Jonas Kaufmann will no longer sing at London’s Royal Opera House — because, of all things, the pay is too low. “I don’t know how you do it,” the tenor recently told BBC Radio 3.
In the same interview, he revealed that he won’t bother singing at the Metropolitan Opera anymore, either, though that’s about ideological differences. For a singer like Kaufmann — arguably the biggest star in all of opera — to swear off two of the world’s top-five opera houses is not merely eyebrow raising. It is cataclysmic.
“I feel so sorry for the next generation,” he lamented.
Nearly every singer who has ever pursued an operatic career has pondered whether anything the business has to offer is worth the hassle: the heartache of losing engagements or rejection, the stress over one’s vocal health, the missed holidays, the travel, all of it.
In the past, a comforting thought would have been that, if only one can perhaps achieve the top levels of the business, all will be well. And now, the very top of the business is telling us that all is certainly not well.
Anyone paying close attention should not be surprised.
“[Opera] actually demands death in order to fulfill its true imperative: to be reborn,” stage director Yuval Sharon wrote last year.
Now, self-described “former soprano” and opera librettist Caitlin Vincent states in her punchy new book, “Opera Wars” (Simon and Schuster): “Most of all, opera needs to be saved from itself.”
The current opera business model is not really current (having mostly started after World War II) and not really a business — as one singer said to me, “No, it’s not a business. Businesses make money.”
Essentially, opera is an art form that is nearly entirely reliant on donations. The top opera companies pull anywhere between 20-40% of their annual budgets through ticket sales, but most companies fall well short of that mark.
In her book, Vincent explains some of the reasons behind this as a series of conflicts: the war between singer and conductor, the war between traditionalists and progressivists and, notably, the war between antiquated representations of different cultures and ever-changing views from a politically polarized and race-conscious audience.
Opera is often viewed as a static art form; a museum piece to be admired as a moment in time. But, as Vincent points out, even Mozart added two arias to “The Marriage of Figaro” between its 1786 premiere and a remount three years later.
So what’s to stop us from modernizing things? Why do so many companies treat musical scores like scripture?
“It’s always the Germans,” quipped my former mentor Kenneth Cooper, a regular collaborator with opera legends Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Joan Sutherland.
Regardless of whose fault it is, Vincent lays out a fair case that companies ought to consider giving old scores a kick in the pants — but within bounds. In a famous example of both #MeToo culture gone wild and an opera rewrite gone bad, the Italian opera festival Maggio Musicale Fiorentino reversed the fates of the two leads of Bizet’s “Carmen” in 2018, having the titular character stab her former obsessed lover, Don Jose, instead of other way around.
In “Opera Wars,” Vincent dissects this bizarre choice and quite definitively dismisses its justification. Though the controversial re-staging resulted in a sellout, changing the fate of iconic opera characters is hardly a promising solution to the sobering figure that 80-85% of first-time ticket buyers are, as Vincent writes, “One-and-done. They never come back.”
But why? A quibble between a conductor and a singer over whether to interpolate an optional high note most likely won’t turn off a first-time audience member who probably doesn’t know the difference. Where people can tell a difference immediately is in the experience, staging and cultural aesthetic.
Some believe that opera’s many caricatured representations of non-Western cultures and characters are off-putting to a modern audience; that perhaps opera is too insensitive to the current political moment and must be changed. “Opera Wars” explores this in a surprisingly even-handed way.
Whereas most people in the business of opera are militantly at the forefront of every progressive cause, Vincent takes a pragmatic approach by drawing on interviews from many black and Asian artists. Many of those interviewed lament being pigeonholed into roles and operas correlating with their ethnic background (Japanese-American directors and singers being asked to only do “Madama Butterfly,” for example).
Striking the balance of being respectful to both the source material and modern sensibilities has been quite a challenge for companies trying to appease various voices.
Some of these efforts have had curious results. A former colleague of mine who is Korean American told me of a recent production he did of “The King and I” in Seefestspiele Mörbisch. The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical set in Siam (current-day Thailand) was cast with almost exclusively performers of Asian descent. As they went around the room having each cast member discuss his or her own background, not one of the cast turned out to be Thai.
Is this more sensitive to racial sensibilities? I don’t think so.
As George Shirley wrote in the introduction to Joseph Horowitz’s excellent book “Dvorak’s Prophecy: And the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music,” published in 2021, “If I am going to sing the Duke in ‘Rigoletto’ with respect for the language and the style, then I can sing the Duke in ‘Rigoletto.’ You don’t have to be Ethiopian to sing ‘Aida,’ or Japanese to sing ‘Madama Butterfly.’ We see or hear something for which we have an affinity and we are drawn to it, no matter its origin. If it speaks to us as a way of life, we have no reason not to pursue it. Music is like that; it belongs to no one person or ethnic entity.”
As the first African-American tenor to sing in a leading role at the Metropolitan Opera, Shirley’s opinion should carry appropriate weight. But, ultimately, what both camps of this debate miss is that — save for a few names and roles — the worries over casting have proven to be our version of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, irrespective of which philosophy companies have chosen.
Invariably, the biggest “war” opera has to fight is that of its own cultural relevance. Merely casting operas based on the number of social media followers or trying to chase political or social media trends has not given companies much traction.
Much of this has to do with the glacial pace opera companies currently cast and plan seasons — often years in advance. By the time the production that’s hoping to seize the moment raises its curtain, the moment is long gone. As a result, there is virtually no cultural currency in being in the opera house anymore.
As Metropolitan Opera bass John Relyea once said to me, “It used to mean something that you were there. ‘I was there when such and such debuted . . .’ That’s almost gone now.”
Where “Opera Wars” shines brightest, and where I am in most agreement with Caitlin Vincent, is in her passionate defense of new operas. Being a librettist has her at the forefront of having to champion new works and I believe some combination of new pieces mixed with traditional favorites is the way forward.
But the business of opera is going to have to start by making attending an opera enjoyable and not, as Yuval Sharon writes, “a barely decipherable ceremony that makes you feel like the only one who never received instructions. Everyone else seems to know exactly what to do: when to clap and, more important, when not to clap.”
Nobody worries about what to wear to a Broadway show or if they’re going to understand the movie that’s in another language, yet we in opera still struggle to explain either.
Opera has a real opportunity now to push back as the true antidote to AI: no microphones, no amplifiers — just the human voice doing superhuman things. If only the business could figure out how to properly market that message to the smartphone-addicted culture. That’s certainly a war worth fighting.
Gideon Dabi is a performing operatic baritone, private voice instructor and writer based in New York.
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