Opera Doesn’t Have to Be for Elites. Here’s Why.

Is opera a standard-bearer or a pallbearer of the status quo?

It’s easy to assume the former: From its less-than-humble origins as a private event in Italian courts over 400 years ago, opera boasted a spare-no-expense theatricality that projected the power and wealth of the work’s supporting patrons. Spectacle was a form of political justification, and extravagance became self-serving. Before long, the equating of display and dominance seeped into opera’s DNA.

Today, opera still seems to many a reflection of a hierarchical and exclusionary society.

Thinking about opera as burying or at least challenging the status quo may seem antithetical to its nature. Yet opera always fares best when it goes against the grain: flaunting resistance to the beauty standards erected by mass media; fitting uneasily, if at all, with the rapid demands of the attention economy; feeling completely out of place with how we consume other art.

For every composer affirming authority in their work, opera’s history offers counterexamples: creators so committed to establishing a new world order in sound that they resisted all conventions and invented their own instruments, their own ensembles or their own theaters. Opera often appears to ratify the reigning ideology, but the art form is most exciting and viable when it is a subversive act.

The status quo in opera is elitism, and the art form’s elitist tendencies (viewing audiences in large swaths differentiated by class) all too easily eclipse its aspirational potential (the art form’s ability to speak to a single spectator and support their process of individuation). To nourish opera’s aspirational quality, its ability to serve as a mechanism for imagining a different world, we need to cultivate an anti-elite approach in the spaces where opera is performed and in the way the artists create the work.

Opera was not always perceived as elitist in the United States: It wasn’t so long ago that opera singers were featured on mainstream television, like on “The Ed Sullivan Show” or “The Muppet Show.” The “Looney Tunes” sendup of Wagner remains for many as much opera as they’ve ever experienced. The director Peter Sellars once shared with me a childhood memory of a handyman pulling up to his home in a pickup truck with the Met Opera broadcast playing on his radio.

It’s easy to view this situation cynically, as though the bejeweled televised appearances of beloved sopranos like Beverly Sills and Leontyne Price represented a mainstream co-opting of opera to sell an image of upward mobility after World War II. But when Leonard Bernstein and Maria Callas appeared on prime-time television, they did not reduce classical music to a mere signifier of economic advancement.