The View from Here
The time-honored philosopher Lao Tzu famously said, “Those with knowledge don’t predict; those who predict have no knowledge.” But…since I’ve been asked to contemplate the future of opera, here I go, ignoring Lao Tzu’s sage advice.
As with everything, there will be good news and less-good news. The good news right now, and it couldn’t be better, is that there are more great singers today than any one company could possibly present in a single season. The less-good news: you are unlikely to know who most of these singers are, because the world simply doesn’t do fame in the way it once did. But the talent, thrillingly, is through the roof.
More good news: there are more composers alive right now who have heard a performance of one of their own operas than at any time since the late 19th century. Since the health of an art is best measured in how much of it is new, and as there have been more than 300 new operas in the 21st century, most of them premiered in the United States, this is excellent news. It must be felt that opera, which began as a remnant of Italian imperial rule, is now an American art.
Given these realities, the future of opera’s creation will depend on a magic combination of Americanphilanthropy and commitment to arts education, but we are also entering Asia’s operatic era, long overdue. Within the huge cultural diaspora of Asia’s approximately 48 countries, many now place huge educational emphasis on music and all of the arts, and we are seeing the results of that now. Many of these artists will seek training in the United States, and Asian artists are most certainly going to dominate the world’s stages in the coming decades.
A new reality, one that needs constant realignment by artistic leaders, is that we’ve largely accepted a broad cultural narrative of decline, and this has huge implications: a culture that can’t tell real accomplishment from notoriety is always going to be teetering. This isn’t only in the arts, but across a variety of sectors: my generation grew up watching humans walk on a desolate moon that is 238,000 miles away, and every day, our nearby NASA services and talks to an international space station that is in permanent orbit 250 miles over our heads. Yet we’re somehow meant to be impressed by private rockets going into lowaltitude orbit for a few minutes? Meh—that is accepting a narrative of decline, and the arts do not have the luxury of indulging in that.
OPERA, WHICH BEGAN AS A REMNANT OF ITALIAN IMPERIAL RULE, IS NOW AN AMERICAN ART."
When I began at HGO 27 years ago, we thought cell phones, internet, and voicemail were major technological advances. So, the recent dizzying technologies of Artificial Intelligence, which weren’t even a gleam in our eye a few years ago, are likely to have huge implications for all live performances. The first aspects we will notice will probably be pre-performance: ticket-buying, parking, and being ushered to your seat. Your preperformance lecture, which I’ve so loved delivering in recent years, will probably soon be produced by AI, delivered to you long before you arrive.
We are not far from an original opera conceived and composed by an artificial composer. Similarly, we will probably soon be hearing a “new” Puccini opera on the Molnar play Liliom, to give just one of thousands of potential examples—this is the play that became Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, which Puccini wanted to compose but was refused by the playwright. Within a few hours of entering your desires into an app you’ve purchased at considerable expense, the Puccini opera could appear on your computer, available for you to request adjustments to make it sound more like Tosca and less like Madame Butterfly. What AI might mean for the future of the performing arts, and for every deeply held tenet for which we exist, is still anyone’s guess. In the right creative human hands, Artificial Intelligence could be beautiful and inspiring, but in the clasp of greedy despots, AI could crush all creativity and much else along with it. One thing it won’t be is benign.
This is hardly prescient of me because we already know it, but it still must be noted in any contemplation of the future: the largest opera companies and orchestras, through no malevolence of anyone, are each facing major reckonings of adjustment to a set of cultural vagaries that can’t be fully predicted. The mid-sized arts companies of deep purpose, committed to performing at a very high level, will not only survive, they will prosper, because they are filling a deep human need.
But no company can survive solely on its past, or on its marketing slogans, or simply on its words. Great opera has a self-proving greatness, and this is true from Mozart right up to the unknown composer born this year who will conjure something we never imagined. Great art is very close to the experience of a sunset or gazing at the Grand Canyon. In the moment of artistic or spiritual experience (sorry/not sorry that I cannot separate them), we don’t care what precise climatic conditions created the sunset, nor if the canyon is a million or a billion years old. (Parts of the canyon are both!) What we care about in the moment is the experience itself, and those with whom we are privileged to share it. This remains the greatest news of all for the future.