***

While we’re waiting, though, it’s just as well to think about a Plan B in case the desideratum of truly-loved new operas is not achieved. Actually, all operagoers under 75 have been living in Plan B their whole lives. There is a strong perception that opera is a “traditional” and change-resistant field, but this comes from looking at trees one by one. The forest is very different from the one our predecessors inhabited in the first half of the 20th century.

How did opera houses then decide what was in a season?

1. Regular rotation of established operas according to public demand and the interest/suitability of interpreters.
2. Regular presentation of new works by established or emerging composers.
3. Adoption of successful recent works into repertory for repetition.
4. Pruning of the canonical list according to dwindling interest or need of space for successful additions.

Absent from this list, and from the standard practice of opera houses before mid-century, is

5. Restoration and reconsideration of previously pruned operas.

Yet this last is by far – very far – the prime source of novelty worldwide today, alike in quantity and in success.

“Revivals” were not completely unknown in the old operatic economy. They usually addressed works written before the standard repertory had begun to form, by composers whose status among musicians had kept their reputations alive. “Standard repertory” meant successful operas from Rossini forward, plus a very small handful by Mozart, Gluck, Cimarosa, and Cherubini (fewer than a dozen operas in all) that were strong enough in communal esteem to maintain a place on the fringes through and past the Rossini craze. “Revival” might mean focusing new effort or attention within that handful, and the repropositions of Gluck’s Orfeo and Alceste by Berlioz and Pauline Viardot in the 1860s were the first of that sort to have lasting impact. Something more radical happened about half-a-century later when Handel’s operas – not a single one had been played onstage since the 1760s – began to be reintroduced in heavily adapted versions in the 1910s and 20s. There were also occasional “homage” revivals (Oberto for the centenary of Verdi’s birth, Il pirata for that of Bellini’s death) – but these were not expected to return to circulation, nor did they.

With rare exceptions like these, opera seasons consisted exclusively of new works being proposed for audience favor, and works that had met with such favor and kept it. An opera holding a modest clearance might feel relatively “rare” (Carmen was for every year; Pearlfishers was for once in a while), but as long as substantial parts of the public and performing team remembered the last time around and expected a next time around, it was still part of a repertory, an ongoing tradition. Every work enumerated in the “success” lists above gained such a clearance internationally and held it for a while; many more did so on a local basis.

It is impossible to overstate the change that took shape in the 1950s and 1960s. When Joan Sutherland sang Semiramide all around the world starting in 1962, practically none of the hundreds singing and playing in the performances or the thousands attending them could have had any way of witnessing the work before. It was “new” to all, though old. Semiramide had held its spot, diminishingly, from its premiere in 1823 to a last international round in the 1880s; after a few sputters in the provinces, its fire seemed spent. That could happen to any work; Joseph Kerman famously predicted in Opera as Drama that Tosca would fade from the canon “as decisively” as Lucrezia Borgia had done. But Kerman in 1956 did not understand what was already changing around him: Tosca has not so much as faltered, and Lucrezia Borgia has roared back. Semiramide did not recede after the few years of Sutherland’s championship; well over two dozen successors have sung it in at least a hundred theaters, and several other “revivals” have penetrated still farther into regular operatic life. If we replicated our opening lists allowing any opera to count as “new” if it had been dormant for half-a-century, using exactly the same criteria (ten theaters, four abroad), we would be forced to record more “new successes” by just these two authors, Rossini and Donizetti, than by the entire list of composers active worldwide since 1950. The list would further include multiple titles by Handel and Gluck; long-abandoned works of Mozart, Verdi, Massenet; international embrace for large chunks of what had been mainly-local repertory.