A New Philosophy of Opera

Unsurprisingly, the director known for staging an opera amid Los Angeles traffic (2015’s Hopscotch) proposes breaking out of the opera house as a way of reinvigorating an art form associated with stuffiness, elitism, and conservatism. Sharon founded the L.A.-based experimental opera company the Industry and was the first American director to produce an opera at the Bayreuth Festival. He identifies opera’s constant struggle for survival as a force that pushes the form toward conservative productions and demands continuous innovation and reinterpretation. His description of the problem is insightful, comprehensive, and occasionally hilarious (“a clown car full of arts” is an apt definition of opera). His notions of how to solve it rest on cultivating an audience without condescending to it and staging productions that expand audiences’, artists’, and (perhaps most critically) funders’ conceptions of what opera can be. Sharon argues that the best opera encompasses poetry and ambiguity, which currently doesn’t seem valued in the arts.