Ideas tumble out and collide in Yuval Sharon's "A New Philosophy of Opera" (Liveright). The out American director, deemed a maverick by many, steps off stage to deliver his manifesto about keeping putatively imperiled opera alive.
There's no doubting the deep personal experience underlying his observations, which include frequent reflections on opera's history, marshaling evidence to demonstrate what has and has not worked in the development of this most exotic —and, Sharon argues, collaborative— form of both art and entertainment. He offers his analyses and surprisingly few prescriptions as a prolegomena for the future of an art that has, over five centuries, been dying, or said to be.
His primary point is that the hope for the survival of opera, and its growth and development as a mixed-arts form, depends on its liberation from the tyrannies of the proscenium. Big opera house "traditions" inevitably lead to the calcification of underlying artistic principles and a culture, such as it can be called that, of deadening.
Galvanizing audiences
This is not, strictly speaking, new real estate. Over time, observers of opera, and particularly those who are also participants in the creative project, have diagnosed the illness at the leaky heart of the art form and proposed treatments if not cures. Sharon's predecessors have gone so far as to counsel that it's past time to decommission big opera houses, since they're a necessary breeding ground for the more infectious maladies. Down with those houses of horror, those pesky mavericks insist.
The thing is, Sharon's bold proposals for ending the supremacy of the big houses do not cancel out the things those houses do to galvanize audiences and make for big tickets. Sharon has had to breathe a little of his own exhaust, what with his big projects of the imaginable future being Wagner at the Metropolitan Opera, as museum-like an arts organization as exists in the wide world of opera. He'll be directing the Met's "Tristan und Isolde" this season and the forthcoming complete Wagner "Ring" over the following seasons.
So much for the cliché that opera is expiring in the unyielding grip of the "elites," an allegation that discovers those elites both in the audience members who can afford this most outlandish of entertainments and the repertory companies whose survival depends on feeding those tastes for repetition and the cult of stardom. No one, least of all Sharon, will be campaigning for the razing of big opera houses anytime soon.
Telling a new story
Sharon locates the "problem," such as it can be expressed in the singular, in the overweening power of narrative, the more so in a repertory in which storylines are famously implausible when not outright risible. His proposed remedy is to "use the narrative as needed and cast it off as quickly as possible to explore complexities and paradoxes as only opera can."
The production with which he has been most tagged to date is the "La Bohème" he staged in 2022 for Detroit Opera, where he is artistic director. Called "the backwards Bohème" it presented the four acts in reverse order. Clever as that idea may seem pre-production, it's hard to imagine any audience members who are not steeped in the old forward-marching "Bohème" appreciating the novelty.
When I first heard of it, I imagined it not as a shuffling of the acts but as a performance of the score of the warhorse exactly in reverse, that is, last notes to first, which somehow seemed more enticing. Why not a palindromic "Bohème," played straight and then in reverse, except that the doubling of the Puccini score would make for an impossibly long night in the theater?
Easier to appreciate and, if you're one of the artists, practice is Sharon's overriding concern that opera find its audience where that audience is or with education might be. Sharon proposes performing operas, particularly ones that have been composed expressly for it, in unusual locales or even and even non-art spaces, such as parking garages. He himself helmed a production that took the work of a half-dozen composers, assigned each to a limousine, and performed the result in syncopation and broadcast.
Although the word "Philosophy" in the title seems a bit insistent (and again suggests that elites are somehow involved), Sharon's book is deeply thoughtful and proposes changes along the lines of clearly defined principles. Sharon knows of what he speaks. The illustrations throughout the book attest to the fact that his productions do not look like the previous ones.
How to solve a problem like Carmen
Sharon's book is the kind that has indices, and I could not resist checking his thoughts about Georges Bizet's "Carmen," one of the repertory's three undisputed warhorses and seat-fillers. Almost dutifully, Sharon comments on the ways "Carmen" productions in America all look pretty much alike.
"The title character will likely wear a frisky red dress, her matador lover will carry a red cape, and the incongruity of French music within an 'authentic' Spanish setting will be shrugged off... Production in this way becomes reduced to image, most often the original image connected to the first performances."
When San Francisco Opera's revival of out lesbian director Francesca Zambello's "Carmen" hits the boards on November 13, audiences will have some new tools to compare those goings-on to actual "first performances."
The enterprising Palazzetto Bru Zane has just released a video of a live performance of "Carmen" as it first hit the stage at Paris' Opéra-Comique. It's in the newish "revival tradition" that gave us the premiere of Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" as it was first played and danced, and, closer to home, SF Opera's production of Strauss' "Der Rosenkavalier" that mimicked the Vienna premiere as closely as possible.
There's plenty of documentation of what can be learned about the 1875 "Carmen" premiere, but what literally paints the picture is the fully staged performance in sets, costumes, and musical conventions true to the historical record. What at first seems antique quickly becomes compelling as the singers find real characters to "imitate" in front of painted backdrop sets of uncommon beauty and interest.
The Carmen, Deepa Johnny, is, by the standards of our day, restrained in her depiction of the title character not as a whore or femme fatale but as a woman of a social status higher than her counterparts led to her tragic death by the opera's true crazy, Don José.
Its pedigree notwithstanding, it's not a performance for the ages, but it's tirelessly engaging and anchored in the astonishing performance of Stanislas de Barberyac's José. It's as fine an example of the capture of vocal writing for French tenor as we have, and the action swirls more around him than Johnny, whose Carmen proposes "attitude" more than scenery-ripping alongside a patrician idea couture and, generally, female beauty.
Its point is less to give modern audiences the "authentic" first staged "Carmen" than a way to appraise how the producers' and actor's input on Bizet's "original" have determined its look over the centuries. The details are many, scrupulously documented by the people at Bru Zane, but the standout are the infamous "Guiraud recitatives," composed expressly for the Opéra-Comique at the theater director's wish by Ernest Guiraud to supplant the spoken dialogue. They turn out to be as leaden as reputed (though they survived through Maria Callas' otherwise legendary 1964 recording of the perturbed gypsy and beyond).
Attention has turned to Bizet's completed score as submitted, before the anachronisms and accretions insinuated themselves into it, and may have contributed to Bizet's deathbed despair over what he thought to be opera's onstage flop. For that version, look no farther than the René Jacobs-led, semi-staged "1874 Carmen" recorded live at Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie. It abounds in riches today's performers mine for improvements in the hidebound old girl.
With the exception of the José, the singers are first rate (Gaëlle Arquez's vivid, spitfire Carmen is spared a trip to the low life) and mostly francophone, and Jacob's conducting is idiomatic and not the least eccentric. It's a "Carmen" to believe in if not wholly to be preferred. It's just the best shot we've got at hearing the extraordinary opera Bizet had in mind.
Yuval Sharon, 'A New Philosophy of Opera,' Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, 305 pp., $29.99. www.wwnorton.com
Georges Bizet, 'Carmen,' Opéra de Rouden, Romain Gilbert, director, Glen Glassberg, conductor, DVD, Palazzetto Bru Zane, www.bru-zane.com
San Francisco Opera performs 'Carmen' Nov. 13-Dec. 1 at the War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Ave. www.sfopera.com
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