A New Philosopy of Opera by Yuval Sharon
With A New Philosophy of Opera, Yuval Sharon has written one of the most provocative recent books on the arts in any of their forms. As artistic director of the Detroit Opera, a guest director at Bayreuth and founder of a cutting-edge group called The Industry, he’s become the insider with an outsider’s perspective. Sharon is concerned with nothing less than opera’s survival. He imagines a future without opera, with opera houses turned into high-end malls with condos attached. The demise of what he calls the “ludicrously large scale collaborations” would leave our society emotionally poorer. He holds opera’s patrons and its creatives responsible for the decline.
Opera was once part of popular culture, at least in some cultures, and in 20th century America, it reached a considerably wider audience than today. According to Sharon, opera singers appeared more than one thousand times on Ed Sullivan and “everyday people” listened to broadcasts from the Met. Nowadays, opera is patronized by an elite whose tastes or agendas call the shots. Some contemporary opera composers have shoehorned gospel or country music into quasi-traditional forms in misbegotten efforts at finding new audiences. As Sharon puts it, “In desperate attempts to prove ‘relevance,’ companies tend to develop projects based on success in other media … often accompanied by pandering.”
Sharon has been eager to push the boundaries without pandering, staging operas in parking lots and other site-specific locations, deploying amplifiers. “Opera has an overwhelming capacity to hold meaning in multitudes,” he writes. But also, citing the use by 7-Eleven of recorded arias to drive the homeless away from their doorsteps, opera can consist of “over-the-top emotions and one-dimensional characters” sung with athleticism not empathy.
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Along with critiquing the way opera companies are run, Sharon suggests a close look at opera’s origins for clues to the future. The 16th century Italian originators of opera aspired to find a “dialogue between ancient and modern” in a collective effort with uncertain, untested ends. The result was less like “the highly systemized genre we know today” than a predecessor of a ‘60s happening.
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