Phoenix — "US AIRWAYS' Flight 450 to Salt Lake City has been canceled. All other aircraft are full until late Sunday or sometime Monday. Please see a ticket agent to reschedule your flight."
It's a Friday afternoon in February at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. A chorus of shocked gasps erupts. A woman with a Brooklyn accent sarcastically shrieks that the airline might as well rent her an apartment in the desert. With a pool! I'm changing planes, en route from St. Paul, Minn., to San Francisco, both cities offering opera premieres. And this diva scene is a not-uncommon prologue to the brave new world of new American opera, because if you want to find out what is happening, you have to take to the skies.
For all the attention being lavished on the innovations at New York's Metropolitan Opera and the ones expected at its Lincoln Center neighbor, New York City Opera, there is, right now, no center to American opera.
Following the opera trail the last two months has involved entering a surrealist sinkhole at Oberlin College in Ohio. I encountered an operatic Abu Ghraib in Austin, Texas, and the spirit of a Ponca Indian chief in Omaha. In St. Paul, Minn., the ultimate bummer road trip was illuminated in delicious if heart-rending song. In a small avant-garde space in San Francisco, a teenage Julius Caesar, taking a respite from his young wife and infant child, learned the ways of a ruler in the bed of an older lover, Nicomedes, king of Bithynia, to the accompaniment of exquisite percussion in the pit.
Each of these new works had something relevant to say politically or socially, though their musical and theatrical styles were radically different. Tradition was respected or overthrown. Classics were reinvented or ignored. Resources varied from a lot to a little. Inspiration came from all over the place.
But what Olga Neuwirth's "Lost Highway," Philip Glass' "Waiting for the Barbarians," Anthony Davis' "Wakonda's Dream," Ricky Ian Gordon's "The Grapes of Wrath" and Lou Harrison's "Young Caesar" had in common were enthusiastic audiences and a sense that opera is an ever-evolving art form that can take on just about anything.
The circumstances of these five premieres varied greatly. "Waiting for the Barbarians" was commissioned for a new opera house in Erfurt, Germany, and came to Austin only after it was rejected elsewhere in America. "The Grapes of Wrath," given its premiere by Minnesota Opera, was a co-commission and co-production with several other U.S. companies, allowing for a good-sized budget and a number of presentations. "Lost Highway" and "Young Caesar" were ambitious projects by, respectively, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. "Wakonda's Dream" was a local initiative by Omaha Opera.
What these works also had in common is that they were created apart from the country's big opera operations: the massive Metropolitan and the other major outfits in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and New York. Everyone, of course, seeks something new these days. But big-city big budgets often bring compromises.
Last spring, for example, Los Angeles Opera emptied its coffers on Elliot Goldenthal's "Grendel." It had director Julie Taymor's great stage pictures but a malfunctioning million-dollar movable rock that held up its opening by several days. Audiences loved the show, although the score got little attention. The opera made no attempt to go beyond a literal retelling of John Gardner's novel about the monster in "Beowulf"; the curmudgeonly cutting edge had to be cut back.
The Met, for its part, spent a bundle last winter on "The First Emperor," Tan Dun's epic account of Qin Shi Huang, who unified China two millenniums ago. In this case, excess was everywhere -- in celebrated Chinese film director Zhang Yimou's spectacular massing of the chorus onstage and in Tan's struggle to translate dozens of Eastern and Western operatic traditions into a stylistically benign vehicle suitable for Placido Domingo.
Just how much imagination a large opera house can accept is hard to quantify. Peter Gelb, now in his first season as general manager of the Met, is full of bright ideas. He has invited directors from Broadway and Hollywood, is broadcasting productions in high-definition video at movie theaters and has commissioned Osvaldo Golijov to write an opera (which will require untold years to complete).
Set to rattle the status quo
BUT the recent announcement that Gerard Mortier would take over New York City Opera in 2009 appears to signal a greater shake-up for American opera. Mortier, who heads the Paris National Opera, is famous for his daring revamping of Austria's Salzburg Festival. He succeeded Herbert von Karajan there in 1992 and shocked conservative audiences with audacious Peter Sellars and Robert Wilson stagings along with a healthy dose of new work -- some of it by Luciano Berio, Kaija Saariaho and Glass -- of lasting value.
