‘A New Philosophy of Opera’ Review: Curtain Calls

An American opera director reveals how to inject new life into an old-fashioned artform.

By 

Heidi Waleson

Sept. 13, 2024 at 11:27 am ET

A scene from Yuval Sharon’s staging of Mozart’s ‘The Magic Flute’ at the Berlin State Opera in 2019. 

PHOTO: MONICA RITTERSHAUS

Opera is perceived as the most traditional of the performing arts—its repertory ossified into a canon of 19th-century warhorses, its performance style determined by the constraints of the proscenium theater, the institutional limitations of opera companies and the tastes of the wealthy, conservative patrons who pay for it.

A New Philosophy of Opera

It’s not surprising. Operas such as Bizet’s “Carmen” and Puccini’s “Tosca,” with their exotic locales and doomed heroines, have been domesticated by opera producers into familiar, comfortable stories, performed over and over again for the initiated. 

In “A New Philosophy of Opera,” the American opera director Yuval Sharon takes the radically opposite view, arguing that the foundational characteristics of opera—collaborative, boundary-crossing, multistranded, experimental—should be embraced in all their messiness and ambiguity. “Rebirth is opera’s true power,” Mr. Sharon writes, and suggests that the art form is infinitely richer and more welcoming than that tired old image suggests.

Persuasively argued and filled with lively and approachable details, “A New Philosophy of Opera” brims with Mr. Sharon’s passion for the form. Born in 1979, he writes that his early encounters with traditional opera performances left him “oscillating between boredom and incomprehension.” It took Meredith Monk’s “Atlas” (1991) to provide Mr. Sharon with the “flash of revelation.” Loosely based on the story of a female explorer, “Atlas” is told with shrieks, stutters, coos and other wordless vocalizations. “Suddenly, hearing Monk’s voice—a singular musical imagination that felt both futuristic and ancient,” Mr. Sharon tells us, “I completely understood opera and its extraordinary potential.”

Ideas from philosophers and writers as diverse as Antonin Artaud, Thomas Bauer, José Ortega y Gasset, Carl Jung, Jacques Rancière and Simone Weil inform his thinking and are smoothly woven into the text. He invokes Weil’s assertion that “not popularization, but translation” is needed to introduce philosophy (or opera) to the uninitiated. Multipage graphics dubbed “Time-Curves” illustrate operatic history as a cyclical phenomenon, constantly reborn and reinvented. Thus, Paris in 1674—as represented by Jean-Baptiste Lully’s “Alceste” and the birth of the tragédie lyrique, a new form reflecting the declamatory style of French spoken theater—is visually juxtaposed with Houston in 1987 and the premiere of John Adams’s “Nixon in China,” one of the first contemporary operas to be based on recent history. There’s also a playlist to emphasize opera’s wildly different manifestations over the centuries, from Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo” (“the oldest surviving opera score that’s still frequently performed today”) to Harry Partch’s “Delusion of the Fury,” a 1969 “ritual” performed on instruments invented by the composer.

One of Mr. Sharon’s central points is that opera loses its power when forced to conform to expectations from, for example, film. Under such restrictions, the author concedes, operatic stories can seem absurd. “When the narrative is the main event,” as it is in film, and everything else is expected to follow from it, then the mechanics of opera can “appear clunky and old-fashioned.” However, when the story “becomes one element among others that make up a less predictable composite—opera escapes the structure of conventional theater and becomes its own magic space.”

His own productions, discussed in the book, offer fascinating examples of how Mr. Sharon rethinks and recombines opera’s basic elements of text, music and theater in ways that upend expectations. He first gained widespread notice with “Hopscotch” (2015), an original “mobile opera” loosely based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. A series of 10-minute scenes, written by multiple composers and librettists, it was performed in 24 cars driving around Los Angeles. Singers and instrumentalists shared the limo space with groups of four audience members, who changed cars for each new scene. In 2022, as the artistic director of Detroit Opera, Mr. Sharon reopened the company’s theater after the pandemic with Puccini’s “La bohème”—with the opera’s four acts performed in reverse order. A staging of “The Magic Flute” (his favorite opera) at the Berlin State Opera featured the characters as marionettes, to explore the opera as “a conundrum of maturity.” 

These productions demonstrate how Mr. Sharon prizes ambiguity and multiplicity rather than offering operagoers a straight line through a piece. “A director must seize the spectators’ attention with the specificity of a strong interpretation, and at the same time leave space for their own interpretations,” he explains. “I want a production to constantly unsettle the audience and ask for continuous renegotiations of their experience.” 

For Mr. Sharon, the need to rediscover the essence of opera is not an academic exercise. In his detailed discussion of “Hopscotch,” he describes the enormous logistical challenges of the project for creators and spectators alike. The goal was to “dismantle the autopilot,” that all-too-pervasive quality of contemporary life. The lessons for the future that he draws from “Hopscotch”—which was entirely of its moment and has ceased to exist—include “opera as an adventure—consistently awe-inspiring and never-before-seen.” 

Decoupling opera from the trappings and rituals of the opera house is one way to shake things up, but how do you do it when you go back inside? Mr. Sharon offers some thoughtful principles that are available to any producer. “Exclusivity is not a virtue,” he writes. “Inclusivity is.” Yet his determination to use artistry as a means toward a less predictable and more inclusive experience will surely run up against the economic realities of opera production.

The Metropolitan Opera, which took nearly $70 million out of its endowment to balance the budgets for two recent seasons, is certainly hoping that some Sharon-style innovation will help it survive. The director will helm a new “Ring” cycle beginning in the 2027-28 season. As a warmup, he will make his house debut in the 2025-26 season with a new production of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” of which, he says, “I don’t think ‘Tristan’ should even be called an opera, since so much transpires that can never be expressed by the singers or production. This is what makes it the single hardest work in the traditional repertoire to stage.” I, for one, look forward to the adventure.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias.”