Rethinking Opera by Christopher Fox (prof)

Finally some sense is being spoken:

Rethinking Opera by Christopher Fox LINK

Quotes:

Opera is, above all, a dramatic form, its defining feature being that its dramas are played out in music by singers
cv - don't like the use of the term singers - perhaps the musical voice would be more relevant as it could include musicised treatments of human voice other than 'singing', and would include the instrumentalist voice.

everything we see and hear flows from dramatic necessity: the musical idiom, the words, the pace and pitch of the vocal lines.

How many operas of the last 100 years have carried on this tradition of innovation? No more than a handful: Aldan Berg's Wozzeck, Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach ... it's not a list I find easy to extend.

the concept-led 'directors' opera' of Patrice Chéreau, Harry Kupfer, Peter Sellers and others has attempted to cover up the absence of new ideas by shoe-horning old texts into new thearical shapes.

history shows us that dramatic innovation in opera has always been led by composers not institutions.

So many things have changed the ways in which we experience drama - film, amplification, telecommunications - yet most investment in new opera still goes into works in which singers with big voices attempt to project over symphony orchestras.

The singers act out stories with beginnings, middles and endings and articulate their thoughts and feelings through vocal lines whose contours owe more to musical fashion than to the expressive identity of individual characters with the drama.

There is little sense in most new operas that their creators have given any serious consideration to whether or not it is appropriate to use a theatrical apparatus perfected by Wagner in the 1870s and 80s.

As long as new works continue to be created for the existing resources of these imposing venues, the problem will remain

Nor, in most contemporary opera, is there an obvious dramatic reason why these characters should sing rather than talk

Nevertheless I see no intrinsic reason why there can not be a form of theatre involving singers and music which has rather more to do with the experience of people n the twenty-first century and which makes a more sophisticated combination of voices and music than can be found in musical theatre.

I would like to advocate a fundamental reform, a return to first principles, as if Orfeo and all the subsequent history of opera had never happened, an attempt to imagine a form of theatre which entirely depends on live music and singing.

it will probably have something to do with the great theatrical innovators of the last 100 years - Brecht, Beckett, Cunningham, Bausch for example - and it will probably use new spaces and new instrumental media

Imagine a theatre in which music was not just a suggestive soundtrack but the drama itself, in which singers sang not because they happened to be opera-singers but because singing was an essential part of their characters' identities. It would be quite something.
cv - Again I don't like the use of the term singers and I reckon this will impede his progression with his reformed opera - perhaps the musical voice would be more relevant as it could include musicised treatments of human voice other than 'singing', and would include the instrumentalist voice.