Building to a Crescendo

But innovation takes shape not only in new operas (few of which, as Littlejohn notes, make the cut or even have more than one run), but also in fresh perspectives of time-tested hits. Imaginative interpretations can be as shocking as setting Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro in a New York skyscraper, as avant director Peter Sellars has done, or as subtle as having singers who are better actors.

Graeme Jenkins hopes that, under his leadership, the Dallas Opera will give "another look at the masterpieces" and is striving to balance the expectations of die-hard buffs with new ideas that might draw an audience that would otherwise dismiss opera as stodgy and outdated.

More than infusing old operas with topical issues, inventive stagings like Sellars' have helped to break down preconceptions that opera is elitist and to reveal the art's connection to popular culture. From Jenkins' perspective, a modern opera like The Dream of Valentino and its story of how icons are built up and destroyed should be "highly relevant" for an "enormous, well-off youthful population looking for something to do."

But opera itself is in a "growth phase" right now, as Smith and Scorca insist. A recent study conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts indicates that of all the performing arts--including theater or dance--opera is the most rapidly growing. Almost every major city in the country has at least one opera company (Chicago, for instance, has two), and the number of performances and productions nationally has grown substantially over the past decade. Perhaps most important, opera has seduced a younger, more diverse audience--one that's between 18 and 24 years old. As Smith jokes, "It's not like the audience could get any older."

The reason for this potential growth is that opera has simply become a larger part of the pop culture. The wildly successful Broadway productions of such shows as Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables are merely opera performed in English, lowbrow masquerading as highbrow.

The Three Tenors in Concert album--featuring Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, and Jose Carreras--sold more than a million copies and went all the way to number four on the Billboard pop charts, saddled alongside Nirvana and the Eagles. And, if one needed further proof of Pavarotti's status as pop icon, he is booked into Reunion Arena--the venue of Sting and Neil Diamond. Opera is even packaged in rock music videos, which have cut and pasted the grand spectacle into three-minute segments.

"Opera has registered the most encouraging growth among younger people," Scorca gushes, "because opera really is the classical [music] manifestation of today's multimedia pop culture. If you look at music videos, which are words expanded by music further expanded by images, the raw material of today's pop music video is the raw material of opera. It's a multimedia musical expansion of the spoken word.

"I think there's a natural resonance between what young people are enjoying in their entertainment forms today and what opera has to offer. For me, the bit that I have seen on film of what Madonna does in concert is nothing but good news for opera."

Still, no matter how clever or pertinent a work might be, nothing seems to capture the attention of a larger public like a star. Along with the innovations, Jenkins acknowledges the importance of bringing in opera's superstars. After all, Pavarotti will command a Reunion Arena-size audience in February, and the loudest buzz in years about the Dallas Opera was generated by the anticipated appearance--and subsequent cancelation--of mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli.

Bartoli canceled her appearance in the Dallas Opera's mid-December production of Rossini's La Cenerentola (Cinderella) because she injured her knee during a November performance in Zurich, then fell ill with bronchitis. And that cancellation all but ruined the Dallas Opera's season--detracting from other presentations, casting a pall where there should have been only rousing applause.

The entire 1994-1995 season was built upon Bartoli's appearance here, with most of the ad revenue going to promote her, and it generated such excitement that opera fans from as far as away as Los Angeles and Nashville ordered tickets to catch a glimpse of the burgeoning superstar. To those who read headlines and know only the names of the opera world's most famous performers, of which Bartoli is one, her failure to appear here this season after so much hype hinted at some sort of failure on the opera's part.

Karayanis insists Bartoli's cancellation and the considerable coverage it received indicate "there's no such thing as bad news." After all, he says, it raised awareness about the company among an audience that perhaps did not know of, or care about, its existence.

But it may have also alienated a huge chunk of its supporters. Dallas Opera publicist Brian Chapman says the company received an enormous amount of calls from people who demanded their money back; even more phoned to vent their anger at Bartoli's cancellation, feeling they had been misled. (No refunds, however, were granted. Each ticket bore a disclaimer that offers the company an out should a featured performer not show.)