Is there a Right way to sing opera?

Is there a Right way to sing opera?Opera won’t widen its appeal by lurching to the left to not show photographer information --> to not show image description --> here with the id "dynamic-image-navigation" is used so that the innerHTML can be written to by the JS call below. -->Igor Toronyi-Lalic

There’s so much that Kim Jong Il would love about the Barbican. All thatdelicious rolling, rising, falling, state-funded concrete, the Gesamt-kunstthrust, the communal togetherness, the cheesecake. And the opera. Arecent spate of new works had enough anti-Americanism/imperialism/capitalismto warm the heart of the frostiest commie dictator.

In Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar we wailed and wailed and wiped ourcollectivised cheek for the failure of the communist takeover of Spainduring the Civil War. In Kaija Saariaho’s Passione de Simone welearnt that “democracy is another form of enslavement”. And in NewCrowned Hope, a season put together by the opera director Peter Sellars,we had Mozart the anarchist, a man so filled with antibourgeois,antimonarchist rage that he could barely contain his revolutionary fervour –but did.

Soon comes an opera about colonial misadventure and imperial misrule, PhilipGlass’s Waiting for the Barbarians – and you can bet therewill be orange jumpsuits.

But it’s not just the Barbican that’s offering up these stale political buns.Most opera houses around Britain, Europe and the US are too, even when itcomes to the repertory staples. Go to Erfurt Opera for the subtleties ofNazi-saluting American capitalists in a “reinterpretation” of Verdi’s UnBallo in Maschera that featured 35 extras wearing nothing but MickeyMouse masks to represent what the director Johann Kresnik calls the “victimsof capitalism”. Go to English National Opera for Soviet-stylerevisionism; in its latest production of La Clemenza di Tito, aboutthe clemency and final triumph of the Emperor Titus, he is deposed. Opera isseeing red, and rewriting history.

Part of the reason for this is rather prosaic: the preponderance of left-wingcomposers. Another part of it can be put down to a more general artistictrend towards an engagement with politics. Opera can’t escape that. But theprecarious connection between opera and public funding lends anotherdimension to this peculiar pattern.

Might opera have been pursuing a left-wing agenda to gain state Browniepoints? To reveal just how little stuffiness, elitism or conservatism it nowexudes? The composer James MacMillan thinks so. “Our political mastershector the opera world on being more socially relevant and inclusive,” hesays. “And those who run and commission opera feel bullied into a kind ofsocial engineering project where they have to ‘access’ ‘ordinary’ people. Todo this, it is implied, the dominant leftist politics of the day have to bevisibly incorporated.”

The implication is that the more to the left you go, the less elitist you are.And the less elitist you are, the more street cred you get. The more streetcred you get the more crowds you get in. And the more crowds you get in themore the state loves you. That’s the theory, anyway.

The reality is that as operas try to be more “relevant” they becomeexaggerated. Berate the monarchy, America and imperialism loudly enough andthe people will think you are one of them. They might. They might also dieof boredom. The big problem is that many of the radical messages of thesemiddle-aged composers are as old as the composers themselves. Even inotherwise rather brilliant works such as John Adams’s Dr Atomicthere is an embarrassingly old-fashioned hippyish residue.

The real danger with a fetishisation of left-wing ideas is that it will leadto an ostracism of those who have different opinions. According toMacMillan, this is already happening in Europe. Composers who don’t fit intothe prevailing political mould can be cold-shouldered and those with strongreligious convictions are often deliberately ignored. The Austrian composerKurt Schwertsik, a Scientologist, has a de facto ban on his work in Germany.“Steve Reich, too, has faced the antiSemitic hostility of the liberal Leftbecause of works such as Tehillim and The Cave,” MacMillansays.

None of this sort of behaviour has yet taken hold at the Barbican, whose headof music, Robert van Leer, says the political views of a composer are alwayssecondary, “neither a requirement nor a deterrent”.

As for the various operas at the Barbican, the composers were chosen, he says,because they had a relationship with the Barbican, not because of thesubject matter of their work. “I strive after voices that are succinct,focused and excellent,” he says. “If they have a political aspect to theirwork which is true and honest, then so be it.”

For MacMillan, however, pressure from the Government will necessarilyencourage more left-wing opera. “The former culture secretary, Tessa Jowell,once said that artists should tackle the ‘poverty of aspiration’. But whatthen happens to the search for truth and beauty? That probably soundssuspiciously too religious for some.”