These are only metaphors, but they are ones we live by. At first, it seems strange that Sharon would like to replace them with his “time curves,” which he presents in a series of little sections of jumbled milestone dates that allow him to assign equal importance to, say, the Oresteia (458 BCE) and Laurie Anderson’s Superman (1981), or Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo and Cage’s Europeras 1 & 2 (1987). That’s just a game. But what serious purpose might lie behind this wish for us to see time as curved, and thus as cyclical? For one, if we set off on a curve (and the Time Machine in my computer aims its arrow up and to the right—the designers experience the route into the past much the same way I do), we eventually arrive back at the starting point, like the limos of Hopscotch. But whereas the hopscotchers went around in space, to and from their Central Hub, time curves work another timespace dimension, whirling us through the past but non-chronologically, and returning us to the present every time. And Sharon, as his book discloses repeatedly, is a thoroughgoing presentist. In his view, we bring the past around to us, where it is so transformed that it is no longer the past.  A second purpose is this: if we can curve our way back to opera’s first great hit, that L’Orfeo, we can come to a clearing where our artform has not yet been defined, where no one can say for sure exactly what it is. And if we can transfer this undefined view to each reincarnation of an existing work, we have a wide-open field. Sharon doesn’t mean this merely in the familiar sense of approaching the interpretation of an existing opera freshly, “as if new,” and so bringing it to life within the form. He means we can do away with the form, rethinking everything about it as work starts. “Who benefits?”, as the Russians say. Why, none other than the autocratic auteur disruptor, who now has permission to claim not only the usual auteur status of co-creator of an opera, but the ultimate freedom to recreate the entire artform— but, as usual, while retaining and exploiting the existing musical materials (even, for instance, playing and singing them in reverse sequence), for which the AD regrettably has no comparable substitute.

Democracy and beyond. In the summer of 1997, Grand Street published the text of a discussion at Columbia University’s Miller Theater, a venue devoted to avant-garde musical and music theatre events. The discussion was essentially a speech by Peter Sellars on the director’s role in opera or theatre, with a few questions and comments from audience members. The drift of the speech was a plug for seeing opera and theatre as direct expressions of their society, and for therefore devoting their creation and performance to sociopolitical amelioration. If you’re angry with the arts, he argues, “It isn’t bad theatre, it’s Washington, D. C.” He goes on to elaborate on this assertion, and to chastise artists who believe that “art is in and of itself the point.” In the phrase that has stuck with me through these 27 years, he says that “I truly don’t care about show business. I care a lot more about democracy.” And naturally, if it’s put that way (let me see: our aspirationally noble political system, or our commercial entertainment onslaught?), I agree. It’s awfully close to saying, though, that he cares more about politics than about art—a natural enough view for a politician, but a questionable one for an artist.