Nicholas KENYON
Our new opera critic Nicholas Kenyon outlines how the art form can come back from the brink
WI’d argue passionately for new, rare work presented against a bedrock of favourites
hat makes opera such a uniquely compelling art form? There’s something scarily unattainable about the number of elements that have to combine in harmony to make a truly great opera performance – singing, playing, acting, direction, conducting, designs, lighting, the list is endless – yet the raw emotional impact it can make when those elusive elements do cohere is overwhelming.
I had little idea what opera was when, as a schoolboy with a decent treble voice, I was thrust into leading lady roles in Gilbert and Sullivan school productions. Those appearances in The Yeomen of the Guard, Patience and Iolanthe led to an obsession with the art form. I did walk-on parts as a young teenager with the D’oyly Carte Opera Company when it came to Manchester for its hugely popular seasons, and the experience of seeing a touring company mounting changing repertory every night plus matinées was both exhilarating and alarming: this was dauntingly hard, professional work.
The toughness of those comparatively stable times, however, has little to compare with the turbulence of the past year which saw opera survive the pandemic – just. Our companies large and small have coped with the Government’s stop-start policies on opening up and distancing, the continuing uncertainty about Brexit travel rules, and the huge challenge of keeping afloat financially. There have been great displays of ingenuity and inventiveness during the pandemic, with the rapid building of outdoor venues, the extensive supply of digital streaming, and the creation of new small-scale work.
Not everyone survived, alas: all deaths from Covid have been tragic, but the emblematic death for the opera world was that of the director Graham Vick, whose work with the Birmingham Opera Company did so much to integrate opera back into the community and prove its continuing importance for our time. From Rameau to Stockhausen, from Fidelio to Lady Macbeth, he recreated opera’s power with local forces in nontheatrical venues. He regularly administered salutary shocks to the big houses where he had often worked, reminding them of their duty to champion the new, and of their imminent danger of losing touch with their audiences.
The big opera houses are burdened with huge overheads; they are trying to integrate adventure and imagine how to draw in new audiences, while doing so with fixed forces and inflexible arrangements. One of Vick’s pungent criticisms became prophetically true during Covid, which was that it was far more possible for small companies to innovate and experiment. One positive result of this traumatic period may be the emergence of small groups like Theatre of Sound (which promises a re-imagined Bluebeard’s Castle in Soho this autumn). We have become more accustomed to reduced orchestras, rescored classics, and simple stagings – and that has raised the notion of flexible opera.
How fixed are operas? I’ve been pondering this as I thought about taking up this critical role and chronicling the future of opera here.
As in too many areas of music-making, opera tends to be in the thrall of a fundamentally 19th-century view of the weighty, unchanging artwork that must be respected. You have only to study how the singers of that era embellished and elaborated their music and made it their own to realise how mistaken that view actually is. When Handel wrote operas, they did not remain fixed but changed with every cast of singers; when Mozart wrote opera he was rather low down on the list of those credited and even he wrote new arias for new singers. They were not thought of as great composers with an unchanging vision – it was left to Wagner to assume that role for himself – but as purveyors of great, flexible entertainment.
What could change today to liberate our opera houses? They have opened up their foyers, but perhaps we could become used to reduced and reworked operas, to draw in an ever-wider audience. Opera is in a different situation from concerts: there, an audience can be introduced to new work as part of a mixed programme that reverts to the familiar classics (as will happen at the Last Night of the Proms tomorrow), whereas an opera audience has to decide to take a big risk on a new or rare work for a whole evening. Opera North rang the changes with its clever season of mixed one-act pieces by different composers: might there be other alternative ways in for a new generation?
Just as operas need not be fixed, so too the repertory is gradually shifting: we think we know the essential operas, but the operatic canon is ever-evolving. This is an eternal topic which has been the subject of lively debate this year in Opera magazine between two of our most discriminating opera scholars Jonathan Cross and Alexandra Coghlan. While Cross bemoans the predominance of core works in the repertory because of their overfamiliarity, and suggests lists of stimulating alternatives, Coghlan supports the central works and the continuing right to weep over La Bohème.
We do need the repertory to be reinvigorated, but this requires great performers who will commit with their talent and audiences who will buy tickets. A shining example is the sudden rise in our generation of Handel’s operas, neglected for centuries, in the programmes of all opera companies: their piercingly direct emotions suit the temper of our times while allowing a director’s fantasy to flourish – they have hit the moment. One fascinating test for the audience will be Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers, opening next year’s Glyndebourne season, a famous neglected piece that deserves to flourish.
I would argue passionately for new work, rare work, neglected work to enter the repertory, but tempered by the experience of the perpetual challenge of balancing budgets with adventure. They must be presented against the bedrock of pieces people have come to love, with an audience development programme which draws them to trust the unknown. In these days of depressingly thin arts education, there is always a new audience to be introduced to La Traviata, Carmen and La Bohème. At the same time, we have seen how rapidly and how widely operagoers with open ears have responded to George Benjamin’s Written on Skin, Brett Dean’s Hamlet and Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel –the repertory is regenerating.
Let’s get away from stagings that simply reinforce the idea of opera as part of a glorious unchanging tradition. What gives opera its shattering appeal is that it can be forever challenging our preconceptions and taking us into new and strange areas of elemental feeling and emotion. In this country we have been lucky enough to have lived through an operatic generation ranging from supreme traditionalstyle stagings by Peter Hall to boldly adventurous reworkings by Peter Sellars, with many more shades in between by a cohort of great directors from Nicholas Hytner and David Pountney to Deborah Warner and Katie Mitchell. But now I feel there is a lack here of the work of leading continental directors who have produced stimulating, controversial work in Aix, Salzburg, and Berlin (no doubt with massive budgets): Romeo Castellucci, Dimitri Tcherniakov, Ivo van Hove. We have a new generation of young directors such as Netia Jones ready to explore digital means to enhance our experience, but do we have the progression routes to develop new directing talent? Our singers are well established: we have a fantastic generation, from those who have already achieved international acclaim (Sarah Connolly, Bryn Terfel, Simon Keenlyside), to those on the cusp of world fame (Sophie Bevan, Allan Clayton, Nicky Spence); it will be a scandal if travel restrictions prevent them from being heard. As the season begins, opera is ready to surprise and envelop us again. When Dr Johnson coined his memorable phrase that opera was “an exotic and irrational entertainment”, he added: “it has always been combated, but has always prevailed.” And so it will today.