Today’s post concludes the article begun last week (published Nov. 29). If you missed Part One, I urge you to read it before proceeding to Part Two, below. The two constitute a continuous argument, but I felt that this consideration of the thought of the radical and influential operauteur Yuval Sharon, who challenges the fundamental assumptions of our artform but is working on some of its cornerstone works within its longstanding institutional structures, merited a stand-alone status.

Yuval/Time/Ambiguity, etc. Every so often, another one comes along—an inventive, ambitious, personally persuasive director of reformist bent whose work and ideas are far enough to one side of the operatic mainstream to earn him the status of enfant terrible, creative disruptor, or, in time, innovative thinker. These directors are talented and intelligent. Their critiques of whatever constitute the “traditional” ways of creating and presenting opera in the times of their flourishing are often entirely justified and keenly put. They frequently assert a sociopolitical motivation for their work, and as they progress beyond their artistic enfance, seek a spiritual connection to it as well, generally found in non-Western religious or mythic sources. But each has before him the problem that terribilité must be redefined in evermore radical terms, until his disruptions and innovations bring him to the boundary beyond which he isn’t really speaking of opera anymore. And such has been the absorption of successive versions of the terrible into the mainstream that we have reached that boundary, and the pretense of reforming within the artform as it has evolved must be dropped altogether.

That, at least, is the conclusion we must draw from A New Philosophy of Opera, by Yuval Sharon. He’s the latest director in a twisting line of descent that includes Peter Brook, Peter Sellars, and Robert Wilson, before we lose the trace amid the troops of auteurs that now occupy most of opera’s territory. And you have surely heard of him. He’s the fellow who directed La Bohème for the Detroit Opera with its acts played in reverse order and with an added character called The Wanderer, played by George Shirley, interrupting the music to call attention to choices Puccini made in his musical narrative, and who (take a deep breath now) with his own company, The Industry, created such events as Hopscotch, in which limos holding four ticket-buying passengers each plus musicians in residence (to each limo, that is), plus a puppet, tooled about Los Angeles following three separate routes (you had to buy into all three to take in the whole shebang), the performers playing and singing the while, with the music and words of several local composers and librettists, loosely related to the adventures of two characters from Julio Cortázar’s “anti-novel” Rayuela, before returning to a Central Hub where a secondary audience could follow the proceedings via onscreen streaming—a neat experience, I can imagine, for the handful of participants and audience-passengers, and to some degree for the Central Hub viewers, for whose sakes Sharon wangled the co-operation of L.A. authorities and the commitment of publicly accountable funds, and somehow managed to declare Hopscotch an anti-elitist event, at least in his own mind.