Could That Aria Be Shorter?
SAN FRANCISCO — For some opera fans, the most startling thing about Calixto Bieito’s production of Bizet’s “Carmen” here last month was not the soldier clad only in his tight underwear and combat boots, or the nude matador. It was the way a series of cuts had whittled roughly half an hour off the opera, which wound up taking less than two hours and 50 minutes, including just one intermission, to propel its heroine to her bloody end.
The streamlined “Carmen” is part of a broader debate within opera. After several decades in which the trend has been toward longer, uncut operas — drawing on the work of scholars to restore rarely performed passages and putting a renewed emphasis on completeness — some impresarios and directors think the pendulum should go the other way now.
They fear that three- and fourhour nights, with occasional slow passages, turn off time- pressed modern audiences. Some believe that judicious editing, which was not unheard- of when opera was younger, can speed things along for a new age.
But it is a tricky balancing act. Can opera companies, many of them struggling at the box office, broaden their appeal by cutting without alienating their core audience of connoisseurs?
“I don’t think we can any longer fail to hear what our audience is saying about length,” David Gockley, the American impresario who just retired as the general director of the San Francisco Opera, said in an interview this spring as he prepared for his final season.
Companies are trying a variety of approaches to shorten nights at the opera. Many, including San Francisco Opera and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, are eliminating extra intermissions. The Met also offers shortened holiday presen- tations of operas that are aimed at families — but which also attract quite a few adults unaccompanied by children.
And although Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana” and Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci” make up opera’s most famous double bill — the two short operas are so frequently performed together that they are known informally as Cav and Pag — some companies are experimenting with splitting up the act, as the Sarasota Opera did in 2014 when it revived “Pagliacci” all by itself. And impresarios who commission new operas often ask for works in the two-hour range.
It is a sea change from opera’s earlier days, when the credo seemed to be the longer, the better. Strauss’s harrowing “Salome” used to be considered too short to anchor an evening all by itself; in the 20th century, the Metropolitan Opera sometimes paired it with other short works, including, somewhat incongruously, Puccini’s comedy “Gianni Schicchi.” Tchaikovsky’s full-length ballet “The Nutcracker” had its premiere in 1892 on a bill with his short opera “Iolanta.” Audiences did not seem to mind late nights.
Operas vary widely in length: “Salome” lasts just over an hour and a half, with no intermissions, while Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” lasts nearly six hours, with two.
Many opera lovers argue that care must be taken to make sure that cuts do not distort a work. Philip Gossett, an emeritus professor of music, who explores the practice in his 2006 book, “Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera,” said that even eliminating simple repeated sections of arias can have a cost. “If one is to study the history of opera,” he said, “one finds that those repeats become very important as a basis for ornamentation, which modern audiences don’t understand very well.”
The shorter “Carmen” here trimmed much of the spoken dialogue, and with it some back story.
Not everyone agrees that less is more, though. Victor DeRenzi, the artistic director and principal conductor of Sarasota Opera in Florida, said in the end he did not believe that performing “Pagliacci” by itself had proved a bigger audience draw, and said that some people seemed to miss “Cavalleria Rusticana.” And he warned against cutting too many intermissions.
“If you eliminate too many of your intermissions,” he said, “you eliminate that community aspect of performance.”
Fears that 4-hour operas turn off modern audiences.