ONE



A Field Guide to the Impossible



Opera is another planet, and if you haven’t spent much time breathing its air, you might find it helpful, before visiting, to have a sense of its atmosphere and of the inscrutable natural laws that govern it. On this planet, apparent opposites—internal and external, sense and nonsense, pain and pleasure—tend to reverse themselves, and violent pressure systems have a habit of forming at a moment’s notice. Before we look more closely at individual operas, let’s get a feel for the art form’s terrain.

COLLISION AND TRANSFORMATION

Opera’s basic ingredients are among the most primal human needs: song and narrative. By combining the two, opera gives voice to sensations that are either too raw or too subliminal for words alone, and incarnates them in specific individuals—people with names and faces in concrete dramatic and historical situations—in a way that music on its own cannot. It is a fusion of the too-big and the too-small, the unnamable and the named.

At the core of the art form are the improbable feats of strength, stamina, and self-magnification that the voice is capable of achieving in the service of cathartic expression. The orchestral music that surrounds the voice and buoys it up is equally important: the atmosphere, in opera, is made not of air but of music. And since, in music, many voices speaking at once can be illuminating rather than chaotic, opera has the singular ability to manifest multiple individuals’ inner states simultaneously, and to embrace and absorb the contradictions that this entails. As a result, I think opera can, at its best, spark a liberating uncertainty—call it negative capability—in the listener.

There’s no such thing as a wholly reliable objective definition of opera, but my favorite is one that I’ve honed together with my colleagues in the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC, pronounced “a-muck,” as in “to run amok”). I cofounded AMOC with Zack Winokur a few years ago in part to figure out what opera is and what it means to us; the idea was to gather some of our most inventive colleagues—singers, instrumentalists, dancers—into the petri dish of an artists’ collective, and see what sort of strange, explosive work might result.

The AMOC definition of opera is this: opera is the medium in which art forms collide and transform one another.

Opera is a composite medium made of multiple constituent art forms, each of which undergoes a mysterious chemical transformation through contact with the others. In any given opera, the drama might seem blunt or absurd if it were divorced from the music; the musical logic, were it detached from the dramatic situation, would seem to be full of gaps; and the words, considered as poetry, would often be merely bad. Put these things together, however, and in a strong opera each element is capable of transcending itself.

Because of this complex interdependence, each ingredient needs to manifest a certain openness and volatility: each one must have the potential to be transformed through contact with other media. As a composer, you have to be able to intuit what kinds of stories would be enhanced by music, not deflated by it; to find a musical language dynamic and fluid enough to serve the drama; to know what kind of poetic text will function effectively as dry kindling that the music can set ablaze. The impossible Wagnerian dream is to combine all these elements into the Gesamtkunstwerk, the “total work of art.” I’ve come to believe that it’s not especially helpful—in fact, it risks feeling totalitarian—to treat all of opera’s constituent elements as a single entity. It feels healthier, to me, to say that opera’s elements should never quite merge, but they should aspire to transform one another through collision.

With collision-transformation in mind as opera’s essential feature, plenty of apparent non-operas feel distinctly operatic to me (and vice versa). The pressurized silences of late Beckett plays, for instance, make for an intensely musical atmosphere: every word that is spoken must contend with the oppressive weight of the surrounding silence, and the resulting friction is quintessentially operatic. Counterintuitive as it might seem, certain silent films also resemble operas, since the music in such films functions not just as occasional seasoning or commentary but as a through-line, a kind of mirror of the visible action.

One of the most operatic non-operas I know is A Study on Effort, an hour-long duet between the dancer Bobbi Jene Smith and the violinist Keir GoGwilt (both AMOC members). As its title suggests, this piece is an inquiry into the extremes of physical effort, and it requires a consummate steadiness and stamina of dancer and musician alike. Both performers might be required to sustain a single gesture—Smith maintaining a strenuous and delicate physical pose, GoGwilt tracing a slowly rising violin tremolo—for many minutes, beyond what seems physically possible. Sometimes the two performers enact their “efforts” separately, sometimes together; sometimes they move on parallel tracks, and sometimes one artist will literally cradle the other in their arms. The differences between dance and music are visible at every moment, but the two art forms seem at various times to be pushing against and supporting each other. Even though there’s no singing in A Study on Effort, this mutually transformative encounter between artistic media strikes me as the concentrated essence of what opera is capable of.

THE BODY AS MICROPHONE

Every operatic artist has probably been asked at some point what the difference is between opera and “musical theater,” a term that I wish were a broad one but that, in American English, has come to mean just one thing: Broadway musicals.

The question is trickier than it appears. It’s clear that opera and Broadway, in their mainstream incarnations, long ago evolved into distinct genres: if you compare familiar exemplars of each—say, La bohème and Rent—the differences between them are probably more obvious than their similarities. But is there a clear, readily definable distinction? If so, what is it?

Bad answers abound.

Answer #1: on Broadway, the singers are amplified, and in opera, they’re not.

Two decades into the twenty-first century, this is plainly untrue. Plenty of opera composers, working across a wide spectrum of musical idioms, require their performers to be amplified—including composers as unlike one another as John Adams, Kaija Saariaho, Chaya Czernowin, and David T. Little.

Answer #2: Broadway is “pop music,” and opera is “classical music.”

Definitions of “pop” and “classical” music are notoriously elusive, and rarely worth the effort of pursuing them. One of the more consistent features of classical music is the presence of a notated score, and that distinction doesn’t apply here, since Broadway musicals use scores too. Opera has also, at many times in its history, functioned as a popular art form; and there are numerous American operas whose musical vocabulary overlaps heavily with Broadway’s. So the presumed pop-classical binary, however concrete it might seem in many individual cases, isn’t universally helpful.

Answer #3: Broadway makes money, and opera loses money.

Well … it’s actually pretty hard to argue with this one.

My own admittedly imperfect answer is this: opera focuses attention on the innate power of the human body, whereas in contemporary Broadway musicals, every sound is created with the assumption that it will be electronically processed. Opera’s materials are organic; Broadway’s are deep-fried. This distinction is closely linked to the matter of amplification, but it can’t be reduced to the question of whether microphones are or are not present in a given circumstance. The issue runs deeper than that, to the question of how the performers in each idiom have been trained to produce sound.


Copyright © 2021 by Matthew Aucoin