Today I am pleased to present an article by my longtime colleague and friend Will Crutchfield on the lack of new operas of sufficient appeal to refresh our repertory on a more than one-and-gone basis. Since my own focus here is first and foremost our operatic canon and its performance, this is a topic I only occasionally engage with, and then generally with small satisfactions. Will explains below how his piece has made its way here, but I very much hope that its life will extend well beyond this posting, because although of course our tastes and opinions are not identical, I think it packs more sharp, independent analysis and supporting evidence into concise form than anything I have seen on the subject—and as always, his writing is clear, pithy, and engaging. A price we pay for Will’s valuable work as Artistic Director of Teatro Nuovo, as conductor and coach, is the loss—except for infrequent forays like this one—of Will as critic, at a time when bold, knowledgeable criticism is badly needed. With that, I’ll turn this space over to him.

Will’s note – Several years ago an editor asked me for a “new-opera” essay, the idea being to combine general reflection on 21st-century challenges with some commentary on the novelties that were then current or recent. I wrote most of the piece, but then begged off from the assignment when it had already exceeded usable length and was still unfinished.

By now it’s significantly out of date, but discussion with CLO of some still newer operas prompted me to dig out the draft for his amusement, and he saw some merit in it. In case any of his readers might like to see it too, I’ve put together a few unfinished paragraphs (the discussion of “plan B”) from notes sketched at the time – but haven’t updated the body of the piece, which still reflects the scene as it appeared then.

The new-opera problem (Nov. 2017)

Let’s skip the introductory recitation of woe and start with a question out of left field: what if there is no such problem? How can concern about opera’s health even come up as a topic? The hottest ticket in New York – the most economically productive cultural enterprise currently underway here, the Talk of the Town – is a new opera. It plays to capacity houses every night; people wait months to get seats. Where’s the crisis?

Anyone rash enough to say why Hamilton is not an opera is welcome to try. Actually, let me save you the trouble:

• Because it’s in a different musical idiom? Pretty weak; if “opera” can encompass idioms as diverse as Vivaldi’s and Mussorgsky’s, Miranda’s is not even a stretch.
• Because it is aimed at widely-shared tastes in the expectation of monetary return? Goodbye Mozart, Verdi, Puccini.
• Because it doesn’t have a full symphony orchestra in the pit? Write off the whole Baroque repertory then, along with The Turn of the Screw, unless we can acknowledge the category of “operas with a smaller band.”
• Because the singers are miked? But the contracts for Nixon in China stipulate that its singers must be miked, and meanwhile the original singers of Kiss Me Kate, South Pacific, Show Boat, and Lost in the Stars were not miked. So, those are all operas, but Nixon and Hamilton aren’t?

All these distinctions are non-starters. One older argument, which used to natter on about spoken dialogue vs. through-composed music (and used to collapse over Die Zauberflöte, Fidelio and Carmen), doesn’t even raise a whimper here: Hamilton, like Sweeney Todd and a growing list of others, has through-composed music from curtain to curtain. New opera, by any reasonable definition – by any defensible amalgamation of the definitions commonly put forward over the years – is thriving.