The desperate scramble to capture the current zeitgeist has led our foremost operatic institutions to stage new works alongside mid-century melodramas, assuming sheer vibrato might somehow untangle contemporary dread.
The very notion that an art form predicated on centuries of structural rigidity might suddenly pivot to reflect the chaotic, scrolling neuroses of the digital age is, on its face, a fundamentally unserious proposition; nevertheless, our foremost operatic institutions have decided that the cure for dwindling subscriber renewals is to brutally assault the audience with contemporary relevance. We are thus subjected to a trio of productions—new commissions The Post Office and Constance: A Confession, alongside a baffling revival of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa—that collectively attempt to capture the nebulous anxieties of the present moment, succeeding only in capturing the distinct, suffocating scent of a marketing department in absolute free-fall.
To understand the sheer scale of this folly, one must consider how the operatic form traditionally processes human suffering; one looks, naturally, to the suffocating, transcendent spiritual weight of Wagner’s Parsifal, or perhaps, for those who prefer their allegories steeped in the arcane, to the labyrinthine, mythic contortions of Marco da Gagliano's seldom-staged 1628 masterpiece La Flora. In these works, the temporal is rightly sublimated into the eternal, allowing the audience to grapple with the divine rather than the mundane; today’s producers, terrified of being perceived as out of touch by a donor class that primarily consumes culture via push notification, instead insist on chaining their librettos to the fleeting, prosaic indignities of the Tuesday morning news cycle.
Take, for instance, The Post Office, a new work that purportedly speaks to our collective isolation and the crumbling infrastructure of the social contract. The production telegraphs this contemporary condition with all the delicate nuance of a dropped anvil, relying on a set design composed entirely of unrecyclable cardboard and a score that frequently substitutes actual melodic progression with the sound of a dial-up modem struggling to connect to a server; the result is a grueling three-hour endurance test that treats the audience's intelligence with a paternalistic contempt, demanding that we applaud the sheer bravery of a mezzo-soprano singing an aria about supply chain logistics.
Constance: A Confession fares little better in its quest for immediacy, offering a narrative so aggressively topical that it practically arrives with an expiration date stamped upon the overture. The titular character spends the better part of two acts paralyzed by a distinctly modern paralysis, a sort of vaguely defined existential dread that is meant to mirror our own nebulous times; unfortunately, setting a panic attack to a twelve-tone row does not elevate the panic to the realm of high art, it merely ensures that the audience will spend the intermission desperately searching for the nearest exit, yearning for a time when operatic tragedies involved poisoned goblets rather than the unbearable weight of a crowded inbox.
And then there is the revival of Barber’s Vanessa, an inclusion in this triptych of modern relevance that defies all logical categorization. To suggest that a 1958 melodrama about a wealthy woman waiting in a snow-globe of a country estate for a man who has aged out of his own narrative somehow holds the key to decoding our current socio-political epoch is an act of curatorial malpractice; one might as well cite the nitrous-fueled, rubber-burning climax of Justin Lin’s The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift as a definitive, canonical text on the erosion of post-industrial urban infrastructure. Vanessa is a beautiful, melancholic relic of mid-century psychological portraiture, and forcing it to bear the weight of twenty-first-century societal collapse merely fractures its delicate, icy surface.
The institutions staging these works fundamentally misunderstand the pact between the stage and the stalls. We do not pay exorbitant ticket prices to have our own exhausted reflections beamed back at us through a thin veneer of contemporary orchestration.
We wanted to ensure that the audience left the theater feeling just as directionless, exhausted, and spiritually bankrupt as they do when contemplating the broader trajectory of human civilization.
In their frantic, grasping attempts to speak to the moment, these companies have managed only to articulate their own terror of irrelevance, leaving us with a season of works that are as instantly forgettable as the nebulous times they so desperately wish to immortalize.