AMERICA WANTS ITS OWN OPERAS

~ Posted by Hazel Sheffield, February 17th 2012

This Sunday an opera by the singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright opens in New York. It's five years since it was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center Theater, but "Prima Donna" won't be premiering at either of those venues. There are several reasons for this, but the glaring one is that Wainwright, who was raised in Montreal by his mother, the late folk singer Kate McGarrigle, decided to write his opera in French.

It fell to a British company, Opera North, to premiere "Prima Donna" in Manchester in 2009. It comes to New York courtesy of the New York City Opera and Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), an organisation whose stated aim is to be "adventurous"—though it might surprise some that an opera written in the language of Bizet and Debussy qualifies as such. The rival ambition, to stage new operas that are American in character, is not limited to the Met. Last month, the Washington National Opera announced an ambitious programme to invest in "New American Works".

But other than language, what makes an opera "American"? The WNO’s director Philippe Auguin believes America's rich tradition of musical theatre means that audiences expect operas to be accessible. A good example is Jake Heggie’s "Moby-Dick", which was commissioned by the Dallas Opera and opened in Dallas in 2010. The opera turned a classic American novel into a spectacular stage show, featuring ladders, masts and winches and stormy screen projections. The willingness of the Met to join with the Lincoln Center on a $2m programme is another sign of the blurring of the lines between theatre and opera.

Subject matter is also important: one successful commission from their joint programme, "Two Boys", which premiered in London last year and opens in New York in 2013, is about a fatal online friendship between two male teenagers. Nico Muhly, its genre-crossing composer, has previously worked with Bjork and Philip Glass. Perhaps the plot of Wainwright’s opera, which is about an aging opera singer, sounded plain old-fashioned.

Either way, the Met has missed out on Wainwright’s star appeal. Tickets for the New York run have almost sold out, and Wainwright revealed on the radio this week that he has been commissioned to write a second opera. No details yet on which language that will be in.

Hazel Sheffield writes for the NME. She is the Fulbright Alistair Cooke Scholar at Columbia University, New York