best, or most well received, modern American opera?

[Brendan R. Wehrung]

The following appeared in the local paper over the weekend and is a tonic
for those who loudly state the opera is dead for anybody not pushing
retirement.

Which modern American opera do you consider the best, and you may also
choose, if you wish, one that should be consigned to the outer darkness,
if it has somehow been deemed a success.

Brendan

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE: New American opera comes of age with an
explosion of accessible homegrown works, including the MOT's 'Margaret
Garner'

May 1, 2005
BY MARK STRYKER
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

During the 1970s, American opera fell into an ice age. The number of
annual premieres by native composers froze in the single digits, and there
was no more effective way to kill a work at the box office than to market
it as a new opera.

The Premiere
The world premiere of "Margaret Garner" at the Detroit Opera House
promises to be one of the biggest cultural events of the year in metro
Detroit. The story, inspired by a real-life fugitive slave tale, was
written by acclaimed author Toni Morrison, and one of the opera world's
biggest stars -- Denyce Graves -- is in the cast.

"I always used to think it was ironic that when a musical opened on
Broadway it was always sold as a 'new musical by so-and-so,' " says David
Gockley, the progressive general director of the Houston Grand Opera.
"That was an anathema in opera."

How times have changed.

In the last 20 years -- and especially since 1990 -- American opera has
undergone a revolutionary growth spurt. Even aficionados have trouble
keeping up with the bustle these days. Between 1990 and 2000, more than
200 operas premiered at North American companies, most by U.S. composers
in U.S. theaters, according to Opera America, a service organization in
Washington, D.C.

With "Margaret Garner," which will be given its world premiere Saturday at
the Detroit Opera House, the Michigan Opera Theatre becomes the latest
American company to enter the contemporary sweepstakes. Composer Richard
Danielpour and author Toni Morrison, inspired by a true story, have
fashioned a tale about a fugitive slave who kills her children to save
them from a return to bondage.

The $2-million production is the MOT's first world premiere since
"Washington Square" by Thomas Pasatieri in 1976.

"Margaret Garner" is the third high-profile American premiere in recent
months, right on the heels of Mark Adamo's "Lysistrata" (after
Aristophane's comedy), which opened in Houston in March, and William
Bolcom's "A Wedding" (after Robert Altman's film), which opened in Chicago
in December. These works, with their audience-friendly scores, did boffo
box office.

For those who always claimed that American opera houses would never
nurture a native repertory as long as they remained overly beholden to the
Mt. Rushmore of European heroes -- Mozart, Verdi, Puccini and Wagner --
the rush of contemporary American works is the most significant
declaration of Yankee operatic independence since the 1930s-50s.

"What is unique about the years since 1990 is the ubiquity of new works
across the country at companies large and small, " says Marc Scorca,
president of Opera America. "New works have become a part of the way we do
business. It's wonderful these days to go to a new work and stand in the
lobby at intermission and hear informed comparative discussion about other
new American works."

Experts cite many reasons for the recent flowering of American opera,
beginning with a crucial pendulum shift toward less foreboding and more
melodic composing styles in classical music. The new operas also tend to
rely on well-known plays, movies, novels and newspaper headlines as source
material.

Typical are Andre Previn's "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1998), Jake
Heggie's "Dead Man Walking" (2000) and John Adams' "Nixon in China"
(1987). All arrived with accessible, eclectic scores and familiar stories
from America's collective unconscious. They also had the benefit of
built-in marketing hooks.

Contributing to the renaissance has been a parallel surge in opera's
overall popularity because of the use of projected English translations
above the stage, as well as opera's multimedia aesthetic, which has found
a simpatico audience among the pop-culture set, a group that craves the
latest music, movies and theater. The new opera boom can be felt
everywhere, from the leading companies in New York, Chicago, San Francisco
and Houston, to such regional companies as Opera Omaha in Nebraska and the
Pine Mountain Music Festival in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

Not all of the recent operas have been hits. MOT's earlier commission,
"Washington Square," vanished almost without a trace. But the issue is
less whether Opera A or Opera B thrills the masses or enters the pantheon
than whether there are enough new works in currency to inject a sense of
vitality and adventure in the opera house.

"If you have enough of a creative churn going on, you will eventually get
masterpieces that enter the canon," says Scorca.

Some observers worry that the fruits of the go-go years aren't necessarily
trickling down to more challenging and experimental composers like the
brilliant conceptualist Robert Ashley or the rugged but communicative
modernist Hugo Weisgall (1912-97). The recent economic downturn and shaky
recovery have also begun to slow the pace of new operas in the pipeline.
Industry leaders are deathly afraid of the potential fallout from another
downturn.

But the consensus is that American opera has turned an aesthetic corner:

"I don't think we're in a golden age in terms of the evolution of the art,
but we are in terms of relevance to the general society," says David
DiChiera, MOT general director. "There is a recognition that people will
go and see these works if they have artistic value, relevance and are
exciting theater."

MOT's 2003 production of "Dead Man Walking," which debuted three years
earlier at the San Francisco Opera, proves the point. The opera, based on
the book with the same title about the death penalty by Sister Helen
Prejean that inspired the popular film, sold almost exactly the same
amount of tickets as that season's staples "Il Trovatore" and "Die
Fledermaus." MOT officials say that "Margaret Garner" has already outsold
"Dead Man Walking" with a week to go before opening night.

The buzz surrounding the world premiere, the appearance of star
mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves and Morrison's celebrity are all manna to
MOT's marketing staff.

The first stirrings of the nationalist muse in American opera came in the
1930s with works like Virgil Thomson's "Four Saints in Three Acts" and
George Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess." American opera expanded in the 1950s
with works by Gian Carlo Menotti, Douglas Moore, Carlisle Floyd and
Leonard Bernstein.

But in the 1960s, the field fell dormant. Classical composition was
dominated by a high modernism that found its signature sound in angular
dissonance and atonality. The public blanched, composers retreated into
academia and, while the number of American opera companies was expanding
exponentially, the repertoire was stuck in neutral.

Things began to change in the mid-'70s, when some composers began to
re-embrace traditional melody and harmony and a nascent neo-romanticism
began to evolve. Meanwhile, minimalism, whose pulsating simplicity was the
antithesis of academic modernism, took root in the music of Philip Glass
and Steve Reich. By the 1980s and '90s, postmodernists were writing in
unabashedly eclectic languages and drawing on contemporary vernacular
sources like rock, jazz and pop.

A watershed came in 1976, when "Einstein on the Beach," a collaboration of
Glass and experimental theater director Robert Wilson, became a cause
celebre after selling out two performances at New York's Metropolitan
Opera, which had been rented for the event.

A few years earlier, David Gockley became head of the Houston Grand Opera
at age 27 and began to champion tonal American works by Carlisle Floyd and
others. Under Gockley's leadership, Houston became the most important and
influential champion of American opera in the country. The company has
premiered 33 works during his tenure, among them John Adams' "Nixon in
China," Leonard Bernstein's "A Quiet Place," Adamo's "Little Women,"
Michael Daugherty's "Jackie O," Meredith Monk's "Atlas" and several pieces
by Floyd, including "Willie Stark."

For Gockley, the turning point has been composers' willingness to reach
out to audiences. "What has driven opera over the years has been the
public, and you have to look toward the public as to what it likes," he
says. "The more skillful composers get, the more liberties they can take
with the public in terms of what the public is willing to accept."

American opera got a further boost in the early 1980s, when DiChiera, then
president of Opera America, created a program to fund new works. The
National Endowment for the Arts and other sources provided similar
support, and the resources encouraged opera companies to take greater
risks. In 1987, "Nixon in China" became another landmark when, after its
Houston debut, it became the first of the new wave of American operas to
be embraced in Europe.

DiChiera has wanted to program another world premiere in Detroit ever
since MOT opened the opera house in 1996. But the company was so consumed
with fund-raising to pay for the building that it has taken a while for
the pieces to fall into place.

Danielpour and Morrison fit comfortably into the contemporary zeitgeist.
He's a lyrical eclectic known for pleasing audiences and singers; she's a
Nobel Prize winner with celebrity cache. The story is based on the same
fugitive slave tale that inspired Morrison's novel "Beloved." To ease the
financial burden, MOT enlisted Cincinnati Opera and Opera Company of
Philadelphia as co-commissioners -- another industry trend.

Despite the dramatic gains, Gockley says American opera still has a long
way to go to reach parity with its European counterpart. "Economics are an
issue," he says.

"I've tried to get composers to keep the length of operas within 2 1/2
hours to 2 hours and 45 minutes, to have just one intermission and to
orchestrate imaginatively so you can have orchestras of 26 to 30 pieces
sound good as opposed to having to employ a 19th-Century Wagnerian
orchestra. We have to think of different venues and electronic things like
video and audio that allow works to be conveyed over larger distances and
in different media."

Ultimately, Gockley, who is leaving Houston to become general director of
the San Francisco Opera in January, wants to see American companies
perform more new works and more revivals of operas composed within the
past 20-30 years. He'd like to see American operas make up 20 percent to
30 percent of the repertoire, and as the works get better he'd like to see
at least a 50-50 split between homegrown and imported works.

Those may sound like pipe dreams, but American opera is nowhere near the
long shot it was 30 years ago.

Contact MARK STRYKER at 313-222-6459 or str...@freepress.com.

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