A new book on opera’s future raises important questions about relevance and access, but misses the deeper case for why the art form still matters.

In a now notorious  interview, actor Timothée Chalamet declared he only wanted to work in a creative field people valued. He was not keen on an art form like opera, “where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this anymore’.”

His comments predictably  triggered a backlash across the opera industry – and some say they  contributed to him losing this year’s Best Actor Oscar race. What should the rest of us make of the fuss?

This is the kind of question Melbourne-based opera expert Caitlin Vincent sets out to help answer in her new book,  Opera Wars.

Her declared target audience is “the opera curious” as well as “opera lovers”, but the book is no mere operatic primer. Vincent, too, harbours serious doubts about the ongoing relevance and importance of this once venerable European art form.

The book’s driving narrative comes from her exploration of the grounds for such doubts. It examines two broad areas of concern. One is the challenges facing anyone considering an opera career today. Her informed and wide-ranging discussion of them accounts for the more successful and informative parts of the book.

The other is more philosophical, and raises questions like: what is opera good for? What is – or should be – its meaning and value for us today?

Vincent is able to draw extensively on her industry experience: as a professionally trained singer, then an opera producer, and most recently as a librettist.

She is surely right that opera production has never before been as fraught as it is today. Starkly differing views on how opera should be staged are, she suggests, where its “trouble really begins”.

Those views can be encapsulated by two German terms: Regietheater (director’s theatre) and Werktreue (true to the work). In essence, they reflect:

disagreement about what a staged opera actually is. Is it a reenactment? A reconstruction? An attempt to recreate the original as closely as possible? (Nods in Werktreue.) Or is it an adaptation? A kind of artistic offspring that’s based on the original but also something new? (Winks in Regietheater).

disagreement about what a staged opera actually is. Is it a reenactment? A reconstruction? An attempt to recreate the original as closely as possible? (Nods in Werktreue.) Or is it an adaptation? A kind of artistic offspring that’s based on the original but also something new? (Winks in Regietheater).

This pithy and useful description gives you a hint of Vincent’s bouncy, casual writing style. Sometimes, however, her penchant for the literary flourish leads to more tendentious claims. One is her declaration that the Werktreue camp (the opera........

© Pearls and Irritations