Can there be a happier fate than being a victim of your own success? In the arts, perhaps yes. Overnight popularity doesn’t often last, let alone guarantee a bonafide renaissance. It’s the Riverdance syndrome: commentators have argued that the step fad has crowded the stage for less camera-ready forms of dance. The better question may be whether an art form can effectively sustain and thrive off a tide of public interest.
Today opera finds itself in the interesting and uneviable position of finding out. A hearts and minds campaign may be coming as the opera community finds itself increasingly surrounded by a new generation of crossover performers, many fiercely marketed as the real thing. Among critics, reactions to Franken-stars like Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman have included obit notices and moral panics, but neither have been particularly effective. Recent developments both locally and across North America, however, suggest that a response capable of seizing the public’s imagination is already well underway. This March opera raises the stakes in Vancouver with two startlingly original productions: treatments of the Marquis de Sade and John Steinbeck’s classic novel, Of Mice and Men. From opera, those folks that space-launched hundreds of frozen pizza and pasta ads into public consciousness, now there’s a bid for something new: social relevance.
Pop culture’s flirtation with opera has never been more apparent. It’s there in last year’s Beyonce Knowles-starring stab at “hip-hopera,” MTV’s Carmen; in nu-hair rocker David Usher’s sampling of The Flower Duet in his latest faux-anguished dirge; in Three Mo’ Tenors, a headlining trio of black devos equally interested in blues and R&B as classical; and in TV ads for Grand Theft Auto 3, a popular video game. Chamber-pop sensation Rufus Wainwright’s songs are littered with operatic allusions. Opera has begun to take on a greater role than simply a bald signifier for all things high class: it’s getting more and more play in the soundtrack of everyday pop culture.
After all that ambient music in the last decade, opera has a bracing freshness. Soprano Renee Fleming wins a Grammy, does Charlie Rose, get a best dressed nod from Mr. Blackwell, and still has time to pose for Rolex ads. Mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves took opera to 9/11’s ground zero for a reportedly searing tribute. Here in Canada, the Canadian Opera Company’s recent production of Salome, directed by Atom Egoyan (who first debuted it in 1996), has been wreathed in equal parts fanfare and outrage for its trademark Egoyan touches—incest, voyeurism and everyday aberrance. All in all, opera seems to have weathered 3 Tenors Syndrome, a kind of hype fatigue many critics prophesied for opera in the 90s, thinking that strutting superstars were bad for the art.
Then again, the pitch of hype has never been more intense.
Consider the example of Sarah Brightman. With an amusingly equal measure of critical disdain and popular acceptance , her self-crafted crossover career is truly peerless—and maybe a harbinger of things to come. See her pin-up calendar; see the glamourpuss “In Style” layouts with her posed askance a divan amid copious unread back issues of Le Monde; see her in a g-string on the back cover of the improbably titled album, “Classics.” In this apotheosis of the diva-as-sex-kitten, she may be the first modern personality with classical pretensions to also command a respectable following among Internet pornographers. (I know: I checked.) Sure, her fellow travelers Andrea Bocelli and Charlotte Church tell us that classical can still sell records. But her confident contribution to the classical world has been fairly unique: Let them eat cheesecake.
The instrumentalist world is equally well stocked with sexed-up performers, such as Bond (think 007 chicks playing in a quartet), the Eroica Trio, the Medieval Baebes and many more. In a ruling that many saw as reactionary snobbery, Bond was formally exempted this year from the UK classical charts, and shunted over to the pop category. Swedish violinist Linda Brava took a turn posing in Playboy, whereas a Bond member opted merely to field the magazine’s questions about the pleasures of cello placement and the demands of wind instruments on one’s mouth. Conversely, in modern times, opera singers never have it so good. As a recent song by the pop band Cake wanly tells of the opera singer’s ambiguous sort of fame, “Most people seem to know my name / Or at least know who I am.”
The real news for many is that the state of opera in North America is decidedly robust. Productions across this continent doubled over the last decade. The National Endowment for the Arts reports that the audience for opera in the United States has grown by 12.5% since 1997—more than any other art form—and that it’s also the only arts audience which has become, on average, younger (the NEA claims that a third are under 35). Cheerleading aside, it’s helpful to remember that in 1997 classical recordings represented only around 3.5% of total sales in the US, and that our Soundscan charts are overwhelmed by the charge of the “lite” brigade: Charlotte Church, Russell Watson, and the score to any given week’s big film. What’s more, over three-quarters of CBC’s Saturday Afternoon at the Opera audience is over 50.
The importance of popular appeal is not lost on those in the opera community. Giuseppe Verdi, the great populist an maybe the Shakespeare of the form, put it plainly: “The box office is the proper thermometer of success.” Andrew Ross, the music critic at the New Yorker, recently asserted that “opera is experiencing a remarkable period of growth.” The Pacific Visions program at the San Francisco Opera is responsible for commissioning a series of English language and contemporary subject operas in the last ten years: a much ballyhooed adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire, an opera on the life of Harvey Milk, and most surprisingly, last year’s Dead Man Walking. This production was rightly seen as signalling a new level of confidence—to take a very recent and Oscar-winning film, one with politically charged themes, and give it an operatic treatment—that opera has a contribution to make to contemporary subjects.
Playwright Terrence McNally, the librettist for Dead Man Walking, is among a number of popular and esteemed artists who’ve taken a turn in opera. Other include Julie Taymor, Francis Ford Coppola, Bruce Beresford and Canada’s Egoyan. American composers Andre Previn and John Adams, consistently ranked among the most prominent working today, are churning out opera treatments of such unlikely figures as Nixon and Stanley Kowalski.
Now it’s happening here. Risk-averse programs are always the rule, particularly among smaller city companies like Vancouver Opera. Still, the broader popularization of opera may be giving birth to a nervy optimism. Small-town Vancouver is getting a round of the tonic this March: the VOA presents the first presentation of Carlisle Floyd’s Of Mice and Men, while Modern Baroque Opera goes one further with the worldwide debut of a new Canadian-written opera entitled 120 Songs for the Marquis de Sade.
Wright doesn’t mince words about the Floyd adaptation of Steinbeck’s classic novel. “It’s not a box office piece,” he admits. “A lot of people who come to the traditional operas are going to feel this is not a piece they want to see.” Far from being a purely artistic gambit, opera companies budget for unusual fare like Of Mice and Men. “For a traditional opera company to do anything written after Turandot—it’s not to be sneezed at. It’s just a simple fact: it’s always questionable.”
Taking these chances is critical, however. Regardless the measure of success, Hutchinson says, “You do get a whole new audience. There’s a lot of people I know who are going to go to Of Mice and Men who would not see Tosca, for example.” Wright counts on this, but sees some guaranteed returns that are independent of box office figures. He relates this opera to last year’s gamble on the programme: “For us, The Rake’s Progress was a big risk. Financially, it didn’t pay off. In all sorts of other ways, it did: a new production, good for the long-term health of the art. The people who came really liked it a lot. It’s not a failure; it’s just doesn’t come near to attracting the kind of audience other things do. We’re going to keep doing that kind of work.”
If Floyd’s opera is a risk for the city’s major repertory company, 120 Songs for the Marquis de Sade promises to be every bit (and far more) as controversial a choice for the avant garde Modern Baroque Opera. MBO’s mandate is to bring to stage rarely performed works, primarily from the baroque era (known loosely as the period between 1600 and 1750) with inventiveness and flair. In the infamous Marquis de Sade, the company may have met artistic match. The legendary French libertine, long a bohemian favourite, has come in for some popularizations with two recent films. (As for the writing itself, it’s right where we left it, behind the librarian’s counter, tucked somewhere between Mein Kampf and Jim Morrison’s poetry.)
120 Songs was commissioned in early 2000, before either film was making news, and it promises to take on its subject and the themes of sexual and personal liberties fearlessly. “Some of his sexual and philosophical ideas have been hugely influential, and they went much further than ‘whip me, whip me,’” says Hutchinson. “Those issues are still very, very ripe,” she maintains. The trick with material of this heft, naturally, is to fight the caricature Sade represents for many today. Hutchinson wants her audience to see the rock star in Sade. A consummate dissenter and unrepetent decadent in his days, he’s a naturally dramatic character and well suited to the stage. Appropriately enough, MBO has cast a diverse group of talents for 120 Songs, hand picking performers from the worlds of theatre, opera, jazz and pop (watch for Canada’s erstwhile queen of metal, Lee Aaron). CBC’s French affiliate has taken interest, and is filming a making-of documentary of the production that may eventually migrate into English programming.
Over time, Wright sees this increased popular interest in new and recently composed operas as spawning ever more relevant, contemporary fare. This is the natural progression of investments made back into the artistic community, such as the Pacific Visions programme. As a result, new works are bound to reflect popular texts and figures. “There’s been operas written in the last ten years on Marilyn Monroe, on Jackie Kennedy—they’re all over the place,” Wright says.
Wright remains philosophical about the possibility of trends. “If you polled most opera company general directors, and they were honest, they would say that the 3 Tenors phenomenon has not appreciably increased audiences at live [opera] performances.” The publicity does more to burnish the celebrity of those few performers: “I’m not sure how much it’s heightened awareness of the general art form.” Bonafide performers like Renee Fleming, according to Wright, are a more tangible benefit to opera: “She’s still about the opera house. People like her are stars because of what they do in opera.”
But evolutionary theory favours the crossover artist. Artisitic purity and propriety have little truck with the public, and for fair reason. Crossover talents like Brightman are not unlike random mutations in the gene pool of legit, trained singers. Her commercial success is the triumph of the mutation, the crossover stunt that proves its greater adaptability to its environment. The crossover epitomizes evolutionary change. Is anyone surprised that opera, which many consider a carbon dated art form, finds itself increasingly on the receiving end of such upheaval?
Any publicity is generally good for the opera these days, Wright maintains, before adding a little fretfully, “Hopefully, there’s some taste.” Things are getting interesting.
