Music: Opera's Next Act
Originally published in The Walrus. Read the full text here.
Few scenes from Greek mythology are as well known as Orpheus’s descent into the underworld. After the death of his wife, Eurydice, the hero plays music so beautiful it moves the gods, and they permit him to enter the shadowy realm and retrieve his late love. At an empty theatre at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity last July, nine musicians attempted to conjure the moment when Orpheus enters the hellscape. But their sound was weak—hardly the eardrum-rattling sensation such a scene demands. Topher Mokrzewski, music director and founding member of the Toronto opera company Against the Grain, paced the auditorium shaking his head. “We need the intensity of a rock concert, but we’re sounding like Tafelmusik,” he said, referencing the genre of light orchestral work typically played at dinner parties.
The show he was rehearsing, Orphée+, is a coproduction by Against the Grain and the Ohio-based Opera Columbus. It is based on Hector Berlioz’s nineteenth-century French opera Orphée et Eurydice, which was itself adapted from an earlier work by Christoph Willibald Gluck. At Banff, the production was due to open in six days, and two of Mokrzewski’s players had yet to arrive. But even when the band reached its full size of eleven, it would be nowhere near the forty-odd-person orchestra for which Berlioz wrote his score.
Against the Grain, which was created in 2010 by artistic director Joel Ivany along with Mokrewski and artistic advisor and soprano Miriam Khalil, is not a traditional opera company. It uses small casts and a range of atypical strategies—which can include amplification, electrification, and pre-recorded tracks—as a means of scaling big operas down into lean, economical productions. For Orphée+, Mokrzewski hired sound designer John Gzowski, who created a suite of abrasive effects, with names such as “stabs” and “hell gurgles,” to compensate for the lack of orchestral firepower. In traditional opera, the use of electronic sounds is akin to heresy, but even with these irregular elements, the musicians weren’t producing enough noise.
On a whim, Mokrzewski asked the players to clear out so stage hands could bring the orchestra pit closer to floor level, making the sound seem fuller. He’d raise the pit again in the days to come, and his sound technician ensured that the synthesizer and electric guitar—two nonoperatic instruments that composer Lauren Spavelko included in the score—were suitably audible in the mix. The tweaks worked: by opening night, at last, hell sounded sufficiently hellish.
Opera is generally known as a grandiose genre that is performed without amplification in large halls that can seat thousands. To create the necessary volume, producers need vast resources: fifty or sixty musicians, forty-person choruses, and a small army of stage hands and technicians. The immensity of the art form is also its albatross, as putting on a full production is incredibly expensive. (The Canadian Opera Company in Toronto—the country’s biggest producer—spent $17.8 million on shows in its 2016-17 season.) In the past two decades, changing cultural tastes and dwindling audiences have left many North American companies in dire financial straits.
“When you’re a classical musician,” says Mokrzewski, “it’s instilled in you early on that you’re not meant to fuck with the culture. You’re the defender of a tradition.” He contends, however, that in the current arts economy, bucking centuries-old conventions may be the best way to keep opera alive, particularly in markets where the genre is most imperilled. Against the Grain’s founders want their work to be imposing where necessary—a descent into hell must sound like a descent into hell—but they contend that opera is still opera, even when it’s small.
This is an excerpt. Read the full text here.