Opera needs to tackle its biases. The future of the industry depends on it
When I hand the Opera Queensland reins to Patrick Nolan in November, it will mark my last outing as an artistic director of an opera company, my fourth time at the helm in a 30-odd year career, as I leave to pursue new creative adventures.
I confess in this time I’ve been in and out of love with the art form, fascinated and bored by it. It’s been the epicentre of my life and a strange planet whose language I don’t speak. Like others, I am troubled by opera’s gender imbalance, lack of diversity, the racism and misogyny of many classics.
When I last wrote about the state of opera, three years ago, New York City Opera had just closed and San Diego had a near-death experience. Since that time, we’ve seen industrial unrest at the Met and radical change at ENO. It has been a turbulent time for opera companies in Australia too, where the national opera review has made its mark.
Charged with reimagining opera’s future here in Queensland, it was sometimes hard to rise above the bruising criticism that Opera Queensland received when the review quite reasonably highlighted the poor financial health the company had been in for more than a decade. Still, we welcomed the review as a catalyst for change and reflection on the problems facing this complex and expensive art form. OperaQ has been in surplus since 2015 and is now working with Arts Queensland and the Australia Council on the structuring of the future funding for the company.
I remain emphatically optimistic. These times of upheaval continue to bring out the industry’s resourcefulness and creativity, and a reimagining of how opera can play a purposeful, even transformational, role in today’s society.
So how can opera survive the tectonic shift, re-centre its purpose and tackle its demons?
I see it in the context explored by the outgoing head of the Arts Council England, Peter Bazalgette, when he wrote about “empathetic citizens”. “We’re a species of story-tellers and story-listeners,” Bazalgette says. “Beyond the diversion of entertainment there are good reasons for it. It helps us to learn to read the emotions of others.”
Directing Theodora for Pinchgut Opera last November following Donald Trump’s election reminded me of opera’s function as communal catharsis; that the themes of ancient stories resonate in our lives. In the soldier Septimius we recognised a timeless moral tension. Forced to obey orders to find and punish Christian dissenters, he feels revulsion: “Descend kind pity, heavenly guest. Descend and fill each human breast with sympathizing woe.” From ancient Rome, via Handel’s 18th century London, one empathic citizen speaks to another across the centuries.
Theodora’s final chorus, immediately following the execution of two Christian martyrs, is a devastating song of protest against an oppressive thought-regime. Uniting the Sydney chorus and the audience was a communal moment of recognition that our world’s power axis had shifted.
Bazalgette demonstrates how empathy works neurologically, and uses it as an argument for public investment in culture. He points to a 2012 Cambridge study concluding “that interacting with a group through music makes us more emotionally attuned to others, even beyond the immediate setting.”
As an artistic director, I have experienced countless moments proving that statement true: hundreds of Queenslanders exploding with energy in the local choruses, who trained for weeks to perform in our regional tours; the ignited imaginations of kids playing witches in Dido and Aeneas in a school holiday workshop; and the faces of people experiencing the sheer power of opera voices up close for the first time, in a theatre, nightclub, field, riverbed or quarry.
Creating these moments – evidence of the transformational power of music – is a state opera company’s job. It’s the way opera can reach through the ages. It’s the way it has always survived tectonic shifts.
To tackle its demons, it must also look to empathy.
Despite a large female audience, opera is controlled largely by middleaged blokes who commission other blokes to direct, conduct and design operas composed by dead white men. Some of my favourite composers are dead white men, but the world has changed. There are countless excellent women composers, conductors, directors, set designers and more. There are no excuses for the industry’s casual bias.
From behind the scenes to the stage, the misogyny and cruelty to women embedded in the opera repertoire has been written about often since Catherine Clément’s excellent Opera: the Undoing of Women in the 1970s. Yet still opera narratives of rape, murder and abuse, or stereotypes – from Carmen’s “bad girl” to Cinderella’s “good girl” – go unquestioned by creative teams.
I’ve lost count of the number of times female performers have told me they love being directed by a woman who can deeply empathise with the female perspective on a role. But to show complex women on the opera stage is still seen as radical.
The gender imbalance in opera doesn’t just affect the careers of female artists; it has a profound impact on the contemporary audience’s experience. Anyone who saw OperaQ’s re-imagined Snow White by an all-female creative team, or the late, great Elke Neidhardt’s brilliant Ring Cycle in Adelaide in 2004, or Kate Miller-Heidke’s The Rabbits, would agree.
If opera’s purpose and means of survival is empathy, its value also lies in things that words alone cannot express. By combining music and drama, even the strangest story can transcend mere narrative to express a deeper meaning as allegory, myth, even legend.
All these elements point to the most compelling argument of all for opera’s survival: the artists, many of whom have dedicated their lives to honing their craft, an incredible 400year-old craft, which we could lose forever if it is not handed down, like the universal human stories, through the generations.
Opera has moments of sheer musical beauty that pierce the soul but its true luxury is the capacity of the human voice to affect and transport an audience. Even in the digital world, the pure human voice as an instrument of power, of passion, of grace and empathy, is unrivalled.
• Opera Queensland’s 2018 season is online now
I am troubled by opera’s gender imbalance, lack of diversity, the racism and misogyny of many classics