And Now for Some More Ranting

Back in June, in his SFCV news column, It's News to Me, Janos Gereben quoted David Gockley rather extensively on new operas and why there are more of them now. (You'll have to scroll down at the link to the item I'm talking about.)

I gotta say, June was a great month for catching folks at San Francisco Opera saying this kind of thing, and I also gotta say, I'm surprised at David Gockley, whom I consider to be extremely smart and knowledgable, not to mention, musically sophisticated.

There is a lot to argue with in what he says. I'm going to copy over most of the article. If it's something Janos wrote, I have prefaced it with JG. If it's a Gockley quotation, it's indented. My own comments I will preface with [LH].

[JG] Writing in the summer season's program, Gockley says that against heavy odds for producing new works, there has been a resurgence, and he quotes OPERA America statistics comparing the 1960s and '70s with the past 10 years. Why the change?

I trace this resurgence to one phenomenon: the ultimate failure of "serialism" and its atonal offshoots as music that works in the opera house. The Second Viennese School, led by Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, lent great genius and prestige to this movement, and it became the music of academia throughout most of the 20th century. But it remained a connoisseur’s delicacy, resisted by large-audience art forms like symphony and opera, especially the latter and particularly in the United States.

[LH: Well, he's wrong about the music of academia. You need to look for an article in Musical Quarterly by Joseph Straus, called "The Myth of Serial 'Tyranny'" for a good rebuttal. But which academia does he mean, in which countries? In which regions of the United States, even? Which composers is he talking about? You can find plenty of nonserialist music composed throughout the whole century, from composers as diverse as Shapero, Martinu, Britten, and Shostakovich and many, many, more.]

[JG] The path from what he calls the failure of serialism to more accessible works, Gockley says, was paved by Philip Glass, "whom I credit as being the Moses that led composers out of the wilderness of this so-called 'modernism.' He developed his own voice and refused to be a prisoner to academic imperatives." (Gockley has commissioned and produced several operas by Glass, including Appomattox in San Francisco.)

[LH: See the above, about composers who, well before Glass, somehow weren't writing music of the Second Viennese School.]

[JG}Led by Glass and fellow minimalists Steve Reich, John Adams, Meredith Monk, Michael Torke, and Michael Nyman, and inspired by opera composers such as Carlisle Floyd and Douglas Moore, Gockley posits, such "neo-melodists" emerged as Jake Heggie, Ricky Ian Gordon, Mark Adamo, Stewart Wallace, and Chris Theofanidis:

Suddenly, all felt liberated to use their own musical voices. Because their work was better accepted, they were kept busy writing new pieces. They got better at what they did. They built happy relationships with librettists and producers. Glass has 28 operas under his belt, Floyd 12, Heggie five, and Adams eight. There is nothing like experience to improve a composer’s craft, including having the right to fail and being given other chances. 

Opera companies cannot continue rehashing the past. New works refresh the opera-going experience and broaden audiences. Of course, the operas must be successful. Fortunately, there is ample evidence that this is happening and will happen more and more as time goes on.

[LH: Floyd and Moore are among the composers who, long before Glass, were writing nonserial music.]

You really ought to read Nicola Luisotti's remarks from around the same period, about how awful serialist is - and about his own influence on the embarrassing La Ciociara. The interview appeared in SFCV in June.

While you're at it, take a look at Alex Ross's article on conservative programming at the Met, which has a paragraph about Gockley. 

Keep in mind, Gockley and Luisotti are in charge of one of the major US opera houses, and in all of these articles they talk as though audiences are too conservative, too shy, to have their minds open enough to hear, for example, Lulu, which is one of the great monuments of 20th century music. They just can't take anything challenging, or anything that they might have to think about, or that might make them intellectually or musically uncomfortable. 

I honestly find this embarrassing. I understand that the people who have to raise money to fund the arts in the US are in a tough position, between influential patrons, the immense cost of staging opera, the economy, and so on. But opera audiences are diverse: there are people who will go for St. Francois or Jenufa who have no interest in Verdi. There are people who got into opera through heavy-metal rock and who don't want to hear Puccini. There are people who find Baroque opera boring, and people who don't want to hear anything more radical than Britten.

Every season that's overly heavy on Puccini, Verdi, and Mozart is a turn-off for someone who doesn't want to hear Rigoletto or Madama Butterfly for the third, fourth, fifth, Nth time. Every failure to stage challenging operas is an insult to the intelligence and curiosity of the audience - and an admission of failure on the part of opera company marketers that they're not imaginative enough to figure out how to sell new and unusual opera.

Even if you think that serialism is somehow the source of all that is wrong with music in the last century - and really, there are plenty of us who like serial and atonal music - that doesn't explain the failure of opera companies to program composers such as Mascagni (he didn't only write Cavalleria Rusticana), Respighi, Zandonai, Zemlinsky, Schmidt, Nielsen, Martinu, and, of course, Schreker, who wrote non-serial, non-atonal music that ought to be comparatively easy to sell to even conservative audiences.

And for crying out loud - we haven't had a Britten opera at San Francisco since 2004-05.