion with music. That’s a neat trip, but goodness, that’s a lot to expect of an audience, yet it’s an approach that is common in American operas of our times.
Some operas can penetrate consciousness on the basis of their subject matter. Examples include Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” as well as much of Philip Glass’s oeuvre. But are these works embraced because of their historical resonance and dazzling stagecraft or because of how audiences relate to their music specifically?
Make no mistake, sometimes it takes time to wrap your head around a new opera. A mature art form hardly needs to hearken only to the immediate taste of the general public. But operagoers deserve more American scores that are neither aural absinthe nor aural Sprite (think “Grease”).
They can find them in many of our native-born operas of the past that grab the ear right away. Larger companies largely avoid this corpus, other than “Porgy and Bess” and Carlisle Floyd’s “Susannah,” with its warm, Appalachian tone. (The Met didn’t even mount this until 44 years after its premiere.)
“Street Scene” is Kurt Weill’s 1947 musicalization of a 1929 play about a domestic tragedy in a tenement during an oppressive heat wave, with lyrics by Langston Hughes. The score is dark and hopeless, with angular melodies and busy ensembles — yet all of it immediately relatable on first hearing.
Marc Blitzstein’s “Regina” is an operatic rendition of Lillian Hellman’s “The Little Foxes,” about a Southern family fighting over their family legacy. While the play itself comes off today as a potboiler, “Regina” achieves a kind of grandeur. Anyone touched by Patricia Collinge’s alcoholic, bird-with-a-broken-wing Aunt Birdie in the 1941 film of “The Little Foxes” would be transported by Birdie’s melting aria “Music, Music, Music” as she reaches for the beauty that real life has denied her.
Gian Carlo Menotti wrote “The Consul” in 1950 about a man being hounded by the secret police. Given ICE’s current aggressions, its plot would resonate today. In a small production I was in long ago, audiences were stopped cold every night by the dark, luscious lullaby often called “My Sleep Is Old.” Samuel Barber’s “Vanessa” is similarly affecting and needs to be heard more, as does Leonard Bernstein’s “A Quiet Place,” whose quirky and accessible music, exploring a small family’s history, can haunt you for weeks afterward. Duke Ellington wrote an opera late in life called “Queenie Pie.” I saw a version in 1986 and recall the melody of the title song to this day.
Then there is the magnificent “Blues Opera,” about wealthy Black jockeys in the 1880s, with music by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer. Written in the 1950s, it was never mounted in its full form, but has been reconstructed by John Mauceri and Michael Gildin, including a full orchestration. The lyrics are smart, the music gorgeous. It’s the sort of folk opera of which there should have been more in the wake of “Porgy and Bess.” This opera could easily be as big a hit for any house that programmed it as the “Tristan und Isolde” currently playing at the Met.
The ability to write a beguiling song is a gift, in English as well as in Italian. Countless American composers have had that gift, and opera companies should share it with audiences more. It could give opera in America a needed shot in the arm.
Nineteenth-century Italians would have been baffled by the idea that opera in their own language should studiously avoid infectious melody and“challenge” the audience to enjoy it. And they kept La Scala packed.
“The Dawning Moon of the Mind,” by Susan Brind Morrow, is a marvelous book on Egyptian hieroglyphs. Egyptologists have come up with bizarre translations, under an assumption that the ancient Egyptians were of a lower mental order than us moderns. In 2005, the hieroglyphic specialist James P. Allen translated the Saqqara Pyramid text on King Unis as “Unis becomes a screeching, howling baboon / Unis’ anus on Unis’ back / and Unis’ backridge on Unis’ head.” Morrow, a poet and translator, makes a patient, convincing, and engaging case that a people surely did better than this. Her translation of those lines is the much more artful “Unis becomes the baboon of the desert hills of old / The rising disc of light is Unis, the wise face is Unis / the shining one is Unis, the face, the head is Unis.” The book, published in 2015, is a beautiful journey. Plus, you pick up some hieroglyphs.
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