OK, please pardon the mind-game, which is intended to provoke. No, Hamilton is not an opera, but for one reason and one only: it exists outside the system devoted to presenting what people generally call “opera.” Which is not so hard to define in the 21st century after all, if we’re willing to be frank about some aspects that we opera people tend to find uncomfortable.

Within the broad category of dramatic-musical-narrative works delivered by live performers before gathered audiences, the particular subset we agree to give the name of “opera” generally has the following characteristics:

• it is European in outlook and derivation
• it is addressed to an audience educated in the musical genres we call “classical”
• it is performed by voices and instruments that project sound without mechanical mediation (or, remembering Nixon, it presupposes performers who spend the rest of their time doing that).
• it excludes any musical idiom that reached wide popularity later than the 1930s.

All four of those things are old-fashioned today, whether encountered in Lucia di Lammermoor or Two Boys. This might as well be confronted head-on by anyone concerned with the future transmission of the works-we-call-operas. More on that below, but I don’t need persuading that such transmission is worthwhile; that’s what I work on every day. Where I need some persuasion is on the idea that new works in this sub-genre are urgently required.

Required by whom, and for whom? In the broader cultural world, we don’t generally consider it a crisis if the creative output in certain forms rises and falls, and we don’t consider shortage of current examples an impediment to the appreciation of older examples. What are your favorite book-length epic poems from the last decade? How about sonnets? Menuets? Landscape paintings? Verse dramas? Silent movies? Cathedrals? It is not clear that the world at large is suffering from the lack of new evening-length performance pieces based on centuries-old technology and instruments. The opera public signals its thirst-level mostly by staying home when recent work is on offer.

For whom, then? If I’m right in supposing that nobody has read this far who isn’t somehow invested in the enterprise of what-we-call-opera, then the answer is “for us.” We, the invested, need new works because it’s depressing to think that we might be devoted to an artform whose creative arc has been completed. Or because we fear our own energies are dulled by insufficient engagement with recently-conceived material. Or because it’s un-cool or even embarrassing not to have something to crusade for. Remember the Wagnerites!

This is a problem.

If Simon & Schuster said it would bring out two epic poems each fall – if Roundabout announced a policy of one new play in blank verse or alexandrines every second season – well, those things would get written. It would be something to discuss. Grants would be granted. It would be a blessed opportunity for any poet who has the urge to produce a new specimen, but might otherwise have been discouraged by market pressures.