The Bus to Hell: On Yuval Sharon
Peter O'Brien reviews Yuval Sharon's A New Philosophy of Opera
A New Philosophy of Opera, Yuval Sharon
Liveright Publishing: A Division of W. W. Norton, New York, 2024 / 305 PP. $29.00
Review by Peter O’Brien
Weaving in and out of August and September just past, two disruptive and generative operatic phenomena occurred: New York’s Metropolitan Opera announced a new Ring Cycle, to be directed by Yuval Sharon and presented over the 2027–2030 seasons; and Sharon’s first book, A New Philosophy of Opera, appeared from our oldest and largest employee-owned publishing house, W. W. Norton. Both events have the potential to change the past, present, and future of this grandly inclusive and most misapprehended of artforms.
Winner of a MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called Genius Award) in 2017 at the age of 37, Sharon has been anatomizing and disturbing the operatic world for some time. His 2013 production of Invisible Cities, by composer and librettist Christopher Cerronne, took place in Los Angeles’s Union Station, which remained in operation throughout the performance; in 2015 he premiered Hopscotch: A Mobile Opera for 24 Cars, which fed upon Julio Cortázar’s experimental and rearrangeable novel Hopscotch, with the audience transported among various locations throughout LA by otherwise underused limousines; and in 2022 for the Detroit Opera he presented Puccini’s La Bohème in reverse order, Act IV to Act I, disrupting our traditional “operatic fetishization” of the opera and exploring its non-linear, circular, and unsettling nature.
Within the pages of A New Philosophy of Opera, and the accompanying 35-item playlist available on Spotify, Sharon wants nothing more than to redefine and fortify the live operatic traditions that we have somewhat unwittingly inherited, and to inspire (yes, that ancient word is appropriate here) new, poetical, ambiguous, and transcendent ways of building and rebuilding classical and contemporary operas.
With a wandering and free-form intellectual wit, Sharon begins his book by imagining opera ceasing to exist forty or fifty years from now. This encourages him to hypothesize the form being reborn, both re-viewed and protean:
A philosophy of opera – a faith in what it is and a vision for what it can be – animates everything I do as an opera director … Mine is a philosophy without a system – because opera is an art form that is most exciting when it is unpredictable and unsystematic. While systems of philosophy attempt to classify, I think a philosophy of opera should constantly de-classify [italics his].
He wants this new, evolutionary process of opera to begin “right now.” Classical opera is replete, of course, with death and dying, sometimes histrionic and melodramatic, at other times shocking and disquieting. Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Puccini’s Tosca, Poulenc’s Dialogue des Carmélites, Adam’s The Death of Klinghoffer – all are meant to enliven our thoughts and reflections of and on death. Always the disruptor, Sharon proposes that all the current “diamantine, frozen views of opera, widely on display most anywhere you look” need to “stop ‘dying’ and actually die.” As he writes: “Die, so that opera can be reborn.”
Wary and aware that many audiences for opera initially waver between “boredom and incomprehension,” Sharon is always on the aesthetic lookout for what works and what doesn’t in the repertoire. Recounting an early exposure to Wagner’s Parsifal as a young boy, Sharon speaks of such inaugural reactions: that everyone else in the audience “seems to know exactly what to do: when to clap and, more important, when not to clap; what to look for and what to appreciate; which aspects, strange as they seem, are not to be questioned. If at the end you don’t understand a thing, then you are nothing but a fool.” He wants to shake off “the dead layers suffocating the spirit and question everything that has settled into routine.” As a director consumed by fertile imaginings, he wants to question everything that he has been given – including such seminal chestnuts as Handel, Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner – and “liberate the spirit of the music, to present it in a way that’s completely of the moment.”
Well, how best to accomplish this liberation when the form itself has a well-trodden reputation for being arcane, stuffy, overly intellectual, excessively convoluted, or (heavens forbid!) sentimental, silly, or just plain annoying? One way to capture and perhaps exploit new audiences for opera is to summon up another of those ancient words: feelings. The German philosopher Alexander Kluge, writes Sharon, “famously called opera ‘the power plant of feelings,’ and perhaps no other art form offers the same opportunity of releasing and sharing emotions – complex, powerful, and elemental ones. Certainly no other art form allows them to appear as confusing as they are.”
With some length, Sharon discusses the artificiality of opera, including the exaggerated singing, the use of foreign languages, the elaborate costumes, and the spectacular lighting. But mostly the authentic energy revolves around exploring honesty and truth. Sharon quotes an extended interview he had with the German soprano Waltraud Meier. He references opera as such an artificial medium and then asks, “How do you find honesty in it?” She responds:
Yes, opera has many artificial layers, but at its core, it’s all about love, hatred, betrayal – all those things that will always be with us. We can wear lots of costumes, but the essence of it surpasses all time. Generations after us will experience the same problems we do. And if you concentrate on that essence, then you have something to say. You’re on stage, looking out to see Mrs. Smith in Row 15, and you tell her how you were betrayed by your lover, you tell her how it hurts. And then you have the truth!
Bob Dylan, quoted here by Sharon, accentuates similar elemental fascinations, even about what might first appear as the quotidian:
“There is something very freeing about hearing a song sung in a language that you don’t understand,” [says Dylan in his book The Philosophy of Modern Song]. “Go see an opera and the drama leaps off the page even if you don’t understand a word … Sometimes you can hear a song so full of emotion that you feel your heart ready to burst and when you ask someone to translate it the lyrics are as mundane as ‘I cannot find my hat.’ ”
For Sharon, this Dylan observation invokes Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, where a minor character sings about a lost pin: “I have lost it, unhappy me. / Who knows where it can be? / I cannot find it, I have lost it! / And my cousin, and my Lord … / What will he say?” Sharon notes that Mozart wrote music for these words with a “heartbreaking and mournful melody, the saddest music in an otherwise sunny opera.”
Whereas most of us think of opera as the rightful, the principal home for the music, and perhaps secondarily for the libretto, Sharon really tucks into his themes, his desires, when he articulates the centrality of the opera director, his occupation and expertise. “Opera’s inherent complexity and layers of signification,” he writes, “give the art form a singular and vital fascination: as a place for multiplicity of meaning, for indeterminacy and ultimately enchantment.” This space, and the director’s attendant role, is his real focus. There are, of course, directors who have been instrumental in articulating, sometimes radically, the way classical and contemporary operas have been graphically and theatrically presented and received over the centuries. But it has really just been over the past fifty years or so that directors have taken on, or insisted on, an inextricable, umbilical role in opera productions. Peter Brook, Tobias Kratzer, Phelim McDermott, Annilese Miskimmon, Peter Sellars, Lydia Steier, Robert Wilson, Francesca Zambello, among others, have helped to redefine and reconfigure operas from the inherited, standard repertoire, and have helped invent new works whose thematic underpinnings and storylines could never have been anticipated by Jacopo Peri (1561-1633), Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687), and George Frideric Handel (1685-1759). But none of the currently active directors, and none of the directors known for their directorial input over the past 400+ years, have published a manifesto that also doubles as a guidebook.
Wayfinding his way through this enterprise, Sharon discusses the three distinct tracks or elements of an opera – musical, literary, production – as three distinct “authors.” If the authors of the music and librettic tracks are living, then the three tracks, says Sharon, have equal weight and intersect with each other. If they are deceased, “as is the case with most operas produced today,” then the director “has the licence to take whatever means necessary to make the piece come to life – including cutting, rearranging, and editing.” Sharon gives himself permission to superintend however he sees fit. And this enabling enactment is encouraged for all directors, as long as “directors … understand that a production is only interesting if it intersects the other two elements in an unstable [italics his] relationship.” At other moments in the book, he uses the words “undefinable,” “ambiguous,” “indeterminant,” and “multitudinous” to define this relationship.
“What, you might ask, could I possibly have done to receive this kind of public shaming,” he asks at one point to usher forth a directorial discussion of his 2019 production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Berlin Staatsoper Unter den Linden. Sharon considers the opera his favorite, and he acknowledges that it is Germany’s most beloved opera. But “nothing in The Magic Flute is what it seems,” he says, and navigating one’s way through and around the story’s sudden and confounding shifts of perception, its inner alchemy, and its continuous fortune changes and inner-reversals, can leave the audience’s sympathies scrambling to keep up. (The opera does indeed have adaptive and multivalent potential: in December 2024, Berlin experienced three different productions of The Magic Flute from its three main houses – in the same week.)
With such limitless potential embedded in the story, coming up with and crafting a production that would “constantly unsettle the audience and ask for continuous renegotiations of their own experience,” Sharon settled on a marionette theatre, with the singing actors as life-sized puppets. And then, of course, he pushes things further. The theatre would be anchored in the visual notion of a collage, with Tamina and Pamina seeming to be fashioned out of wood, with bright red boots reminiscent of the manga character Astro Boy; the slaves were onyx robots from Star Wars and S&M clubs; the Three Ladies serving the Queen of the Night were neon heads emerging from one voluptuous naked body; and the Three Boys, perched on a cloud, wore “see no evil” / “hear no evil” / “speak no evil” monkey masks. All these, combined with various other fantastical directorial decisions, proved too much for the audience, which started to boo at the end of Act 1, and welcomed the performance’s final bows with a “wall of sound that” that was “unlike anything I’d faced before.”
Witnessing such a reaction, Sharon revised and recast the opera for its next iteration three years later. He simplified and clarified his intents, making use of a tiny puppet theatre to encourage the audience to follow him in his chosen direction. The subsequent showing of the opera was met with the audience rising to their feet to cheer. He did absorb a valuable lesson, courtesy of a remark recounted by Meredith Monk when she was working on a production of her opera, ATLAS, for which she served as the librettist, composer, and choreographer. An actor had told her: “The audience will go with you to hell and back. But the bus has to say ‘Hell’ on it.”
Wagner has long been a soulful interest of Sharon’s, and with his 2018 production of Lohengrin he became the first American to direct at the famed Bayreuther Festspiele. He also will be directing a new production of Tristan und Isolde at the Met next year, 2026. Noting that some operas “make the ineffable their subject matter,” Sharon calls Tristan “the single hardest work in the traditional repertoire to stage.” He highlights how, in Act II,
an hour-long love duet examining the philosophical possibilities of individuals melting into some new entity gives way, almost comically, to action dispatched in thirty seconds. It’s as if Wagner can’t really be bothered with the narrative and prefers to focus on the way his music chisels out of air the most subtle gradations of a transcendental experience.
And all eyes, ears, and (sometimes hard-to-please and mutable) sympathies will be on him for his four-opera, fifteen-hour Ring Cycle, scheduled for the end of the decade. Der Ring des Nibelungen (Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung) is rightly considered the high-water mark of the operatic form, the deepest well of informed understanding and appreciation. A new Ring Cycle is always a challenge for the ages, or at least the immediate next age.
Whether or not current and new audiences will accompany him on this reconstituted multi-act adventure is still unwritten and unsung, but there is no denying Sharon’s bravery and luxuriant force of will. It does take some courage to ruffle and reshape the forms that we think we all already well know. And it does take some bold fortitude to encourage new audiences to accompany you. Sharon casts his benevolent imaginings both forward and backward to the very beginning of the form, when it was called not “opera” but “favola in musica” or a fable told through music (as in the composer Claudio Monteverdi’s and the poet Alessandro Strigio’s L’Orfeo, which premiered in 1607 during the Carnival Season on Mantua). I await, with bated breath, or perhaps, more accurately, with enthusiastic and inquisitive anticipation, Sharon’s continuing operatic pursuits.
Whatever Sharon has up his magical, paradoxical, transcendent sleeves for his new Met Ring Cycle, the productions are sure to be marvelous – both for our outer sensual pleasures and our hungry inner lives. Richard Wagner, “drunk on the future,” says Sharon, did not want his own children to blindly follow in his footsteps. “Create new things!” he told them. And Yuval Sharon, a very good listener and an adventurous creator, will surely continue on the newly cadenced pathways he is continuously communicating and bringing to extravagant life.
