Ambivalent Engagement: contemporary opera between populism and the postmodern

Abstract

Today, the relationship between opera and society could best be described as ‘displaced’—at least in the German-speaking countries. As an institution, opera has become a ‘Repertoirebetrieb’ that hires living stage directors to make popular works from the 18^th and 19^th centuries palatable through their scenic recontextualization, despite the racism, sexism and otherwise questionable ideology of these works. The critical approach of this mode of stage direction creates space for the discomfort of ideological regression and, at the same time, fends off such discomfort, ultimately saving the work—untouched in its musical and textual structure—for the enjoyment of and commercial business with that regression. At the same time, these institutions also commission and perform new operas, which disappear after their world premiere, never to be integrated into the seemingly closed opera canon. These new operas suffer, in particular, from two ambivalences: i) the institutional ambivalence of opera houses towards these works; ii) the ambivalence of the new operas (and their creators) towards their audiences, which manifests, for example, in a kind of prejudice against categories such as narrative, identification and pleasure.  

In this article, German composer Hauke Berheide and US-American director/librettist Amy Stebbins propose an aesthetics of ‘ambivalent engagement’ as a conceptual framework for constructing narratives in contemporary opera. The article begins with an historical overview of the aesthetics and institutional parameters of postwar opera in the German-speaking context, giving particular attention to its role in the public sphere. To this end, it refers to operas by Helmut Lachenmann, Olga Neuwirth/ Catherine Filous, Beat Furrer/ Händl Klaus, Anno Schreier/ Kerstin Maria Pöhler, and David T. Little/ Royce Vavrek. Using examples from their own opera Mauerschau (Bavarian State Opera, 2016), the authors show how the reflexive and intermedial character of opera lends itself to large-scale narratives that call attention to their own inner contradictions. In this way, Berheide and Stebbins seek to demonstrate opera’s unique potential to make current issues, such as the rise of neo-fascism, sensorially understandable without slipping into the populist affirmations particularly present in contemporary American opera.