San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Why it’s so hard to bring back newer operas
Shortly before the turn of the millennium, the San Francisco Opera offered a commission to Jake Heggie, a young song composer who had been working in the company’s press office, to write his first opera. “Dead Man Walking,” which featured a libretto by playwright Terrence McNally, was an immediate triumph.
In the ensuing decades, “Dead Man Walking” has become as close to a repertory staple as the world of 21st century opera has to offer. It has been produced on countless international stages, in close to 80 different productions. By some reckonings, it is the most successful American opera of the past quartercentury.
Yet it has never returned to the stage of the War Memorial Opera House where it began its life. Nor, for that matter, have any of the company’s other commissions or cocommissions been revived — not the operas of Berkeley’s own John Adams, not Philip Glass’ “Appomattox,” not the version of “A Streetcar Named Desire” adapted from the Tennessee Williams play by the late André Previn.
Not until now. “Dream of the Red Chamber,” which opened on Tuesday, June 14, is the first commissioned opera in San Francisco Opera’s history to get a return engagement — and it’s happening just six years after the world premiere. The piece boasts a sumptuous score by the Chinese American composer Bright Sheng and a libretto by playwright David Henry Hwang, based on a classic novel of Chinese literature.
But if the company’s M.O. has been to birth new works and send them out into the world without a second glance, what makes this one the exception?
“This is one of the most successful pieces we’ve done in the past six years in terms of audience reaction,” General Director Matthew Shilvock told me. “We place a lot of importance on making sure that the stories we tell here resonate with the community.”
In other words, box office. But there’s more to the story.
“It’s interesting to see how different the piece feels this time around,” Shilvock continued. “Six years later, you hear it with different ears. There’s a lyricism there that wasn’t as apparent the first time.
“We in the company get to hear these pieces over and over again, during rehearsals and performances. But the audience doesn’t have that luxury. So it’s important for them to hear a piece a second time, to deepen their connection.”
That, in a nutshell, is the battle every new opera faces in trying to get a foothold in the repertoire. Most works of art don’t yield their secrets all at once. It takes time, and repeated exposure, before listeners have a good sense of what rewards are available in a particular creation.
But that entails a level of financial and institutional overhead unlike that of any other art form. You can reread a novel, or watch a film multiple times, or binge-watch “The Wire” until your eyeballs fall out; there’s no comparable way to arrange your operagoing life so you can experience, say, Heggie’s wonderful “Moby-Dick” even a few times. And if audience members depend on opera companies for even the most basic opportunities for repeat listening, it’s important to understand what their incentives are.
For a long time, especially during the 1980s and ’90s, opera suffered from what used to be called the “second production” problem. A company would occasionally introduce a new work (perhaps even commissioning it) and reap the PR benefits of a glitzy world premiere. But getting a second company to follow suit — risking all the financial downside for none of the glory — was a harder sell.
My impression is that this syndrome is less prevalent nowadays. One influential factor is the rise of consortium commissioning, in which a handful of companies pool their resources to create a new opera. The opera then comes into the world with four or five premiere engagements lined up — each of them different, but each of them glitzy in its own way.
Most of the new operas on the San Francisco Opera’s recent and imminent schedule have come into being that way. They include, for example, Rhiannon Giddens’ “Omar,”
which had its world premiere earlier this month at the Spoleto Festival in South Carolina and is due in San Francisco as part of the 2023-24 season, or Mason Bates’ “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs,” which began life at the Santa Fe Opera in 2017 and had its scheduled San Francisco premiere postponed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“If a work is commissioned as part of a consortium,” said Shilvock, “then by default it has a future life. That’s the healthiest thing possible. That work is then seen by more people, and it develops a fluidity within the repertoire in general.”
There’s a catch, though. (There’s always a catch.) The more opportunities there are for opera companies to spread risk around — using commissioning consortiums as a sort of artistic group insurance plan — the less room there is for new work arising outside that operatic ecosystem.
“As the phobia about new opera has lessened, everyone has fewer slots available for the contemporary opera,” Heggie said during a recent phone conversation. “And there’s still a lot of fear in the
opera world, because opera is not a part of popular culture the way it was in the 19th century.
“So this becomes a way to avoid risk. I’ve had many general managers say they’d rather give the second performance than the premiere. If the premiere is a total disaster, that’s something you can never come back from.”
The only way out of this logjam — and this is a drum I’ve been beating for more than 30 years — is a torrent of new operas, turned out with little or no concern for the blessings of posterity. Let them appear, let them strive, let them fail or succeed on the strength of whatever merit they may have.
That’s how we got the core operatic repertoire of the 18th and 19th centuries. That’s also how we got the Broadway musical, the midcentury
American studio film and, in our day, the golden age of television.
“If you look back at previous centuries,” Heggie said, “people just weren’t interested in the opera of the past. They only wanted to hear the latest thing. There were hundreds of thousands of operas written, and nowadays we do 20 of them.”
It’s a funny line, and it has the added benefit of being true. It isn’t that one new opera is taking up the single slot that another opera could be occupying. It’s that the 20 die-hards — your “Toscas,” your “Carmens,” your “Aidas” — are taking up all the other resources, and forcing the new works to compete for scraps. (There’s a socioeconomic parable to be drawn here, which I leave as an exercise for the reader.)
If we can somehow reorient operatic culture to once again put a premium on the new and inventive — the way literally every other art form does — then there should be room for all sorts of contemporary work to thrive and find a home.
Maybe “Dead Man Walking” could even pay us a return visit.