Opera
Operas come in all shapes, sizes, and venues. Having just returned from a visit to New York’s Metropolitan Opera House to see the final performance of an outstanding production of American John Adams’s new opera, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, it was quite an adjustment to see fellow American Nico Muhly’s latest opera, Aphrodite, commissioned and staged by Sydney Chamber Opera at their usual venue, Sydney’s Carriageworks. Adams’s opera calls for many soloists, supplemented by a large chorus and orchestra; Muhly’s work involves two singers and seven instrumentalists. The Metropolitan is the largest opera house in the world; Carriageworks is rather more intimate.
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‘Who wants to hear Samson et Dalila?’ Bernard Shaw asked rhetorically (in typically lordly fashion) after a concert version of Camille Saint-Saëns’s opera in 1893, the first time it was presented in Britain. ‘I respectfully suggest, Nobody.’ So Shavianly sure was the comic-curmudgeon that he left after Act Two.
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Whither (or whether) Opera Australia?
Ever since its beginnings in the late sixteenth century, opera has been preoccupied with death. Illness, murder, and suicide stalk countless libretti, from Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Puccini’s Tosca to Berg’s Wozzeck and Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves. To the litany of horrific fates which have historically befallen the medium’s protagonists – stabbings, immolations, death by snake bite, poison and toxic mushroom, to say nothing of various wasting diseases and literal descents into hell – can now be added that most contemporary and shocking of demises: death by mass shooter.
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