Normally, I am content to read about doings like these (Alex Ross, for instance, has been a big Sharon advocate), or perhaps to sample whatever is available of them by way of free video to get a feel. But Sharon is coming for our Wagner. From beginning to end of our current season, not a note of Wagner will have been played or sung in the Metropolitan Opera House. But next year, we will get Tristan und Isolde, and beginning in 2027-28, the Ring, one opera per season. And Sharon is the director Peter Gelb has selected to stage them all, with Nézet-Séguin on the podium. So it behooves us to pay some heed, and his book should help us do that. It happens that Sharon has also done some previous work with Wagner, including a Lohengrin at the Bayreuth Festival in 2018. A look-see at that will be in order, too. He’s not a dummy, and he’s on top of his working materials.

For me, a peculiarity of reading anything by or about any of the auteur disruptors is that despite disagreements, however extreme, I always feel a degree of kinship. After all, anyone who has devoted life and career to opera, and who expresses that devotion in what they say and do, shares interests and passions with me. Moreover, they often perceive some of the same problems in opera’s present condition that I detect, and sometimes recommend similar attempted solutions for them. These perceptions and recommendations are even, at times, expressed in much the same way I would express them, so that there is an eeriness in seeing one’s own thoughts turned to such opposed purposes. There’s a bait-and-switch quality to the whole business, a feeling of wait, no! that’s what I think, and you’re turning it upside down! Such is the case for me with Sharon, and while I would not want to let legitimate artistic debate slide into ad hominem finger-pointing, one naturally looks for a key to how shared interests and passions can diverge so radically. Sharon offers one in the first chapter of his book, and it’s coincidental enough with my own history to give it some explanatory value.

When Sharon was twelve, his father took him to see his first opera, La Traviata. He didn’t like it! He was bored and uncomprehending. In Italian, and no supertitles! Not much action! Everyone except him seemed to know all about it, so he felt excluded. I also saw my first opera at twelve, and in the company of my father, by whom I wasn’t so much “taken” as escorted—I’d nagged him about it for days, if not weeks. My opera was Carmen (probably a better first-time choice for an early adolescent), and I was in an excited state from beginning to end. I’d read the synopsis, had heard at least the Toreador Song and the Habañera, and couldn’t wait to see how all this was actualized, and how it sounded, in a theatre. By the end of that season, I had seen Il Barbiere di Siviglia and, it happens, La Traviata, with great curiosity and fascination each time, whereas for Sharon—though Siegfried, a year after the Traviata, stirred a bit of interest—it wasn’t until he encountered Amistad, a contemporary opera sung in English the year he turned eighteen, that he began to feel that opera might be for him.