Before I even read about the Timothée Chalamet controversy, I was getting messages from all over the world asking if I had any opinion about it. After all, I’ve been spending the last couple of decades working full time on expanding the reach of opera, in a place far from the centers of the operatic cosmos. Surely I must be personally affronted by such a casual dismissal of my life’s work!
The thing is, although it’s a bit much to say that “no one” is interested in opera, statistics would seem to indicate that world-wide the audience is shrinking — just like the audience for non-blockbuster cinema. But where I am, it’s not shrinking. When I returned to Thailand almost thirty years ago, there was virtually no opera to speak of here, but now there’s a bit of a scene. Opera Siam, the company I founded, has had its setbacks, but continues to produce both classic and new works. It has now been joined by a plethora of more specialized companies and, most recently, by a “youth opera” run and staffed entirely by college-age students that is doing significant and revolutionary work. And it’s all home-grown.
I’ve been hearing (and ignoring) for years that “no one” is interested — but they are. When we first started working here, we had two audiences: expats who wanted a taste of what they had left behind in Europe, and high-society locals who wanted to dress up and show off their jewels. But there was a third audience — young people, educated people, people who found excitement and stimulation in a medium that was new to them — and that audience, in this part of the world, has grown so much that it has overtaken the other two.
All sorts of people who probably haven’t met Chalamet are screaming that he’s uneducated, has no talent, whatever. I haven’t met him either, but I’ve always admired his work — he’s clearly really smart, is at least bilingual, and a thoroughly convincing Kwisatz Haderach. If, like many actors who started young, there are some gaps in his world-view, or if he simply doesn’t like opera (many don’t) this is no reason to dismiss his opinion out of hand. The death of opera is an oft-repeated rumor.
But I think it bears reminding that the genre of opera, invented about four hundred years ago by some intellectuals in Florence who were actually trying to reinvent Greek tragedy, is directly ancestral to film. By the 19th Century, opera had become a populist, mass-appeal art form. In the streets, Italians sang Verdi’s “Va, pensiero” as a political statement about reunification. How many more became symbols of entire historical movements? Many thought that the arrival of film would make opera obsolete, but they said the same thing about painting when photography became popular. In fact, the structure, tropes, character types, and expressive language of opera insinuated themselves into film from the very beginning.
Movies are permeated with operatic tropes. Wagner’s music of “love-death” in Tristan and Isolde informs the sound world not only of fantasy films like Excalibur but of classics like Vertigo. There are opera references in films all the time, but there are times when it’s more than just reference, but inextricably intertwined with the substance of the film itself: Godfather 3 is unthinkable without Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. The use of Boïto’s Mefistofele in Batman Begins turns the film and the opera into metaphors for each other. As a film audience we’re absolutely impoverished when we don’t see the connections. It’s not just about getting the in-jokes.
Perhaps it’s true that opera is dying in the places where it originated: here, it’s exciting, and it’s saying new things.
And there are emotional experiences that can only happen in opera. When the end of Figaro transforms a sitcom farce into a powerful celebration of compassion, forgiveness and shared humanity, it’s because of Mozart — because it’s an opera. When in Rigoletto, a duke tries to seduce an assassin’s sister, the sister goes along with the seduction to lure the duke to his death, the man who hired the assassin is pointing out to his daughter that the duke is a cad, and the daughter is both in love and in shock — and all those things happen simultaneously — it works because it’s an opera. All four of those characters pour out their contradictory feelings at the same time and it’s not chaos — it’s stunning, heartrending harmony. You can’t do this in any other art form.
Every time I watch this scene, it’s different. Different singers, different conductor, different characterization, different staging, even different wrong notes! Yet another meaning to be squeezed out from this potent raw material. No matter how many times I watch Dune, Chalamet will never give a different line reading. There’s always more to be read into any classic film the more times you watch it, but the evolution is in the observer, not in the finished object.
Actually, I think there’s a much bigger issue at stake — it’s the balkanization of our culture. What used to be a huge collective cultural consciousness has been fragmenting and separating out into mini-cultures that don’t communicate with each other. That’s why our cultural diet needs to encompass more than one genre.
One of the last and most powerful intersections in the arts, where cross-fertilization and creative renewal can and should happen, is between film and opera. Opera has always had a lot to teach film, and recently the reverse has also been true.
Preserving opera is about evolving opera, not about keeping it in a museum. In Europe, they’ve done La Bohème in outer space and Il Seraglio with watersports. (Lines around the block as soon as people knew there would be kinky sex.) I’ve done a few things like that, like setting Aïda during the Thai-Burmese War of the 16th Century, and Tosca during the French colonization of Southeast Asia. Both these settings made local people aware that these were not remote stories of an alien land, and allowed the music to speak unfettered and directly to the heart (though I was roundly condemned as well). But in composing my own operas, I have learned the most from the language of film. From the faster pace of modern movies to the ability to dissolve between locations and states of mind, and even the application of the classic three-act Hollywood structure to opera, I’ve stolen liberally from the art of moviemaking. In fact, I’m writing an opera right now that is an adaptation of Plan 9 from Outer Space. Because you can’t help but hero-worship someone [Plan 9 director Ed Wood] who doesn’t let anything stand in the way of their vision — even lack of talent.
Offhanded or deliberately provocative though his remarks might have been, I feel that Chalamet did say something meaningful, whether he meant to or not. Opera is going to survive no matter what anyone says, because it contains a body of work that is a proven testament to the human condition. But — just like film — as a living art form, it has to reinvent itself constantly. It’s doing so right now. From where I’m standing, more and more people are going to the opera, often discovering it for the first time. Perhaps one day we’ll end up exporting the revolution back to the west.
S.P. Somtow is a novelist and opera composer who is the artistic director of Opera Siam. He has occasionally dabbled in filmmaking. The Maestro: A Symphony of Terror, a film he recently wrote, was dubbed “Mr Holland’s Opus meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” by The Hollywood Reporter.
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