Because Cincinnati Opera’s recent U.S. premiere of Another Brick in the Wall brought in a number of people associated with North American opera companies, it used the occasion to present a lunchtime panel discussion on new works. Besides the grand-scale Another Brick, the Opera was also presenting another recently composed, or “new,” work at the same time: the intimate As One in Music Hall’s small Wilks Studio.
As invited guests listened at Music Hall’s Taft Suite, Marcus Küchle, Cincinnati Opera’s director of artistic operations and new works, revealed some startling statistics about the changing nature of opera in the United States: In the 2010-11 season, 15 percent of all productions were new works — 9 percent of those were composed between 1950 and century’s end; 6 percent were 21st-century creations. But for the current 2018-19 season (which includes Cincinnati Opera’s just-concluded summer season), 27 percent of all the productions were new works, with 18 percent of them having been created in this century.
“That’s a very significant increase in the production of new works,” he told the audience. “This is a level that keeps the art form well. It needs an influx of new works.”
Something is happening here and we’re just realizing what it is — opera is becoming one of our most progressive forms of the performing arts. Opera companies increasingly are searching for new audiences by equating contemporary works with relevancy. And they’re finding success. Cincinnati Opera reports its 2018 season, which had five productions, was its highest-grossing ever. And Another Brick, which had five performances at Music Hall’s Springer Auditorium, was the highest grossing production ever.
In a follow-up telephone interview, Küchle spoke at length about why this trend was building, and what it means for opera. In some regards, he says, the art form has to find new audiences. But it is fighting against the fact that many have a negative view formed by their exposure to childhood cartoons and TV comedy sketches depicting the stereotypical Wagnerian “lady in the breastplate.”
“Even potential audience members who have never seen an opera already have a preconceived notion of what it might be — and then also determine it’s not for them, for whatever reason,” Küchle says. “That is the real problem we have to combat. The term ‘opera’ is full of preconceived ideas that are not necessarily correct.”
So one thing driving the surge in new works, then, is a desire for connection to modern culture. Another Brick had it — it was a grand-scale, high-tech, operatic adaptation of Pink Floyd’s classic Rock & Roll album The Wall. But operas like that, so far, are rare.
Relevancy also means that a new work has important contemporary subject matter, one that can be presented in ways other than traditional spectacle. In that regard, the success of As One may be even more indicative of the change than Another Brick.
Featuring just two singers — a man and a woman — and with its music played by a string quartet rather than an orchestra, it told the poetic, accessible story of a transgender woman’s journey to self-realization in just one act. Cincinnati Opera added 25 seats to Wilks Studio’s 200 seats to accommodate demand. (The 2014 opera was conceived and composed by Laura Kaminsky with a libretto by Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed.)
It marked the second year that the Opera has presented such a scaled-down production — “I like to call them ‘pieces,’ ” Küchle says — as part of its five-year CO Next: Diverse Voices initiative.
“We’ve made a deliberate choice that this cycle (of new works) be in the here and now and be an analysis of current contemporary American society,” he says.
While there is an economic driver to producing “smaller” new works, it is not a retreat. Cincinnati Opera has expanded its schedule to present them, and uses venues other than the 2,388-seat Springer to stage them. It also finds that the audiences it’s trying to reach as it seeks diversity accept these as opera. “You see the faces of people directly in front of you,” Küchle says. “The immediacy of the performance is very compelling.”
Coming up in the CO Next series are two more announced new works, both commissions, with a third still in the planning process. Next year brings Blind Injustice, based on the work of the Ohio Innocence Project in exonerating wrongly-jailed people. Using a book by University of Cincinnati law professor Mark Godsey, it features the stories of six exonerees and will be composed by Scott Davenport Richards with a libretto by David Cote. It will use an orchestra of 12 musicians, no more than 12 principal singers, plus members of the Young Professionals Choral Collective.
In 2020, to mark the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote, Cincinnati Opera is having WordPlay Cincy and the Music Resource Center collaborate on a new work based on observations and experiences of young women ages 11-17. (The librettist working with WordPlay will be author Sheila Williams; the composer working with Music Resource Center is William Menefield.)
“In my work with the kids from WordPlay on this project, I don’t even tell them, ‘You’re writing an opera,’ ” Küchle says. “I want to avoid them gravitating to a specific idea, a concept, that will send them in an aesthetic direction that will be harmful for the project.”
Behind CO Next is a belief that, while operatic masterpieces should survive, there needs to be new works that use different forms to address challenging times. “I think topics that have some sort of societal consequence, that are timely, make very good subject matter,” Küchle says.
He adds that these have a social agenda but not a political one. “What we’re going for is a humanist agenda,” he says. “We’re not trying to influence public policy directly. We’re not trying to influence elections. We’re trying to influence empathy and awareness of certain conditions in current society.”
For more on the Cincinnati Opera, visit cincinnatiopera.org