Mal(opera)tions

The lights of the theater in the opera house begin to dim, and the voices in the audience grow hushed as the orchestra plays the opening sequence for the first act. The primadonna enters the stage. She dons a contemporary outfit of snakeskin jeans and a fluorescent orange crop top, and holds a microphone in her hand. Disapproval flickers in the eyes of the audience. She is meant to be wearing an ornate gown, and she should be able to project entire arias that can be heard from the heavens using her voice alone. It’s not that a microphone suggests an inferior voice, but that opera singing has traditional techniques that require the singer to use their entire body to evoke a response from the audience that the artificial amplification of a microphone is unable to replicate. The more blunt of the viewers may quietly whisper, “Ugh, this is a modernization,” incapable of shielding their dread and displeasure with a superficial veil of politeness.

Perhaps the dwindling interest in opera in the younger generations provokes directors to take centuries-old works and place them in more ultramodern settings and lenses. This is an effort to keep the performances relevant for their viewers. But this attempt to keep opera “fresh” nearly always spoils the work because changing visuals and scripts warps the context and intentions the opera’s creator had for their work. Language is delicate in the sense that too many changes in the words that are sung can convey warped ideas, ideas that contrast with their original meanings. This attempt to be relevant only results in it being repulsive.

“Romeo and Juliet,” while originally not an operatic piece, is often adapted to opera. Unfortunately, it has often been modernized to the point of convolution, when even the identities of the characters have been compromised. Juliet Capulet is meant to be a girl who has just entered her adolescence, a 13-year-old filled with naiveté and intimidated by the intensity, profundity, and novelty of young first love erupting within (and ultimately demising) her.

Yet, I once saw a performance in which she played a woman in her 20s in a dominatrix guise, black leather ensemble and whipping, promiscuous remarks to boot. In another context, I would praise such a character for being an example of how a woman has the right to unapologetically be whoever she wishes to be without societal rebuttal. However, this was not appropriate because this was not Shakespeare’s Juliet. In changing her character to this degree, many of the play’s themes became erased in this modernized adaptation. I will emphasize that it wasn’t a bad performance by any means, but it simply was not Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.”

Indeed, one could argue that the opera’s writer is dead and that the themes in their work remain timeless. However, changing the lenses through which their work is regarded also changes how the themes in their work manifest in the performance. Their writing is a historical artifact, and modernization is like drenching that artifact in neon spray paint.

Occasionally, modernizations don’t create this stark effect, but that’s because the tweaks given to them are incredibly minor. The Metropolitan Opera had performances of “Carmen” that were modernized. “Carmen” is an opera composed by Georges Bizet that takes place in Seville, Spain during the midst of the 1800s. The Met’s version took place during the Spanish Civil War, almost a century later. However, this change in time period only affected some of the fashions worn by the opera singers, and the director did not take any greater creative liberties that would have otherwise affected Bizet’s oeuvre on the volatility and flightiness of love.

It should be noted that other art forms are not taken and modernized like most performing arts are. Artworks are preserved in museums, never altered. Words are retained in novels and when they are modified, the novel is explicitly labeled as “abridged.” Even in dance, modern interpretations are given their own genre, “modern dance.” (Perhaps, since modern opera deviates so much from traditional opera, it may as well be its own thing.) Instead of using modernizations, opera writers of today should compose new works or parodies of old works to represent the present and create a new chapter in history.