It Is Easier To Imagine the End of Opera Than the End of Capitalism: On Yuval Sharon’s “A New Philosophy of Opera”
Yuval Sharon | A New Philosophy of Opera | W. W. Norton | September 2024 | 320 Pages
Recently we went with an acquaintance to see the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Aida. During intermission he asked how we were introduced to opera: “Did your families put you onto it when you were little? Family friends?” It’s grim that an art form as potent as opera—blending music, poetry, direction, set design, and costuming, just to name a few of the mediums involved—is viewed as something one must be inducted into from a young age. Apparently, one doesn’t just spontaneously wander into an opera house and fall in love with the art form, as one might do at a movie theatre. Though, as we told our acquaintance, that’s exactly what happened with us.
Even the Met, perhaps the American opera house par excellence—the largest in the world by audience capacity, putting on more productions every year than any other opera house in America, and attracting the most talented and sought-after singers of our time—seems unsure whom opera is for anymore. Despite its many marketing schemes, discount programs, and outreach initiatives designed to attract new audience members and donors, the Met is still struggling financially. (Last year it withdrew $40 million from its dwindling endowment to cover expenses.) Part of the reason is that many people, even before exploring the genre, believe that opera just isn’t for them. It’s as if they would need to pretend to be someone else—someone who is a part of the milieu, in the know—just to attend a performance. Hence the questions we are commonly asked before our friends join us: Is there anything I need to do to prepare? Is my outfit nice enough?
One can sympathize with their anxieties upon review of the Met Opera’s golden curtain, golden proscenium arch, and golden ceiling, designs all meant to project an air of luxury and opulence. Even the Met’s new and much-anticipated Aida production is a traditionalist re-staging which features, you guessed it, golden costumes, golden artefacts, and golden backdrops. Opera, which used to proliferate in the public consciousness, as evidenced by the fact that it was featured in more than one thousand episodes of TV’s longest-running variety show, The Ed Sullivan Show, has seemingly become a rarefied pastime of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy, or those aspiring to be.
Is there a future for an art form that is widely perceived as snobby, stuck in the past? Yuval Sharon believes so, with the caveat that it needs to be reconfigured for the present. As the artistic director of Detroit Opera and the founder of the experimental opera company The Industry, Sharon has spent his career advancing a vision of opera’s possibilities freed from the fetters of tradition. His productions, which have taken place in surprising locations like a parking lot, a state park, and a train station, often turn conventional operas on their heads—for example, commencing La Bohème, an anchor of many opera houses’ programming, with its final act and ending with its first. A fierce advocate for new and contemporary opera as well, he has staged an opera inspired by Julio Cortázar’s counter-novel Hopscotch in limousines, wherein audience members were treated to arias while they were driven around Los Angeles.
Now, Sharon has written a treatise on both his personal artistic philosophy and opera’s history and potential. It is fitting then that the book opens with an epigraph by Walter Kaufmann:
We are not so rich that we can do
without tradition. Let one with new
ears listen to it in a new way.
An intellectual known for his translation and reinterpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche, Kaufmann revised Nietzsche’s reputation in the English speaking world, introducing his work to a new generation of postwar thinkers. And what Kaufmann did for Nietzsche, Sharon would like to do for Wagner, Puccini, and the entire operatic canon.
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In the face of new knowledge, we are constantly rediscovering and recontextualizing history. Likewise, Sharon argues that it is a misconception to treat opera like an immovable relic of the past. Of the three major artistic strands that make up an opera—music, text, and production—music and text may be fixed on the page, but the production is living, and each production is an opportunity to breathe new life into this malleable art form. Accordingly, much of A New Philosophy of Opera is dedicated to illustrating Sharon’s ideas through compelling, creative re-readings of classic operas.
Using Mozart’s The Magic Flute to demonstrate the potential for opera productions to recontextualize history, Sharon points to the dilemma of staging a racist aria sung by the character Monostatos, a Moorish man who lusts after the sleeping princess Pamina. Decrying his own skin color, Monostatos sings “black is so ugly” as he considers raping Pamina, whose “whiteness makes her a paragon of beauty.” The libretto is of course inflexibly problematic, but every opera production and performance allows the opportunity for some choices: whether a contemporary artist chooses to excise the aria, retain it faithfully, or portray it with a critical viewpoint, Sharon argues, “its presence will end up saying much more about the company, the director, the conductor, and the singer than it does about Mozart.” These choices, large or small, add a living voice to productions and can reveal the flexibility of an opera that is falsely viewed as eternal and unchanging. Sharon insists, however, that opera should never be simply didactical. Echoing Kantian aesthetics, he argues that beautiful art is never simply a means to a determined end, such as the education of the spectator.
After describing his childhood pastime of playing domino rally—at the end of a satisfying spree of dominoes toppling one after another, he would be left with a “rubble still bearing traces of the inevitable, doom-laden design”—Sharon connects his dispirited mess of dominoes to the final act of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung and its depiction of the world’s unsalvageable corruption. Wagner concludes his opera by having a valkyrie immolate herself and the entire world with her, but, for Sharon, Wagner’s deus ex machina has now “outlasted its metaphoric value to human culture.” It is a dramatic mistake, since it treats history as an “objective, fixed entity.” We now know, Sharon claims, that such a quick fix is not only inconceivable but could even be harmful, because such a miraculous appearance as the valkyrie’s minimizes the need for individual agency. That doesn’t mean we should stop performing Götterdämmerung, but that we should search for new ways to depict its final act of salvation, perhaps in a critical light, and support new operas that offer other ways to think about individual and collective responsibility.
For Sharon, a dearth of ambiguity in art is not only an aesthetic problem; it is a political one too. Citing Dr. Stanley Budner’s psychological study on Ambiguity Tolerance, Sharon asserts that “the more individuals [react] negatively to ambiguity, the more they [respond] to the pleasing order of totalitarian leadership.” To further highlight the importance of ambiguity, Sharon draws on the Nigerian writer Ben Okri, who wrote, “once a work is thought to be understood, its magic is dimmed, not in the work, but in the person seeking to understand.” Given opera’s artifice—the multilayered incorporation of different genres, the librettos often sung in a foreign language, and the curious dramatic pacing—the constituent parts of any opera work together to produce a multifaceted reality that is complex and even contradictory, just like real life. The text of an aria may seem triumphant while the music suggests menace, as frequently happens in Verdi. No two audience members walk away from an opera with the same takeaway, and no two productions are ever identical. Opera is therefore uniquely positioned “as a space for multiplicity of meaning, for indeterminacy and ultimately enchantment.” Which is why opera at its best reveals human nature to be complicated, sometimes inconsistent, and anything but straightforward.
This indeterminacy is best preserved through what Sharon, citing French philosopher Jacques Rancière, calls a “poetic reading,” as opposed to a realist or symbolic one. Using his “made-for-Cleveland” production of Leoš Janáček’s Cunning Little Vixen as an example, Sharon explains that a straightforward production of the opera reduces the work to its surface-level narrative—“a sly fox constantly outwitting the myopic humans around her”—which is its least interesting dimension. But on the other hand, a symbolist production faces the challenge of giving symbols material presence—as Sharon confesses, “I dread to imagine how she would feel if I asked the soprano to play ‘the symbolic manifestation of nature’ instead of the darting consciousness of a fox.” Sharon’s way out of the realist/symbolist binary is a poetic reading in which actors can be both animal and not at various moments. His own production of Vixen features a triptyque of screens which envelop a small stage. Elaborate animated scenes such as a fox dreaming of becoming a human dancer or chasing after chickens are projected onto the blank screens, with doors that singers can poke their heads through when they are not occupying the stage physically. Sharon argues this poetic reading allows the audience to“inflect the story without being subject to it,” and make the meaning for themselves.
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Sharon embraces a wide variety of genres, thinkers, and forms of inquiry throughout A New Philosophy of Opera, making it hard to pin down his philosophy intellectually and historically. The closest model is Walter Benjamin, a philosopher whose essays exercised a great influence on the critical theory Sharon cites. Benjamin’s two most influential essays, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and Theses on the Philosophy of History, neatly map onto Sharon’s arguments concerning the pitfalls of routinized opera and fatalist readings of history that see historical events as nothing more than dominos falling one after another. And even at the level of imagery, Sharon’s prose mirrors Benjamin’s—Sharon challenges this assumption that the past is “a burden and a mess, like the floor of fallen dominoes,” while Benjamin describes history from the perspective of Paul Klee’s painting “Angelus Novus,” which depicts “the angel of history” with “his face turned toward the past,” his eyes fixed on “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.” The contrast between Benjamin’s image of sublime destruction and Sharon’s banal re-imagining of it reveals the different stakes of their respective arguments. Benjamin wrote Theses on the Philosophy of History in the middle of World War II, just before attempting to flee Nazi capture; in the face of ascendant fascism, he was concerned with the future of civilization itself. On the other hand, Sharon is concerned with the future of opera, not civilization as such; he only half-heartedly, and in the abstract, attempts to address the wider social phenomena which determine opera’s future, and are determined by it in turn.
In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin claims “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” Aura, for Benjamin, is the aspect of a work of art that, based as it is in ritual, resists mechanical reproduction. It is what separates the print of Chagall’s The Triumph of Music that anyone can purchase for $28.00 at the Metropolitan Opera’s shop from the mural adorning the wall of the opera house itself. When Sharon argues that “routinized performance[s]” of opera fail because they are nothing more than “the rote reproduction of ritual,” it’s hard not to hear echoes of Benjamin. However, Benjamin’s point is not so simple. His essay continues to capture the imagination of humanists precisely because of its paradoxical thesis: although Benjamin seems to deeply respect the appeal of aura and ritual, he also favors the advent of enhanced mechanical reproduction of works of art, and its concomitant minimization of aura, because he believes it will pave the way for a more democratic aesthetic experience.
In contrast, Sharon, while also arguing for democratic aesthetics, comes out on the side of aura. He writes explicitly against mechanically reproduced, ritualized performances that merely confirm the taste of opera-goers already in the know, because he believes that opera’s unique power flows from the aura of singular, innovative new productions and performances. Sharon approvingly references the work of Benjamin’s friend, Theodor Adorno, who proposed in his essay “The Radio Symphony (1941)” that radio producers should play live rehearsals of symphonies—replete with interruptions from the conductor—instead of uninterrupted performances. Sharon agrees with Adorno’s claim that unlike routine, flawless performances, these oft-interrupted rehearsals possess the aural power to awaken a “sleepwalking public,” jolting it out of its unvaried listening habits.
Sharon’s philosophy is, however, more consonant with Benjamin’s when it comes to the question of historical progress. The epigraph to the fourteenth thesis of Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History—a simple aphorism from Karl Kraus, “Origin is the goal”—perfectly encapsulates the ethos of A New Philosophy of Opera. And when Benjamin claims that “the past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again,” he prefigures Sharon’s argument that opera should capture the great works of the past in order to reconfigure them for the sake of illuminating the present. Indeed, Sharon’s fundamental claim is that the essence of opera is “rebirth,” for it is an “art of resurrection” which constantly reinvents itself to sing to changing social circumstances.
Sharon’s expansive historical survey testifies to this cyclicality. As he explains in the book’s “Overture,” opera’s originators, an interdisciplinary group of Florentine gentlemen known as the Camerata, were first motivated to found a new art form by their desire to return to the musical and dramatic style of antiquity, which they considered less “corrupt and extravagant” than the polyphonic music popular in the Renaissance. Accordingly, in Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, the oldest surviving opera score that’s still frequently performed today, polyphony is largely avoided so that the music’s themes and the singers’ recitations can be clearly heard. Almost two centuries later, in keeping with Sharon’s thesis, the operatic form was reborn when composer Christoph Willibald von Gluck resurrected the Orpheus myth in his opera Orfeo ed Euridice. Echoing the artists of the Camerata, Gluck worried that the perceived excess of star singers showing off was overwhelming opera’s musical qualities, and he looked back to the “beautiful simplicity” of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo while writing his own score. If opera ceases to exist in one form, Sharon explains, it will always be reborn in another. Reports of opera’s death are therefore greatly exaggerated.
The operatic lineage of the Orpheus myth exemplifies Sharon’s essentially genealogical theory of opera. In three sections spaced evenly throughout the book, literally named “time-curves,” Sharon traces the history of opera from its origins in ancient theater through the meeting of the Camerata and up to the present day. Unlike the previous sentence, these interludes are not linearly organized; instead, Sharon skips around, jumping from 430 BCE to 2008 CE and then back to 1573 CE. In contrast to so many bog-standard historical narratives, these unexpected juxtapositions of the very ancient, the not-so-ancient, and the not-ancient-at-all are consistently interesting and surprising. Sharon’s method is built on his conception of history as a fundamentally “cyclical phenomenon,” and he offers his “time-curves” as a demonstration of his heterodox historical method. Sharon puts Benjamin’s famous remark that history is “a tiger’s leap into the past” into practice.
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To tackle the diminishing relevance of opera in America, Sharon briefly treats the material conditions of operatic production in the United States, and deduces, unsurprisingly, that “opera faces an impossible economic condition” in this country. According to him, the fundamental contradiction facing opera houses today is an accounting issue: they are torn between their status as donor-supported institutions who are compelled to serve a social function to maintain their nonprofit status and as commercial, money-making entities who sell tickets to stay afloat. Sharon claims that, like all art, opera is fundamentally “use-less,” and as such, it cannot survive as a mere means to make a profit (from ticket sales) or as a status symbol (for the elites who donate to opera companies). He explains that “opera’s only hope is to somehow escape both modes,” and insists that “there must surely be a way out of this gulf between the nonprofit and the commercial.”
But it’s anybody’s guess what that way out actually is. For now, opera companies must focus more on pleasing their financial stakeholders than pushing opera forward. As Sharon puts it, “[o]pera in America has every incentive to adhere to the status quo—mostly for a sense of security that those paying the company’s bills will continue to do so.” That opera companies focus more on pleasing the wealthy than the rest of their audience is reflected in opera houses’ architecture. Proscenium arches emphasize the “centrality” of the most expensive seats in the house: sets behind the proscenia are constructed and painted with a vanishing point of perspective that only looks natural from the center. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Opera is situated in an enclave of Manhattan named Lincoln Center, removed both socially and architecturally from the rest of the city.
But when opera caters to wealthy stakeholders, Sharon argues, it becomes a mere means, another commodity to be proffered by opera houses and purchased by patrons who duly list their donations on their tax returns. An opera is just another transaction: patrons provide the funds, and opera houses present them with what they’d like to see, often the same productions year after year. Opera stops challenging its form; it can no longer offer any new social critique or connect with new audiences. And so it becomes stale, slowly withering away. To avert its demise, Sharon calls for a new, “anti-elite” opera, where inclusivity is a virtue and there are no celebrations of “privilege or power.”
In a striking passage, Sharon describes the hypocrisy he felt after walking by a homeless encampment on his way to see Alban Berg’s Wozzeck in San Francisco’s ornate War Memorial Opera House, and denounces the inequality between the wealthy patrons seated comfortably inside and the struggling people outside. Such an image would seem to indicate that as long as class inequality exists, opera, and art itself, is in a compromised position. Superficially, Sharon concludes instead that “it’s the catering to wealth that causes the problem,” not the wealth disparity itself, although an inquisitive reader might wonder why opera companies in America cater to wealth at all if they could really decide not to do so of their own volition. The answer is they can’t.
But Sharon’s framing of the battle for opera’s future as one fought between the “elite” and the “anti-elite” obscures this obvious truth. In Sharon’s new philosophy of opera, and in much left-liberal discourse in general, language critical of the “elites,” a concept more detached from economic reality than, say, the owners of the means of production, elides the more cutting question of class struggle. Especially when it comes to the political-economic question of how to fund artistic production, class can better articulate the stakes artists face. That is why Marx argued in The Poverty of Philosophy that until philosophers take the class struggle into account, they will remain tacit defenders of the bourgeoisie. In light of Marx’s critique, the viability of A New Philosophy of Opera’s call for an anti-elite opera seems more dubious. Even Sharon’s productions rely on the goodwill of wealthy donors—some of whom are thanked in the book’s acknowledgments—and the willingness of corporations like Sennheiser to grant Sharon pro-bono use of their “very expensive” technology. Sharon’s viewpoint is nonetheless understandable given his social position. As the founder of an opera company, and short of a full-scale revolution, he must rely on donations or ticket sales to stay afloat, but, like all artists, he must simultaneously imagine himself as not beholden to his benefactors.
In the end, it is impossible to see how opera could effect an escape from its social conditions alone. Sharon tacitly admits as much in A New Philosophy of Opera’s very first sentence, which calls on readers to “imagine a near future…in which the art form of opera ceases to exist,” and “opulent opera houses would be transformed into experiential shopping malls, or perhaps expensive condominiums.” Sharon doesn’t seem too concerned about the prospect of opera’s dying out, as he serenely states that opera can never really die because it is an art form of “rebirth.” The implication, though, is that venues of artistic creations may be destroyed, as long as singers, poets, directors, etc., come together, opera will exist in one form or another. Or, to invoke Sharon’s own imagery, it is a domino rally that can always be rebuilt. But for those of us who want the art of opera to persist materially—not just metaphysically—it is easier to imagine the end of opera, or art in general, than the end of capitalism. If we don’t take political action to stop it, opera houses will all be turned into shopping malls, and artists into investment bankers, leaving nobody with the money or time necessary to rebuild the domino rally.
Benjamin infamously claimed that when fascism renders politics aesthetic, “communism responds by politicizing art.” Though Benjamin’s injunction finds no place in Sharon’s new philosophy, there is still a radical core to A New Philosophy of Opera’s defense of democratic aesthetics, which makes it worthwhile reading for anyone committed to art’s potential to envision a more just world.