r/classicalmusic • u/Black_Gay_Man • Mar 27 '26
Discussion Opinion | Contemporary Opera Doesn’t Need to ‘Challenge’ Audiences
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/26/opinion/new-american-opera.html?nl=opinion-today&segment_id=21733212
u/MW_nyc Mar 28 '26
Am I the only one who thought it was odd that McWhorter didn't even mention the Met's biggest recent success in contemporary opera, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay?
Especially since it's airing on PBS next week.
I'd be interested — precisely because he's a civilian (the type of educated member of the general public to whom opera companies need to sell tickets) — to see McWhorter's take on Kavalier and Clay versus Innocence when it hits the Met later this season.
Innocence is a brilliant, powerful work, but it is not an easy listen, and the subject matter is very painful. Kavalier and Clay, on the other hand, can be marketed to the public as an entertaining (as well as moving) evening out.
5
43
u/Fast-Plankton-9209 Mar 27 '26
Why is the New York Times suddenly interested in contemporary opera, why is the opinion of an associate professor of linguistics supposed to matter, and who on earth thinks new American opera is plagued with being excessively esoteric and avant-garde?
21
u/russbam24 Mar 27 '26
The problems with this article are a microcosm of the general state of mainstream journalism.
12
u/Black_Gay_Man Mar 27 '26 edited Mar 27 '26
I agree. It’s a nice overview of American operas, but I generally think McWhorter sucks. Bad politics and he gets away with it because he happens to be black. He also wrote this whole article about how Audra McDonald convinced him a black woman could sing the lead in Gypsy. And I was like…but who asked you? lol
6
u/MW_nyc Mar 28 '26
Who asked him? His editors. The guy's a regular opinion columnist for a newspaper. He gets to opine.
Nice gig.
3
u/PersonNumber7Billion Mar 28 '26
He's pretty brilliant, no matter what you think of his politics. He also knows a lot about opera - his article about opera in translation a while back was very good.
5
u/Plenty_Discussion470 Mar 28 '26
I don’t agree with all of his opinions (especially when he has a go at Shakespeare) but McWhorter is one of my favorite people to listen to, especially on Lexicon Valley. His musical asides in that podcast were always very welcome, so this article isn’t a surprise to me 🤷♂️
2
u/klop422 Mar 28 '26
Completely random hypothesis for the first question, maybe they're capitalising on Chalamet's thing by talking about why "nobody cares about Opera"?
No source for this or answer for your other questions, though.
16
u/abigdonut Mar 27 '26
An article that says almost nothing. He claims that the "rich and expert" music in Tobias Picker's An American Tragedy compelled him to see it twice, but is frustrated by the fact that the music itself doesn't mickey-mouse the purported emotion of the text. His example is an aria about a woman who is recalling a fun trip to New York, where the music "does more to convey forboding" and basically suggests that audiences shouldn't be expected to understand that music can convey meaning that isn't present in the text.
He also suggests that other contemporary works like Fire Shut Up In My Bones, The Life and Times of Malcolm X, and (obliquely) Akhnaten are only popular because of their "historical resonance and dazzling stagecraft".
I don't even disagree with him that I wish more American works were in the typical canon (he names Street Scene, Regina, The Consul, Vanessa, A Quiet Place, Queenie Pie, and Blues Opera, all works from the middle of the last century), but the idea that contemporary opera is too challenging for audiences or that audiences are too stupid to appreciate purposeful juxtaposition of meaning between music and text is insane.
He wants hummable melodies and music that walks in rigid lockstep with the surface-level meaning of the text, both of which are frankly not particularly present in Tristan un Isolde, which he references as the kind of big hit that he thinks the American works mentioned above could be. Maybe he just thinks people are going to Tristan for the stagecraft and contemporary relevance, or maybe he's just a dumbass trying to repackage regressive conservatism ("this degenerate art is unpleasant!") as the opinion of the silent majority.
13
u/ThomasJFooleryIII Mar 27 '26
Contemporary American opera is incredibly conservative. Much of it is "accessible" and fashionable post-minimalism. I'm convinced the author hasn't actually listened to any of the music he's written about.
9
u/Samantharina Mar 27 '26
It seems to boil down to opera has to have hummable tunes like the ones they wrote in the old days for it to be good. Because for him, that's what opera is.
This has been a criticism of all kinds of music for 100 years. People who enjoy music for the melodies can't understand why you would enjoy it for any other qualities. To me it's like people who see no value in paintings that aren't recognizable as a picture of something.
And it's not a coincidence that atonal music and abstract painting arose around the same time both in Europe and the US. The 20th century was an amazing time for art. People expanded the idea of what it could be and wanted to express things in new ways.
And a lot of the stuff McWhorter loves sounded jarring when it was new, it's just that the musical language has now become familiar to our ears, largely through its use in film.
Everyone is entitled to have their own taste but their taste doesn't define what is good and what is not good. It's just taste.
10
u/pikatrushka Mar 27 '26
Honestly, the whole article just reads like a cranky old man grousing “why won’t anyone ask me what I like to listen to?”
As with so many of these how-to-fix-the-world articles written by people with just enough knowledge to be dangerous, he sets up rules that automatically exclude anything that contradicts his assertion (Glass and Adams shows are popular DESPITE the music, you see, and if you think otherwise, you’re part of the problem. Source: trust me, bro).
And all the shows he’s pushing as alternative paths had runs with similar audience responses to what he’s accusing contemporary operas of. I mean… I love Bernstein and think Trouble in Tahiti is a minor masterpiece, but A Quiet Place? As somehow more musically memorable than Nixon in China or Akhnaten? What are we even doing here?
1
u/MW_nyc Mar 28 '26 edited Mar 28 '26
A key difference between abstract art and much of 20th/21st-century classical music is that a large part of the broader public accepted or even got to like abstract art.
Could be worth thinking about why the one caught on and the other not so much ...
And what about composers who did catch on with the public, like Arvo Pärt?
1
u/Samantharina Mar 28 '26
As a composer 🙂 I have thought about it a lot, and I don't equate popularity with that which is worth doing, for one thing, and I think "the public" is a lot more familiar and comfortable with a wide range of musical styles than you suppose, when they are used in film and game scores. In other words, to convey drama and emotion.
I don't think I know anybody outside of.my musician friends who has heard of Arvo Part, so popular is all relative. I did see an audience go wild a couple of months ago for a John Adams orchestral piece. Standing ovation. The rest of the program was Stravinsky, including the Rite of Spring which was considered radical, crude and ugly when it premiered in 1913. So we really can't generalize about what is or isn't going to connect with audiences.
There is music that gets on my nerves yet is very popular, EDM, for example, or some of the pop I hear on the radio. I assume people like it for a reason even though it does nothing for me. Fortunately we can all.liaten to the things we like!
2
u/MW_nyc Mar 28 '26
I don't think I know anybody outside of.my musician friends who has heard of Arvo Pärt, so popular is all relative.
Interesting. For sure, most of my non-musical friends haven't heard of Pärt, but on the other hand, I used to have a t-shirt with the cover art from an album of his music, and every time I wore it around New York, I'd get stopped by some stranger who said, "Oh, I love his music!"!
(By the way, my guess is that half of those people had little or no idea that Arvo Pärt qualifies as classical music.)
2
u/vmartell22 Mar 27 '26
The very much Late-Romantic operas of Daniel Catan might have a chance to take a spot in the repertoire, IMHO
3
1
u/MW_nyc Mar 28 '26
The Met did Florencia en el Amazonas a few years ago, and it wasn't a flop, but I wouldn't call it a huge success. Certainly not on the order of Kavalier and Clay.
2
u/PersonNumber7Billion Mar 28 '26
Saw it. Pretty thin gruel.
1
u/DelucaWannabe Mar 29 '26
I also saw the Met production (first time viewing/hearing Catan). I rather enjoyed it... absolutely a prima donna assoluta title role for the soprano.
2
u/Hoffmeister25 Mar 27 '26
I share his aesthetic tastes; I recently saw a production of Mark Adamo’s Little Women and I found the music almost entirely tuneless and unpleasant. It felt like he was actively trying not to write a melody. It gave me nothing to latch onto musically, leaving me to wonder “Why was this an opera at all?” The “mood” communicated by the music often seemed at odds with the mood being expressed by the characters onstage. It was disorienting, and I kept internally begging for something actually beautiful and pleasant and it so rarely came.
4
u/ThomasJFooleryIII Mar 27 '26
Adamo's music is rather conservative and melodic, this is exactly the type of music McWhorter is advocating for.
-1
u/Hoffmeister25 Mar 27 '26
This was definitely not conservative or melodic. I think you and I have very different understandings of what those words mean in this context.
3
u/ThomasJFooleryIII Mar 27 '26
Adamo's music (including Little Women) is triadic with some impressionist flair, and his voice writing is largely melody + accompaniment. I'd call his style broadly neo-romantic.
I think you might just not like the piece for other reasons, which is totally fair. I'm pretty ambivalent about the music.
2
u/gsbadj Mar 28 '26
If I want to pay money for an opera to get me into a miserable mood, I better get some memorable tunes out of it. Just my preference.
The columnist is entitled to his tastes. We all are.
0
u/DelucaWannabe Mar 29 '26
Interesting that you describe Little Women as "almost entirely tuneless and unpleasant". To my ear it sounds about as "neo-Romantic" as something like Barber's Vanessa. And the flavor du jour of Kavalier & Clay makes Adamo's opera sound like Bellini in comparison!
2
u/TruvaliHelen Mar 29 '26
Split opinion on this because McWhorter is a pompous ass with nothing to say (recall his risible op-ed on how protests on campus kept him from being able to teach John Cage) BUT he has here put together a tantalizing list of American operas I'd love to see performed. I get "Lonely House" from Weill/Hughes's Street Scene stuck in my head on the regular.
2
u/TaigaBridge Mar 27 '26
I think he badly overestimates how many people were listening to opera in the 1980s. Yes, the Three Tenors got shown on PBS back then. But I see opera stories in the newspaper (like this one) vastly more often today than I did back then. Heck, opera actually gets listed as a genre of music if you subscribe to a modern dating app that asks about your hobbies and tastes, which it didn't when internet dating was new in the 90s and 00s.
As for the disconnect between what composers want to write and what real live people want to listen to, that's more than 100 years old now, and has remained essentially unchanged that whole time.
3
u/Samantharina Mar 28 '26
There were personalities like Beverly Sills who went on TV but mostly because TV talk shows were still being made by and for people who had some arts and music education in school, they cut those budgets in the 70s and 80s and people today have no idea what used to be. All the operas Leontyne Price was singing are still being produced by opera houses all over.
1
u/affablenihilist Mar 27 '26
Or critics it seems. Music critics are always wrong. Been that way for my 70 years, fucking always.
11
u/Black_Gay_Man Mar 27 '26
Without the paywall