The Incredible Shrinking Repertoire: Some Perspective on what opera lovers love
BY PATRICK SUMMERS, ARTISTIC & MUSIC DIRECTOR
HOUSTON GRAND OPERA
At this moment there are more living composers who have seen and heard one of their own operas than at any time since the late 19th Century. Isn’t this amazing?
But there’s another simultaneous reality that would seem at odds with the above: the operatic repertoire has shrunk precipitously in the last half-century. For opera companies, repertoire is destiny – for what are we besides the operas we perform? We are asking ourselves a lot of questions about repertoire, but the key is to ask the right questions.
Defining repertoire isn’t obvious. Technically, repertoire refers to any opera that we could perform with a few weeks’ notice, meaning a production we own and a score we could perform with a few rehearsals, something which doesn’t require us starting from scratch like a summer festival. But much more importantly, repertoire defines the operas that the public will attend in sufficient numbers to warrant the enormous expense of putting them on. There is no doubt that the core operatic repertoire in the United States is shrinking, but so is the core repertoire of every symphonic orchestra, professional theater, and every ballet company. Traveling musicals sell far fewer tickets than even 25 years ago and plays barely travel at all now. Subscription sales to everything, including sports teams, peaked in 1987 and have been in steady decline since that time – cinema attendance is a whisp of what it was 25 years ago. Does any of this have meaning?
Indulge me for a second, as I seek draw to some lessons from the past, always the best indicator of the future. Let’s briefly transport ourselves back a century, to the late summer of 1924.
The only US opera company at that time, New York’s Metropolitan Opera, was preparing to open their season that fall with a production of Verdi’s Aida with an extraordinary cast: Elizabeth Rethberg and Giovanni Martinelli as Aida and Radames, while the major debut that evening was conductor Tullio Serafin, who 25 years later would shepherd Maria Callas through the greatest triumphs of her career.
There were, incredibly, 42 other operas that season besides Aida. Composer Giacomo Puccini was memorialized in a concert following his death that fall on November 29, and the season already included three of his operas, the oldest of which, La bohème, was 28 years-old that year, along which his slightly newer Tosca and Madama Butterfly. Programming a 28-year-old opera now in 2024 would mean Daniel Catan’s Florencia en el Amazonas, which premiered at HGO in 1996, and which Houston Grand Opera has performed three times since its premiere, recorded twice (which is quite unusual) – and which the Metropolitan Opera performed last season, starring Ailyn Perez. Florencia is, objectively, as successful an opera in our time as Bohème was in Puccini’s, but it feels different, doesn’t it? Stay with me.
There were seven Wagner operas at the Met that season, four by Verdi, one relatively new opera by Richard Strauss, then just over a decade old, Der Rosenkavalier. The oldest opera was the only one that season by Mozart, Cosí fan tutte. There were many French operas that were all less than 50 years old: Romeo and Juliet, Faust, The Tales of Hoffmann, Samson and Dalila, Carmen, L’Africaine (starring Rosa Ponselle), La Juive, Thaïs (a big hit that season because of the sensational star Maria Jeritza), Le Coq d'Or (actually a Russian opera but performed in French), and the Met premiere of Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande, just over 20 years old at that moment, and which starred Edward Johnson as Pelleas, who would a decade later become the Met’s General Director.
The big news that season was the US Premiere of Janacek’s opera Jenufa, an opera then about twenty years old, performed not in its original Czech nor in English but in German, and starring the biggest star of the time, who sang many roles that season, the soprano Maria Jeritza. The remainder of the season’s repertoire also consisted of Italian operas, most of which would not be out of place in today’s repertoire. There were no American operas at all, and barely any American artists.
So, on our time-traveling trip back to 1924, you will notice that the repertory operas are essentially the same as they are now: Aida, Bohème, Madama Butterfly, Traviata, Carmen, Tosca, Rigoletto, The Marriage of Figaro, Der Rosenkavalier, The Magic Flute, Faust, Pagliacci, Turandot. The rest of the repertoire was relatively new, written in the lifespan of the audience – and therein lies the most important part of this history lesson. The repertoire of future of 2024 lies largely, not solely, exactly as it did in 1924 – with operas that are written within the lifespan of the audience.
There are a few more operas that we consider “standard” repertoire: Il trovatore, Faust, Pagliacci, Hansel and Gretel, The Barber of Seville, Don Giovanni, and all of the major Wagner operas are still standard repertoire for a major company in 2024, just as they were a century ago, though each Wagner opera also requires enormous resources that stand outside the idea of ‘repertoire’. This means that the widely-recognizable repertoire consists of about 25 operas, though out of those 25, really only about 12 have a superpower status with the public.
Many operas that used to be standard repertoire have fallen away. Some of this is simply due to the only major technological upgrade to opera in the last half-century: supertitles. I will never forget a longtime patron of San Francisco Opera saying to me around 1990, in the early days of titles, “Oh, how I used to adore Ballo and Gioconda and now that I have to read all night I no longer like them.” Some operas simply have a moment and then vanish, which is not unusual, others age out of their subject matter or are cultural appropriation nightmares that don’t need to ever be produced again.
Yes, the range of operas that used to be absolutely standard and now rarities is a long list: Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, Macbeth, and La Forza del Destino, Boris Godunov, Massenet’s Manon and Werther, The Tales of Hoffmann, Samson and Dalila, Andrea Chénier, Norma, Eugene Onegin, Smetena’s delightful The Bartered Bride, Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvrer, Lakmé, or the most popular opera in the world at one time, a work that swept all of the major cities for years, Charpentier’s Louise, a remnant of which lives on in opera fans in its most famous aria, “Depuis le jour”.
So, what happened? In the early half of the 20th Century, the short answer is that two major world wars and a worldwide depression happened all in the span of 30 years, which had a severing effect on all culture. It was a time that required a total reset. In the second half of the 20th Century, several operas captured an audience, and those works are with us still: Peter Grimes, The Rake’s Progress, Dialogues of the Carmelites. Alban Berg’s searing Wozzeck premiered in the 1925 but really only found its audience in the post-war years.
And in the center of all of the turmoil of the early century we find the first stirrings of an American operatic repertoire with Gershwin’s 1935 Porgy and Bess, an opera with the most unique and now-fraught history. A range of forces converged around Porgy and Bess. In the late 19th Century, the great Czech composer Antonin Dvořák made a famous trip to the United States, even spending time a summer in the Czech-speaking settlement of Spillville, Iowa. Dvořák’s observations about American music have been famously reported ever since: that if America (as he called us) were ever develop an authentic national music, then American composers needed to study the music that was truly native to this land, the music of the American Indians and the spiritual African-American music that arose out of the trauma of centuries of enslavement.
George Gershwin took Dvořák’s advice. Having fallen in love with Dubose Heyward’s novel Porgy in the 1920s, he wanted to compose an authentic American folk opera. He traveled to the Carolinas to hear and experience Gullah Geechee culture firsthand. His first versions of Porgy and Bess extended well past four hours, and major cuts had to be made. The Metropolitan Opera at the time, the mid-1930s, had commissioned an opera by Louis Gruenberg on The Emperor Jones by Eugene O’Neill which starred the Met’s biggest baritone star, Lawrence Tippett, playing the title role in full blackface. It was into this world that Porgy and Bess emerged, and Gershwin’s decision to only ever have African-American artists in his opera turned out to be a double-edged sword.
No artist wants to be limited to one repertoire, much less one opera, so there was an understandable resistance to Porgy and Bess from the start. Duke Ellington thought the work automatically inauthentic and demeaning, and he disavowed its success even while admiring Gershwin’s score, an argument that may feel very recent, but this has been part of the opera’s history from the start. The first casts of Porgy and Bess also hit the brick wall of race relations in the United States: in many theaters in which they played on tour they would not have been allowed to buy a ticket. Then, suddenly, Gershwin prematurely died of a brain tumor in his mid-30s, with so much left to accomplish and Porgy and Bess never quite finding its way, not until Houston Grand Opera presented it in 1976 as Gershwin conceived it, not as a Broadway musical but as a fully scaled opera, through-composed with a large orchestra and chorus. It took 40 years, but Porgy and Bess finally emerged into a completely changed world from the one in which it had been composed.
Is Porgy and Bess now a repertory opera? It is a masterpiece, to be sure, but its performing forces must always be assembled specially for any production, so by its nature it is a festival work, of special and exalted status, but not a repertory work in the traditional sense. What has happened because of works like Porgy and Bess is a best possible outcome, one that would no doubt delight George Gershwin: it has made space for new works by a generation of 21st Century composers, and this is where we are now, with more American composers having premiered an opera than could ever have been imagined in Gershwin’s time.
During the postwar stereo/television/home entertainment boom in classical music, the interested public gravitated first towards personalities—Callas, Stern, Bernstein, Horowitz, Pavarotti, Sutherland, Horne, Cliburn—who in turn led their fans towards their favorite works. Reviewers at that time focused their evaluations on the music, even as the larger public’s interest was largely in the performers, so the opportunities for learning were everywhere, and a broad cultural knowledge – a recognition of many names – was quite common.
But the Internet age and the collapse of the recording industry in the 1990s has indisputably and irrevocably changed this paradigm: ever-younger musicians were presented to the public in the same way they always had been, yet the culture around them was so altered that their impact was lessened. There began a hopeless cycle in which only the new is newsworthy, yet it is impossible to become a star without a body of work, which requires multiple years of interest by the public, and in a saturated public world, no one can hold attention for long. Stardom has changed forever: when you were in your 20s, you could easily name 25 movie stars who were your age, many of whom you probably followed through your life and theirs. Reading this sentence right now, how many 25-year-old movie stars can you name? The same has happened in all fields.
Another major factor affecting the shrinking of the repertoire is a decline in education and general faith in humanities institutions. As this decline, so will interest in the arts. A disdain for expertise and distrust of science in a world that is increasingly dependent on scientific expertise is obviously a recipe for cultural disaster that may still be coming, if it hasn’t arrived already.
So, what is an arts company to do? There are things beyond our control, of course, but success in the future depends on filling in the education gaps to the extent that we can: provide as many opportunities as possible for families to attend. Work constantly to fight the elitist label which is a political one that has little to do little to do with the arts. And most importantly, provide as many chances as are humanly achievable to educate interested people in all of the arts. People are hungry to learn about opera, and with so much available on the internet it is very difficult to know where to get started.
Now, back to the that shrinking repertoire. Instead of bemoaning the decline of titles the public will recognize, or focusing on a time like 1924 which is not returning, perhaps we should recognize that we are asking the wrong question of repertoire. As stated: repertoire is destiny, there is no doubt about that, but instead of thinking solely of a core repertoire, of titles a large will automatically recognize and associate with opera, we should instead be thinking very differently. Firstly, there is already a newly-composed 21st Century repertoire of more than 300 operas, at least 25 of which are highly worthy of entering the repertoire, and this is an amazing reality. The culture will catch up to this before very long, and it is already happening at HGO, with this coming season’s performances of Breaking the Waves. The successful arts companies of the 21st Century will become communities of performance, education, and shared values about excellence and accomplishment – reflected in the repertoire.
Rest assured that the repertoire of the future is still going to include those marvelous old ghosts from 1924 but will, just like a century ago, include many more works of our own time that will happen now and very likely disappear when the artists of 2124 gaze back on us. This is fine – it is the cycle. Since the supporting elements that used to hold up a large amount of cultural knowledge have dissipated into the incessant din of the modern world, successful companies of the future have to fill in that gap. The repertoire shrinks, but the human spirit constantly expands. The dreams of so many people are dependent on the arts community, and community is the only place where repertoire has ever been expansive.