opera houses under fire

Elaborating on the debate with Bernard Foccroulle (director of La Monnaie in Brussels) and Pierre Audi (director of the Nederlandse Opera in Amsterdam) that took place during NewOp9 in Brussels in November 2000, Lukas Pairon, the director of the Ictus Ensemble and founder of NewOp, issued a statement entitled ‘Opera houses under fire for their engagement towards new works’. NewOp is an annual international meeting of performers and producers of contemporary opera and music-theatre. Lukas Pairon himself has been a producer of new music and music-theatre for more than ten years, first at the Walpurgis contemporary opera production company and currently as the director of Ictus, the internationally renowned contemporary music ensemble based in Brussels.

‘The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.’
Igor Stravinsky

Considering the pioneering work so many performers have done outside the established institutions in recent decades, the time is ripe for the major opera houses to become participants in this field too. The opera house of the future is one where the production of newly-written works forms a substantial part of the programme. What follows below is an invitation to join in the reflection on new organisational models for the opera house of the near future and to put this question at the top of the agenda.

György Ligeti’s ‘Le Grand Macabre’ at the Flanders Opera and the success of Philippe Boesmans’ ‘Wintermärchen’ in Brussels, Lyon and Paris, and other examples of successful large-scale opera productions from other countries, such as Peter Eötvos’ ‘Trois Soeurs’ and Helmut Lachenmann’s ‘Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern’, all seem to indicate that the advance of new work in the opera institutions cannot be halted. But appearances can be deceptive.

It is positive that several opera directors shudder at the label ‘museum art’ and for this reason sometimes take sound initiatives and opt to present the first performances of new works or produce recent works once again. All in all this remains extremely limited. Either the opera houses of the future will succeed in rejuvenating and restructuring themselves, or else we had better close them down, with a few fortunate exceptions which we can then cherish as museums of lyrical drama. But at present they are almost all museums. Despite the current debate, and contrary to appearances, most opera houses are suffering from the same malaise.

1. Making a living art

Many of the contemporary operas performed in opera houses are not really ‘contemporary’, though I do not want to open up a discussion on what may or may not be called ‘avant-garde’. But if devotees and critics had to judge these ‘contemporary’ operas on their ‘contemporaneity’ in terms of music, theatricality, production and so forth, it would soon become obvious that many of these ‘new’ productions would not qualify at all. Why are the criteria for the evaluation and appreciation of new opera still different from those applied to new works of music, theatre, dance, the plastic arts, etc.?

The most important reason for this is that many intendants of opera houses are completely out of touch with what is going on in contemporary music, the visual arts and present-day performing arts in general. It is precisely because of this lack of contact with current developments that many new operas are extremely dated in aesthetic and artistic terms and that to many people opera therefore remains a moribund art.

But opera does have a future if more account is taken of a younger generation of worthwhile composers, writers and artists who propose new models for the art of creating music-theatre. Opera houses that intend to produce and perform new works in the near future will also have to allow for a serious renewal and restructuring of their production methods.

It is no longer sufficient to put the occasional new work on the bill, as now happens. We should be able to expect from each opera house director a plan in which new creations occupy a central position. This is far from the present situation, where opera house directors are appointed or reappointed without complying with this condition. It is in addition hard to enter into fundamental discussions with the heads of the present opera houses precisely because too many interests and resources are involved. However, in several decades the opera institutions as we now know them will no longer exist, and we must reflect on the best form an establishment for the production of the ‘music-theatre of the future’ should take. It is essential to launch as broad a social debate as possible on this topic in order to generate a well thought out new model in which we can in future offer lyrical drama a place, without the repertoire of one particular period excluding all the rest, as is now the case. Considering the enormous investment society puts into it, it can and should no longer be tolerated that wherever one goes in Europe and beyond, it is always the same repertoire that is performed, in different, sometimes more ‘modern’ guises.

2. The intendant/devotee

In order to take a sound approach to new work, the opera director must himself be a devotee of contemporary music and performing arts. Only then will he wish, regularly and in the long term, to develop new works as an essential part of an opera season. Being in touch with these arts is the absolute precondition for persuading the public to discover and appreciate newly-created and performed works. In any case, there is a substantial potential audience that is sufficiently interested to discover new forms of music theatre. It appears abundantly clear from the experience of the Nederlandse Opera that this sort of attitude can in the long run actually convince a broad audience. This company has invested in the creation of new works more than any other in Europe: its intendant and resident stage director, Pierre Audi, is one of the few opera house directors who are real enthusiasts of contemporary music, and thanks to his personal contacts with composers and writers he has succeeded in keeping abreast of the latest developments and thereby in creating in just a few years a dynamic which also draws in a substantial proportion of the Dutch public.

3. Rethinking structure and working methods.

It is only those intendants who are true devotees of the contemporary arts that will be capable of changing the structure and working methods of the opera houses.

Although there are certainly interesting examples of collaboration between major opera institutions and independent, performer-based ensembles and production centres, this sort of operational model is not ideal. The production methods in the respective organisations are after all so different that it becomes extremely complex to work smoothly together. It is therefore essential that in addition to such joint ventures, opera houses also start to play an independent and more active role in the field of creation.

Performers who wish to put together a new work should not be saddled with a large orchestra, chorus, a fixed rehearsal and production schedule, classically-trained singers who have little experience of contemporary practices in acting and/or movement or of contemporary music compositions, etc. The makers of new music theatre will not always want the musical and education backgrounds of the performers (singers, musicians, actors, dancers) with whom opera houses are accustomed to work. One characteristic of much new music theatre is that those who create the works do not necessarily follow the standard production schedules of most opera houses (neither the composition of the production team, the timing and planning, nor the type of working spaces and theatres). By accepting these conditions anyway, these creative people often make works for opera houses which in fact are far removed from their original vision or concept. Those who reject the restrictions imposed are unfortunately rare. The appeal of working for a major organisation and the respect and recognition it brings are often too attractive to refuse.

4. In anticipation: a ‘special task force’.

‘Opera’ means ‘the works’. So it should involve more than one sort of music theatre. We have to abandon the 19th and 20th-century opera house methods as soon as possible so that there is space for the creation of works that turn out not to fit into the present very limited production and artistic ‘corset’ of the majority of opera houses.

Every opera house director who wants to take up the challenge of adapting the existing opera institution so that a greater variety of new projects can be carried out, should in the transitional period at least make a start on forming a special team responsible for keeping track of the special needs of the new works being created. This team should definitely not function as an independent unit, but must be fully integrated into the organisational structure of the opera institution. It is no solution to attach laboratory-like units to the major institutions, because of the danger of ghettos being formed and the possible dissociation of this sort of unit when times are hard. We should see it rather as a ‘special task force’ in a transitional stage to a situation where the ‘art of the repertoire’ is in less of a majority and there is more openness to differences of intention and approach shown by artists of the past and present.

5. New infrastructure.

The opera house buildings are themselves a matter for discussion too (stage infrastructure, audience areas, electronics, multimedia, etc.). The theoretical work has been going on for some time among architects and music and theatre artists. Most existing opera houses date from the 19th or early 20th centuries or earlier, and are suited to the performance, in ideal circumstances of just one particular repertoire. On the other hand, not everyone feels at their ease in the velvety surroundings in which the middle classes past and present like to be. If we want to bring music theatre to a broader, but not necessarily ‘larger’ audience, it would be a good thing to make the theatres more accommodating not only to those who work in them, but also to the public. Instead of adding on enormous auditoria where more people can see more of the same, it would be better to work on theatres better suited to showing a variety of art forms. It is after all well known that good theatre is not well served by the distance necessarily created between stage and audience in big theatres. Huge spectaculars can be put on in sports halls and similar large spaces, as they already are. For the other theatre and musical works, a different, not necessarily very large infrastructure must be considered.

6. Chorus and orchestra.

The future of the chorus and orchestra is also open to discussion. One of the recurring arguments against reshaping the opera from the inside is the need to keep the orchestra and chorus in work. Yet here too a great deal of fascinating thinking and experimentation has been going on in various parts of the world. A recent example was the project at the Opera de Rouen, which from now on, under its new name of ‘Leonardo da Vinci’, will present a programme in which less work from the repertoire will be seen and heard and where the doors will be opened to the other arts, while the orchestra and chorus will be employed in completely different fields than simply accompanying opera productions, and will even serve several establishments and festivals. Another example is the programme of the Nederlandse Opera, where such chamber music ensembles as ASKO and the Schönberg Ensemble, which concentrate on first performances of new music, will make regular appearances.

7. Invitation to reflection and dialogue.

Artists and producers that work on new opera and music theatre outside the major institutions should be able to participate in this reflection. At the moment they do this too little or not at all. They often adopt a subservient attitude, with a hand outstretched to the opera houses in the hope of catching a few crumbs or leftovers from the well-laden table. Another common but opposite attitude is the utter rejection of everything to do with the opera institutions, as if the ‘outsider experiment’ was above it all. Here we encounter the sterile discussion about the ‘avant-garde’. Does this intransigent refusal by certain artists and producers to enter into dialogue with their colleagues in the opera houses have something to do with maintaining a sort of ‘protected environment’ of ‘so-called experimental, new or avant-garde art? What is going on outside the opera houses is not all trouble and affliction, but it would be equally untrue to claim the opposite.

But what is much more important is the discussion that should be carried on with the broader public, and also with the politicians who at present prefer to keep everything as it was by granting billions to institutions who will thereby be able to continue almost exclusively to show art from the past, with a paper-thin coat of modern varnish.

Although I have here spoken only of the creation of new works, it is by no means my intention to argue for an artificial and superficial division between ‘old’ and ‘new’. Although I am surrounded at all times by new music and contemporary forms in the performing arts, I am also a great fan of much that is beautiful in the opera repertoire. But what I am pursuing is dialogue, with the emphasis on a future for newly-written works, with the clout of the opera houses being employed to produce genuinely new operas.

Lukas Pairon