Helen Todd as Aunt Lydia
in the Minnesota Opera production of Poul Ruders’
The Handmaid’s Tale. |
Curtain Call
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Opera at Amherst
So, what turned the state of opera around again? Scorca credits new trends in
opera composition, a focus on more modern themes and, interestingly, another
new technology: the Internet.
Today’s composers are eager to connect with their audience. “If you
are writing music that only a musicologist can understand and appreciate,” Scorca
says, “then your audience is necessarily limited.” In the past 20
years, opera composition has seen a return to narrative and musical themes that,
if not simple, are more easily understood by audiences than are the nuances of
mid-century music. Also, the past 15 years have witnessed a tremendous growth
in the number of new works. But these new works don’t necessarily focus
on the same themes that define the operas of the 19th century. Dead Man Walking played
at the New York City Opera last fall; Dangerous Liaisons premiered at the San
Francisco Opera in 1994; an opera based on playwright Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge debuted
at Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1999. “A
lot of these new works are based on American characters or American literature
or
historical events in the country,” Scorca says. “So there’s
a link between the subject matter of these new operas and popular culture, the
modern American story.”
Scorca also attributes the recent resurgence of interest in opera to the modern
expectation of a multimedia performance. “Opera is a multimedia art form
in a multimedia world,” he says. “People think of multimedia as a
fairly recent phenomenon; opera is a form of multimedia entertainment that was
invented in 1597. The rest of the world has just caught up.” He explained
that audiences—most notably younger audiences—have come to expect
the fusing of words, music, movement and images. “Those basic elements
describe opera as much as they describe a music video,” he says. “There
is a comfort with the aesthetic complexity of our art forms among young people
who have grown up with multimedia arts and entertainment. Also, many of the more
popular entertainment forms deal with larger-than-life emotions: the archetypical
terms of love, desire, disappointment and jealousy—the terms of opera.
As I look at the connections between popular culture and opera, I see a lot of
points of reference.”
Learning from the problems of the past, Opera America has turned competing media
to its advantage, using the Internet to help opera reach broader and deeper audiences.
Scorca stresses that the Internet—a communications platform that transmits
words, sound and images—complements opera beautifully. “If we’re
not thinking about how to harness this technology, we’ll be left behind
by new art forms and new entertainment forms that will replace us,” he
says.
One of the most effective ways to harness the technology is through education.
Opera America’s research suggests that many people who don’t attend
operas would, if they knew more about it. Also, frequent opera attendees indicated
that they would enjoy the opera more if they had a deeper understanding of the
art form’s complex layers. "Part of the responsibility of Opera America
is to think of a way to keep an art form that has such a transformational power
accessible to people who can benefit from the richness it has to offer,” Scorca
says. To that end, Opera America has set up a distance-learning program. Developed
experimentally with Boston Lyric Opera and nationally with a number of other
opera companies, the program began to offer courses on opera through its Opera
World website, www.operaworld.com, in the spring of 2002. When Scorca tried to
think of the proper faculty to teach an online distance-learning course, two
of his friends from Amherst, Roger Pines ’79 and David Jackson ’80,
immediately came to mind.
"Roger Pines has forgotten more about opera than I will ever know,” Scorca
says glowingly of his colleague, who is the editorial dramaturge at Lyric Opera
of Chicago and who taught the first distance-learning course, on Giuseppe Verdi. “Roger’s
just brilliant, and he does extraordinary work with Lyric Opera of Chicago. He’s
also generous of spirit and just abundantly qualified to teach anybody anything
about opera. David Jackson taught our Russian opera course; he’s one of
my best friends since Amherst. His career as a conductor is developing, and he’s
just an absolute expert in Russian opera and Russian arts and literature. When
we wanted to do a course on Russian opera, he was the perfect person to go to.”
"It’s fascinating,” Scorca says, “because the Internet
is borderless. Usually when people take one of our distance-learning courses,
only about half the students are from the city where the course is linked. The
other half are from anywhere around the world; it’s just been remarkable
how diverse the enrollment is in each one of our classes.”
Bringing the joy of opera to the widest possible audience is really at the heart
of Scorca’s work, not only because it will help opera companies, but because
it makes a real difference in people’s lives. “We know from our research,” Scorca
says, “that the arts help to inspire personal creativity in individuals,
connect individuals to their community and foster cross-cultural understanding.
We know economically that the arts are an important engine for downtown vitality
and redevelopment in some cities. So the discussion can revolve around two points:
the intrinsic value of the arts as a cultural expression and the instrumental
value of the arts in a community. Many times, arts organizations are measured
in these sorts of secondary categories of value. For example, ‘Arts organizations
are important to this town because they help attract businesses, and build downtown
restaurants; arts organizations do great programs at the area schools.’ We’re
happy that’s true, and we believe in those programs. But the central reason
we do what we do is because we believe that the arts are transformative, that
the arts can inspire people.”
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Photo: Michael Daniel
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