My local bookshop gives prominent display to a recent volume called The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, which tells you how to avoid death by earthquake, crocodile attack and landslide. Somehow the authors neglected to mention how to survive giving birth to a new opera, or how to save the infant from a quick death by underexposure.
The puzzle of how to produce a new opera that will not tank at the box office, and that may even last as long as a Volvo (to borrow a phrase from Leonard Cohen), has become a minor fixation of opera companies all over North America, including the San Francisco Opera (SFO), which on Saturday raised the curtain on an adaptation of Dead Man Walking. In many ways, the opera is a textbook example of current received wisdom on how to introduce new work into the deeply conservative opera world.
As it did with its 1998 operatic version of A Streetcar Named Desire (and as the Metropolitan Opera did with The Great Gatsby), the SFO chose a subject widely known from another medium, in this case the Oscar-winning film of Sister Helen Prejean's book. It also found a high-profile librettist (playwright Terrence McNally) and cast two major singers (Frederica von Stade and Susan Graham) in leading roles.
Most importantly, perhaps, it hired a composer who would speak to the SFO audience in a language it could readily understand. An advance excerpt of Jake Heggie's score revealed a sweeping lyrical style that would not be out of place in a Hollywood filmscore from the forties. While Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle described the premiere as "a triumph," The New York Times's Bernard Holland derided Heggie's contribution as an exercise in "the aesthetics of ingratiation."
This kind of writing, which enjoyed a major resurgence in the nineties, seems to be winning the repeat-production sweepstakes. A recent survey by Opera America, an umbrella organization that represents 114 companies in the United States and 17 in Canada, found that the living opera composer most likely to be heard on North American stages during the past decade wasn't Philip Glass or John Adams. It was the 74-year-old Carlisle Floyd, whose Susannah and Of Mice and Men figured among the top seven most frequently produced works written on this continent. Floyd's music harkens back to the simple folkways of a bygone rural America (the setting of many of his operas), and the reassuring harmonic language of late 19th-century Italian opera.
"Carlisle Floyd and Gian Carlo Menotti [composer of another top-seven hit, Amahl and the Night Visitors]are contemporary music for people who are comfortable with Puccini," said Richard Bradshaw, general director of the Canadian Opera Company. There seem to be a lot of those people among opera audiences in Canada, where Susannah was produced by Opera Ontario last season, and is on the bill for Calgary Opera next January.
Floyd's plain-spun dramas appeal also because they are relatively easy to stage. He generally doesn't require large casts or orchestras, and his music is simple enough to done effectively with fewer rehearsals than many other contemporary works.
Susannah, which was first performed at a Florida university in 1955, has easily passed the Volvo test. Dead Man Walking, and the 26 other new operas on the current schedules of Opera America companies, are eagerly being groomed for a long life on the road.
Even before the premiere of its new creation, the SFO was busy lining up second and third runs of the work in other cities, and a full-length recording on Erato. Opera Pacific in California's Orange County is renting the production for its 2001-2002 season, said SFO communications director Elizabeth Connell, "and a lot of large houses are interested."
A Streetcar Named Desire, which featured a key role for superstar soprano Renée Fleming, and a score by celebrity composer André Previn, played in New Orleans, San Diego and Strasbourg, France, after opening in San Francisco to middling reviews in 1998. The opera was also broadcast on PBS, and recorded on CD.
The last Canadian opera of that scale and ambition to have a comparable run was Harry Somers's Louis Riel, which was produced in Toronto and Montreal by the Canadian Opera Company in 1967 and '68, and revived in 1975 for shows in Toronto, Ottawa and Washington. A TV version was made for CBC television in 1969.
The COC showed a smaller Somers work, Mario and the Magician, to 8,000 people in 1992 (plans to restage the work have not yet been realized), and went large again in April, 1999, with another new opera, The Golden Ass, with music by Randolph Peters and libretto by the late Robertson Davies. The piece's popular idiom grated on some critics, and provoked veteran composer John Beckwith to write that the cause of new opera in Canada had been set back 30 years, but 16,000 people attended the shows at the Hummingbird Centre.
"It seemed important to do something on a large scale that would grab people," said Bradshaw. "[ The Golden Ass]was the right piece to surprise people that they could like contemporary opera. Next time, perhaps, we can do something more challenging."
Some who specialize in new work believe that's exactly the wrong approach. Wayne Strongman, artistic director of Toronto's Tapestry New Opera Works, said he's all in favour of grabbing and surprising people, but maintains that with new work, it's much easier to do that in small spaces.
"The operatic world is hamstrung by real estate," said Strongman. "In a 3,000- seat theatre, everything has got to have the assurance of a museum piece. But if you're trying to open up the art form, that aim is not necessarily served by having the audience physically removed from the action in a big venue."
Tapestry's pieces tend to be compact, easily transportable, and conceived with a view toward reaching a public that may not think of itself as part of the usual opera audience. Elsewhereless, a 1998 chamber opera by Rodney Sharman and Atom Egoyan, drew partly on Egoyan's film audience, and was presented in Toronto as part of du Maurier World Stage, a major theatre festival. Elsewhereless has since been produced in Ottawa and Vancouver, for a total audience of 9,000.
Iron Road, a forthcoming work by Chan Ka Nin and Mark Brownell about Chinese railway workers in Canada, is sheduled for a premiere run of nine performances next April at the Elgin Theatre, where Strongman expects a healthy proportion of seats to be filled by Chinese-Canadians. That isn't just wishful thinking; In his nine-year effort to produce the piece ("longer than it took to build the railway"), Strongman picked up Cantonese so as to promote it more effectively among one of its target audiences.
Queen of Puddings, another small company that does only new work, had a comparable run with Beatrice Chancy, the tuneful 1998 James Rolfe/George Elliott Clarke opera that played in Toronto and Halifax, and is on Edmonton Opera's schedule for next February. It has also been filmed for television by the CBC.
"We would never put on anything without thinking of its future life," said Dairine Ni Mheadhra, the company's co-artistic director. "And we're always thinking internationally."
That global orientation is shared by Tapestry, which sent the Nic Gotham/Ann-Marie MacDonald opera Nigredo Hotel to England in 1993, and by Chants Libres, the small Montreal company which sent Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi's Chants du Capricorn was seen in Belgium in 1999.
Chants Libres's productions are among the most challenging in Canada, both musically and in terms of the electronic technologies required to produce them. Not surprisingly, perhaps, its strongest links lie outside the conventional opera world, in theatre and even visual art. Its most recent work, Zack Settel's L'enfant des glaces, was co-produced with Montreal's Musée d'art contemporain. The linkages across disciplines reflect the company's work, but they're also a measure of its frustration with the operatic mainstream.
"I would say that I'm shocked to see that our main opera company, l'Opéra de Montréal, is so conservative," said Liette Turner, Chants Libre's general manager. Turner looks forward to the pending departure of OM director Bernard Uzan, whose single contribution to the Canadian repertoire was Nelligan, a 1990 pop opera by Michel Tremblay and André Gagnon that ran for 23 performances in Montreal, Quebec City and Ottawa.
"One of the first things I will do is to contact his [Uzan's]successor to form a real partnership," Turner said. "We should be included in their season, because the public is interested in new things."
In the ideal world imagined by many companies large and small, co-operation would be the norm, with several partners signing on as investing co-producers before the work even goes into rehearsal. That spreads the risk and increases the audience, but it can also spread the pain if the piece doesn't work out.
There are far more projects being shopped around than there are buyers. And most that get produced -- more than half, according to Opera America -- are done by small companies with a particular vision of where the art is going.
What the little players always lack, however, is the promotional clout of big organizations like the COC. And the big companies are more and more convinced of the wisdom of a comment made by Carlisle Floyd in a recent article in Opera News.
"I think that what American companies have done is simply to go back to the fact that Verdi and Donizetti wrote for the box office," Floyd said. "Opera was a popular entertainment or it simply didn't exist."