The Anti-Opera exists on the model of the Anti-Prom. Those who seek out an Anti-Opera or Anti-Prom are not against Operas or Proms: rather, they are against how the mainstream versions are being done by the institutions that control them.
For too long, the Santa Fe Opera, as well as other famous opera houses, have been anti-opera in the other sense — that of being opposed to the very operas they present. This includes the ways that they modernize shows that were never meant to be modern, in ways that don’t enhance the storytelling or make the material more accessible to audiences. All they achieve is the snooty self-satisfaction of displaying how much more clever they are than the “dumb old shows” they’re performing, as by for instance resetting an opera that takes place in the Trojan War into the American Civil War. Why? For the enhanced relevance? How old do you have to be for that to seem more modern and relevant — 200 years? Why would an opera about the Trojan War even need to be modern and relevant, when it certainly wasn’t to the composers and librettists of the opera who were working thousands of years after the fact? Even worse is when not just settings are changed, but actual alterations are made to the librettos in the name of “modern audiences” who somehow are assumed to desire to see a 200 year old opera but also not to want to see something old.
In effect, the Anti-Opera is anti-anti-opera. We believe that operas are wonderful just as they are and as they were meant to be. It is natural that every staging will have differences from past versions, as each new director, new costumer, new singer, new performance space will compel a different take on the material, but there should not be a deliberate, thoughtless aim to alter the material just for the sake of alteration rather than actual enhancement of the audience experience. This is worse than that time a guy named Bowdler revised the works of Shakespeare and gave us all a new word — at least he had a reason for it (to make a family-friendly edition of Shakespeare.)
Indeed, for over a century the theatre has been in decline. People trying to solve this problem always seem to assume that the answer is in offering more “innovative” shows or more “relevant” subjects. They lose sight of the fact that the production is not the key part of what makes theatre theatre, but rather the audience.
- The audience is the most important part of any theatrical show. In theory, a show that consists of nothing but a blank stage might be done, provided that the audience is willing to sit through it; but if a show of any type is performed lacking the audience, it’s not a show.
- Therefore, the audience is due more consideration when working in a theatrical medium than in other artforms like painting, film or photography, where it is not necessary to have an audience for the work to exist as a complete work.
- It is acknowledged that Contemporary Art doesn’t believe in pleasing an audience. But if to make Contemporary Art is the intention, why not make an actual piece of Contemporary Art instead of butchering an old theatre piece to force its conformity to newfangled principals it wasn’t meant for?
- The opera house is not a gallery where an arteest gets to ride on the viewer’s own “interpretation” of an original work: these are known theatrical shows, that have specific messages to convey. People are coming to see Mozart’s message, Puccini’s message, Wagner’s message, not some hacky art school grad’s message, no matter how many awards he got in New York.
- Opera was not created to be new. Opera was formed by a few Italians, circa 1590, to display what ancient Greek theatre had been (to the best of their understanding.) Its purpose was always intended to be “so old it’s new.” It has evolved with time — Monteverdi is not Mozart, Mozart is not Puccini — yet almost all of the standard repertoire was designed to give the audience it was composed for a familiar, well-loved story. The Marriage of Figaro was the most successful play of the 18th century before it was turned into an opera; La Traviata began as a famous novel by Alexandre Dumas, fils; Samson and Delilah is a story from the Bible. The audiences arrived with many preexisting expectations about what they’d be seeing, and this wasn’t regarded as a bad thing — it was a draw.
- Opera must be rescued from those who seek to modernize it not out of a love for the original work but out of contempt for its “dated” stories and “trivial” subjects (especially when they merely replace it with something that will age just as horribly and which has nothing to more to say to an audience than “Why did you spend your money on this crap?”) It becomes the duty of the audience to rise up and undertake this task.
- The goal of the Anti-Opera is therefore to enhance audience participation in the fandom of opera.
Fans have fandom: fanfiction, fan art, merchandise, whole theme parks built around the property they love. Harry Potter fans buy little figures of Harry Potter, not merch with the Warner Bros. logo. But Santa Fe Opera is so full of itself that it won’t even sell items from the gift shop with anything but its own logo on it. But, as we’ve established, opera houses already don’t care about their operas or their audiences, so it’s not surprising that they care only about selling themselves.
If you are a fan of The Santa Fe Opera then by all means, give it the fangirl treatment and get a tattoo of its logo on your foot. But if you actually like operas as individual works that you can do Rule 34 about, then the Anti-Opera looks to fill your jones.
The Anti-Opera emphasizes audience participation and crowd-pleasing events, for there is no theatre without an audience and no such thing as “classic operas” without fans of those works to turn them into classics. The audience is the theatre.