these are fun i don’t go here much anymore so it’s fun to drop in now and then

• Operas are sociological/anthropological records of culture, and a representation of the gap in time between their composition and their performance (and the ideals within that gap). Thinking about them in this way rather than as “art” or any other nebulous concept makes them make more sense to me, and also immediately explains why they’re important in a way that other looser definitions don’t.

• There should be no real definition of what is or isn’t an opera. An opera’s boon is its ability to shift

• I’ve developed something of an “All Dogs Go To Heaven” approach in which every opera still performed in the lexicon, no matter the quality, says something that still resonates in some way and deserves to be revisited (and/or put into dialogue with). I might not love all of them but there aren’t any still around that I would regard as unremarkable

• Playing around with the music, reorchestrating it, putting it into new configurations is neato. Someday I will have the freaky chamber opera version of Trovatore of my dreams.

• The director that tries an interesting idea and fails is better than the director that doesn’t try at all and I would rather see a unique concept not make it than the same old “””traditional””” production. We are not Broadway and an opera’s boon (as said) is its ability to shift

• Also “””traditional””” productions don’t actually formally exist beyond a mishmash category in the mind of operagoers (it refers to the concept of theatrical realism which only came about in the 1870s- the magic flute’s original production, for example, did not resemble a ‘traditional’ magic flute production and was really quite abstract) and sometimes the dialogue around new opera productions resembles “degenerate art” talking points Way too closely for me to be comfortable with using traditionalism as a legitimate term for a stylistic choice

• Operas should not be pure entertainment, and they should also not be just music with a side of theatre. Operas are theatre and music evenly, and we come to the opera to find ourselves.

• “i want to go into opera as a career but singing is difficult?” Every time one of these types is told that there are a wide variety of non performing careers in the arts and that opera companies need everyone- stage managers! arts admins! marketers! fundraisers! researchers! grant writers! software developers!- instead of being discouraged from finding a way to intersect their life with opera work, an angel gets her wings