Across America, the Covid-19 crisis is creating unsettling questions for opera companies. How can they produce performances during the pandemic? What kinds of art will people want? Will companies survive?
To be sure, there have been other moments when opera has been disrupted and companies shuttered, such as World War II. Such circumstances always have the potential to change the genre's trajectory.
MIT Associate Professor Emily Richmond Pollock is closely attuned to these issues. Pollock is a music historian who studies how opera has evolved while keeping its links to the past intact. In her 2019 book "Opera after the Zero Hour," Pollock scrutinized opera in postwar Germany, where the reconstruction of society opened a space to help modernize the genre.
Pollock's second book, in progress now, focuses on contemporary U.S. opera festivals and the artistic choices they confront. Now, with the pandemic upending daily life, Pollock is watching another kind of "zero hour" unfold.
"It's a disaster for the performing arts sector," Pollock says. "It's not the same kind of disaster [as war], but these companies are going to have decisions to make about how to move forward."
As Pollock's work emphasizes, even when opera moves forward it tends to conserve its heritage more than other forms of music do. This is opera's essential tension: How does it balance innovation and tradition? The pandemic reopens such questions for opera companies today. Does social crisis generate an impulse toward experiencing new works, or intensify people's desire to see the familiar again?
"In the immediate postwar period, the first production in a German opera house would be 'The Marriage of Figaro' or 'Fidelio,' something standard in their repertoire, for which they already had costumes and could cobble together sets," Pollock says. "It wasn't the most innovative thing, but it was comfortable and materially possible. In Covid times, a lot of opera companies are looking for new work that is native to Zoom or tailored for alternative performance ideas. It's a contrast - but I wonder if innovative works and new modalities will become the norm, or if companies will revert to the known quantities when they come back to life."
Studying opera in troubled times can yield subtle insights beyond that. For instance: Even when we seek out familiar classics, we may find new meaning in them.
