The Metropolitan Opera in New York City has sparked a buzz and ticket sales, and it has some purist keepers of the "opera brand" upset.
Peter Gelb, a former record industry guy, tore up the rulebook that has kept the opera experience frozen somewhere between the excitement of watching paint dry, and the surprise of discovering Sunday just after midnight on Saturday. He's opened dress rehearsals to the public, slashed weekday ticket prices, added performances to the schedule, and simulcast live performances on movie screens around the world.
It's the last part that has the opera brand purists up in faux arms. Voiced most dramatically by the head of the Opera National de Paris, the reactionary position is that opera is meant to be experienced live, on a stage, and that all this fooling around with rehearsals and broadcasts will hasten opera's demise.
To them, opera ceases to be opera when it gets digitized into another stream of entertainment content. Opera is a happening.
Only it isn't, or hasn't been since the advent of recorded music.
The content of art, just like that of brands, is inexorably linked to context. Live theater was the immersive virtual reality experience of the 16th Century; dull, muddy reality couldn't hold a candle to it. Symphonies, the ballet, and opera were riffs on this theme, creating highly stylized live theater experiences targeted at niche markets of mostly well-off consumers. Over time, rituals evolved that made it harder to access these experiences, almost simultaneously as other experiences arose (or technologies invented) to challenge them.
People built an edifice around their favorite art forms, mostly in hopes of preserving them.
Yet opera, as an art form, is no more sacrosanct than any other. It certainly doesn't have to be attached to a particularly configured stage, or the costumes sewn in a specific fabric or style. It's not the sum total of the rituals that accreted to it over the centuries; that's just the detritus of past generations' efforts to define it for themselves.
Walls built up around art tend to make it inaccessible to people.
Ultimately, operat is content -- a book and score -- and the form its takes should be driven by what best expresses it to a particular context and audience. I can no more experience an opera as 16th Century person might, any more than he could watch something really culturally important to my time, like Battlestar Galactica.
So I say the more Mr. Gelb does with it, the better it will be for his troupe, as well as for the genre overall. Nobody needs to keep an artistic form on a museum shelf, so the purists could very well destroy the thing they aspire to preserve. The greatest crime would be to let opera slip away and become wholly irrelevant to our culture.
It's high time somebody ripped apart the opera edifice. More creative people should get involved, and risk destroying it altogether. Better to explode in a wonderous burst of invention, than to wither and die covered in dust in some corner of society.
You've got to risk the brand in order to save it.
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