Conference Agenda

The so-called renaissance of American opera that began in the 1980s has elicited significant attention in recent years. Countering a pervasive discourse around operatic obsolescence (Abbate and Parker 2015, Wiebe 2009, Žižek and Dolar 2002), musicologists have looked to operas by Glass, Adams, and others for evidence of ongoing modernist challenges to the genre (Gutkin 2014, Metcalf 2017) as well as its contemporary political and social valences (Ebright 2019, Fink 2005, Renihan 2020). These concerns have extended into the present, with scholars giving particular attention to operatic experimentation in non-traditional spaces, often by non-traditional companies (Kreuzer 2021, Steigerwald Ille 2021). Whereas most scholarship concentrates on single operas, this panel explores the social, economic, and artistic conditions and conventions that underlie a much broader swath of operatic practice in the United States. For every opera that breaks new aesthetic ground (or attempts to), several more conform readily to established musical and dramaturgical conventions.

The opening paper chronicles the NEA’s support of opera in the 1970s, which catalyzed the ensuing renaissance. The early history of the Endowment’s Opera-Musical Theater Program reveals the debates and discourses that were circulating at a national level as American opera coalesced into an art world that remains recognizable in the present. By contrast, the subsequent papers explore contemporary operatic practices from a regional lens, examining how institutions and the people who comprise them shape opera at the levels of genre and convention. The second paper turns to the landscape of contemporary American regional companies and asks how new work is positioned within programming and discourses dominated by a historical canon. The popularity of composers like Heggie and Catán is often used to counter the charge of operatic death, but their works are nonetheless in uneasy dialogue with older repertories. The final paper reframes the programming choices of these regional opera companies by considering the ecosystem of reproduction at the heart of contemporary U.S. opera. By examining the interplay between large-scale institutional convention and the repetitive labor of performers, this paper draws out tensions inherent in contemporary opera’s systems of circulation and (re)performance.

In the late 1970s, a seemingly simple question roiled the National Endowment for the Arts: what is opera? For many American opera practitioners, the NEA’s traditional answer—a predominantly musical art form, inherited from Europe, which synthesized drama, visual arts, and dance—no longer sufficed. NEA contributory experts, including director Hal Prince, impresario David Gockley, and composer Carlisle Floyd, instead argued that opera was “a form unto itself.” In a 1976 proposal to liberate opera from the NEA’s Music Program via the formation of an autonomous Endowment unit, opera representatives made a then-controversial claim: opera “is at least as much theater as it is music.” And in the postwar U.S., it had begun to transform into something new.

The subsequent creation of the Endowment’s Opera-Musical Theater Program (OMT) in 1978 marked a historical watershed for American opera, one that I follow along a documentary trail of memos, meeting minutes, and letters held at the National Archives. Its significance, I argue, was both social and aesthetic (Born 2010, 2011). OMT’s formation reveals that American opera was coalescing into an art world (Becker 1982), as a growing U.S. network of opera companies and service organizations developed collective aims, discourses, and methods. These played out in Endowment debates over the genre, and the reframing of opera as one form of “music theater” among many reflects the internal and external pressures that were shaping the field aesthetically. Reform-minded directors and producers like Frank Corsaro and Sarah Caldwell advocated for opera as theater; musicals by Stephen Sondheim and others edged ever closer to opera.

Amid the NEA’s pivot toward non-institutionalized American artists in the mid-1970s (Uy 2020), the U.S. opera field fortified its cultural position by redefining opera as a capacious, distinctly American, and evolving art form that encompasses multiple genres of music theater. Theory begat praxis, as OMT’s support of “New American Works” catalyzed the following decade’s operatic renaissance (Metcalf 2017). This historical episode ultimately demonstrates the means and mechanisms by which art worlds emerge and transform, as individuals and institutions navigate unsettled networks of activity, aesthetics, and artworks.

One common rejoinder to charges of opera’s death is to point to the prolific and sustained production of new opera in American regional opera houses, particularly the works of composers like Jake Heggie, Daniel Catán, Libby Larsen, Mark Adamo, and Kevin Puts. This repertory, typified by operas like Dead Man Walking and Little Women, has indeed enjoyed a prominent presence in the U.S. as well as Canada, one defined not by breaks with operatic pasts but rather its assimilation of them in the name of canonicity and self-proclaimed accessibility. In this paper, I consider this repertory in the structural context of American regional opera.

First, I will argue that a “new American traditionalism” can be considered a coherent repertory. The musical style, performance histories, promotional strategies, and reception of these works are defined by a tonal and highly melodic musical style; self-proclaimed accessibility (realized with various strategies); regional circulation; and self-conscious historicity. These operas’ musical style and the discourses around them frequently create a narrative of continuity with canonical opera and its lingering cultural prestige. They also promise a typically middlebrow approachability that presumes that their audiences gravitate toward melodic, tonal scores and “relatable” characters.

I then examine two works to consider what they have to say about opera itself. Both Daniel Catán’s Florencia en el Amazonas and Jake Heggie’s Great Scott feature main characters who are divas. Heggie’s work features elaborate parodies of operatic cultures that both question and reify operatic ritual, locating opera’s appeal in its obsessive camp excess but frequently eliding the production mechanisms and labor that go into its creation. As Christopher Weimer has explored, Florencia’s titular diva, on the other hand, rejects opera itself as an overly Eurocentric culture. Yet Florencia the opera has been leveraged by American opera houses as a diversity initiative even as critics have called its score overly derivative of European traditions. In neither work is opera quite dead, nor is it fully alive, but rather suspended in the historicity of its environment.

While the first performance of a new opera is a cause for celebration, often it is the performances in the months and years after the premiere that cement that work’s standing within the repertory. At the same time, the institutional standardization necessary for the successful economic circulation of a new opera or production can limit the creativity of those involved. Scholars have given attention to the role of institutional structures in producing new opera (Metcalf 2017, Ebright 2017) as well as the rise of transnational schools of contemporary opera libretti (Stebbins 2020). To date, however, the relationship between the economic intricacies of production—that is, the institutional details that govern a work’s circulation within the twenty-first century opera industry—and operatic convention has been overlooked.

This paper examines the ways operatic institutions in the United States rely upon generic repetition, rather than creating space for more fluid representations. I argue that the circulation of a production should be considered as yet another of opera’s “systems” (Petrobelli 1994), one with the power to shape many other elements of operatic convention. I compare two categories of “repeat” performance: co-productions and repeat “experimental” performances. The first category, co-productions (Kosky, Andrade, and Barritt’s Die Zauberflöte and Sharon’s The Valkyries), highlights how closed institutional systems standardize performance down to the smallest details of production. By contrast, repeat experimental performances, such as the 2021 Detroit Opera staging of Ragnar Kjartansson’s conceptual opera, Bliss (also directed by Sharon), offer different challenges on levels of reproducibility and thus, scale. The experimental structure of Bliss thematized the notion of repetition itself through twelve hours of performance. Unexpectedly, performers perceived this structure as creatively liberating rather than redundant.

Co-productions conceal the labor of the performer’s repetitive body and experiments like Bliss spectacularize it; both types of performance reveal the tension between experimentation and repetition at the heart of a U.S. operatic enterprise dependent mainly upon the actions of institutional networks. At the same time, identifying such limitations—and connecting them to the conventions of historical operatic performance—offers illuminating possibilities about the means of experimentation within such a system.