1. modern-opera
At the beginning of the twentieth century, when modernism started to undermine the
fundamental grammar of music, some of the aspects that underpinned the workings of opera
inevitably was the target of attack, too. Although some composers continued to write operas
where the symbiotic relationship regarding the music, the words and the drama they
presented was very similar as it had been for the last Three hundred yrs, others took the
chance to ponder on common assumptions about dramatic format, and the role of music
there. In the years right after the world war ii a whole demographic of younger avant garde
composers considered opera with doubt. It was an outmoded form of art, they decided, too
heavily indebted to the past. Composers who still discovered it had something to deliver
(Benjamin Britten and Hans Werner Henze, for example) were normally regarded with
contempt. Progressively, however, attitudes softened until the bulk of those former hard-
liners became basically reconciled with the form, no matter if they had to reimagine it in their
own conditions.
With the cave in of tonality, music had lost much of its narrative potential, they reasoned, and
so storytelling need no longer be a precondition of opera either. The music activity would still
include, service and bolster the onstage drama, but that drama didn't have to be linear:
scenes could continue concurrently (as in Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten, 1965),
produce varied variations of the same story (Harrison Birtwistle's The Mask of Orpheus), tell
no story at all (Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach) or dispense with a text entirely
(Wolfgang Rihm's Séraphin, 1995).
Additional composers reimagined the form rather differently. For them, the imperatives were
less visual than economic. In the Sixties and Seventies opera was a very pricey art form to
put on, and "difficult" new opera, which certainly tempted scaled-down viewers, was higher
priced still. Opportunities to write full-length operas complete with a chorus and full-blown
orchestra were rare, and so composers hunted for more cost-effective options, which were
ideally named as music theatre. With roots in works by composers as varied as Monteverdi
(Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda), Stravinsky (The Soldier's Tale) and Kurt Weill
(Happy End), these types of stripped-down pieces normally had just a solitary protagonist (a
singer or an actor), used a chamber ensemble as opposed to a full orchestra and specified to
be delivered in concert halls, with a minimum of set and props. Subsequently, on the other
hand, limitations have confused even more, and with the usage of new technologies, along
with the incorporation of film or real-time movie and digital consumer electronics into the
work, identifying what is opera and just what music theatre is oftentimes quite challenging.
modern opera, opera festivals