Good afternoon everyone:

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So how about this as a stretch for end-of-day-note topic: opera. Probably less a stretch and more a full stop for more of you than I can imagine.

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I had conversation a couple of weeks ago with my 22-year old daughter, who is deeply immersed in emerging, independent musical artists. Flipping through the “playlists” I use on my daily running route, she was incredulous that it was so opera-heavy. Actually, by Anna’s measure, any iPhone that contains more than two operatic entries is a serious abuse of an otherwise invaluable technology.  Needless to say, my choices far exceeded her threshold of acceptability.

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I tried to suggest that opera is a more complex and varied art form than is generally thought. “Grand Opera” like Verdi’s Aida or Puccini’s La Boehme is certainly of one type. But scroll back to the 1600’s and you get really interesting pre-modern, bare-bones compositions from composers like Monteverdi. Scroll to the present and you get minimalists like John Adams (e.g., Nixon on China) or Phillip Glass (e.g., Akhenaten) or indescribably diverse “avant-garde” composers who are exploding the subject matter, form, and venues of “opera” (try Joseph Keckler, a vocalist and visual artist who somehow straddles the world of opera and You Tube videography).

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I’m not a musical historian, so am not even remotely competent to go beyond any of this. But then I got a note this morning from our newest colleague, Adrian Ohmer, and I got sucked in all over again.

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Adrian called my attention to the Michigan Opera Theatre’s announcement this week of a new artistic director. A big deal in and of itself – Detroit has an enormously distinguished history in the world of opera, largely through the efforts of David DiChiera (the 2013 Kresge Eminent Artist), who founded MOT in 1971 and led it with transcendent vision and skill for the next 46 years.

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But it’s an even bigger deal because of the choice the Theatre made. Their new artistic director will be Yuval Sharon, who was characterized by the New York Times as “perhaps the most innovative opera director in the United States. It’s an unexpected move, if a coup for Detroit.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/09/arts/music/yuval-sharon-michigan-opera-theater.html).

Sharon has never directed at a major American opera house. But he has developed a reputation for staging imaginative, experimental productions outside those settings through his Los Angeles-based company, The Industry. In Hopscotch, audience members were driven to scenes sung around LA. In Invisible Cities, the opera unfolded in the middle of commuters in Union Station.

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Mr. Sharon will continue that tradition in Detroit – or, at least, he will launch his tenure at MOT that way. On October 17-20, the company will stage “Twilight: Gods,” an interpretation of the final opera of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle. It will be staged inside the Opera House’s parking garage. It is part radio broadcast, part drive-through, as the audience takes their vehicles through six scenes spread over a 65-minute condensation of the opera’s customary six hours.

Sharon is bringing in the world’s leading Wagnerian soprano, Christine Goerke, together with  a world-renown tenor and bass. Detroit’s Marsha Music will also perform new poetry that connects the mythological world of the Ring to the current circumstance in Detroit.

I think about [the production] in relation to COVID and Black Lives Matter and the call for all of these structures that are no longer serving us to be torn apart. This notion that Brunhilda is this powerful woman who is the one to dismantle that system so something new can arise, is an incredibly apt and inspiring story for right now.

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If all we get is light entertainment and pretty music — no attempt at engagement, no attempt at grappling, no attempt at trying transfigure everything that we’ve been experiencing into an aesthetic experience — then I think opera really is lost.

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Detroit has been such an important intersection for music in this country, and I would love to figure out how, as soon as you see a picture or even hear the music, you think, that’s opera in Detroit. It’ll be a process for me to learn what’s exciting for people here, what are people afraid of, and then craft a program that will really be in dialogue with them, and not like I’m coming to Detroit with my bag of tricks and deploying them one by one.

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I think about the people who have been here through all of these turbulent times and what histories they have to tell. That doesn’t have to mean it’s an opera about the uprising; it’s about retelling classic stories with an accent so that it speaks to this particular community. It would be great if they felt that opera represented their life in some way.

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Welcome to town Mr. Sharon.

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Rip