American Opera

Good article from Anne Midgette in Sunday's New York Times about the state of American opera. It brings up some interesting points about genre, workshopping (good or bad?) and getting further performances. One of the things I learned by my work in the promotions department of a music publisher is that commissions and premieres happen fairly often, it's getting the second performance that's tough. Everyone likes to claim "world-premiere", but who wants to say "second performance"? As a result, many good works are left to collect dust on the bookshelves. The observation that smaller-scored works gain more performances is definitely true. It's a lot cheaper to hire 5 singers and 15 players than a cast of 15, full chorus and an orchestra of 70. This makes operas performable by universities and smaller companies of young singers.

Still, I guess we should be happy that there are so many talented American composers and singers working on opera. This doesn't even include the music-theatre genre benders like Adam Guettel and Michael John LaChiusa (also featured recently in the Times in a profile by Jesse Green) who are questioning conceptions of what makes a musical. I think audiences (particularly opera audiences; musical audiences are often tourists seeking entertainment-which is fine, until they're confronted by an experimental, dark work and run screaming) are game to see something new by their fellow countrymen. For a lot of people, Jake Heggie's 'Dead Man Walking' is much easier to identify with than 'Il Trovatore'. And it's nice to see the pre-historic Met lumbering towards new music with the appointment of Peter Gelb.