In a surprising turn of events that one reporter described as Shakespearean, Justice Charles Hackland has ordered Toronto Mayor Rob Ford to be removed from office for violating conflict of interest rules. The outspoken mayor's plight may in fact be more operatic than theatrical, and leaves us wondering if history has inadvertently written a final act for Rob Ford, The Opera.
Last winter, the University of Toronto's Opera Student Composer Collective mounted a wildly popular production of its opera based on the life of Ford. Music critic Lev Bratishenko reviewed the production for CBC Music on Feb. 27, and asked why we don't see more opera based on current events. Why indeed?
Rob Ford, The Opera premiered last month in a one-off production to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Opera Student Composer Collective at the University of Toronto. The partisan audience had not come for opera, but for ideas and relief, and the MacMillan Theatre at the faculty of music was unprepared for the need. Ford supporters were not obvious in a line that crowded the lobby, the hallways and the bathrooms, gleefully anticipating the skewering their controversial mayor was about to receive, like a voodoo doll, in absentia.
The cathartic libretto was by a known, Michael Patrick Albano, and the music by four student composers, Massimo Guida, Anna Höstman, Adam Scime and Saman Shahi. The singers were all voice students with the exception of Andrew Haji as Rob Ford, who came via the genetics lab.
Bracketed as a classroom production, the afternoon was a fantastic success. The music was interesting but not difficult, the satire sophisticated enough to hit tragic notes, and while most of the singers were very promising, all were too young for bad acting habits. The audience went bananas. My seat neighbour wept from laughter.
Afterwards, I reflected in a corner until I was certain that I’d never felt this electricity at a normal performance. But if topicality is the obvious explanation, and people are so hungry for topical opera, why isn’t there more of it?
A scene from the Metropolitan Opera's 2011 production of John Adams's Nixon in China, composed in 1987, and based on U.S. President Richard Nixon's historic 1972 visit to the People's Republic of China.
Contemporary opera works few and far between
A Google of recent and current productions at major Canadian companies shows few contemporary works among them: Kaija Saariaho’s Love from Afar in Toronto, written in 2000 about 12th-century troubadours; The Barber of Barrhead in Edmonton set during the gold rush; the semi-pro Maritime Concert Opera premiering a work by local composer Mary Knickle on the urgent issue of Morgan Le Fay. Tapestry, in Toronto, always presents exciting new work but favours fiction to fictionalization, such as opera about the immigrant experience and not about Felicia Abimbola Akinwalere.
Yet these efforts still will not attract the attention given to Rob Ford (they certainly did not attract the attention of Rob Ford) and did not introduce as many people to opera’s delights and eccentricities. How much should opera reach out is an interesting question, but I would ask another one: Can there be a contemporary performing art without a proportion of contemporary works in the repertoire?
I think not. Opera, as most of us experience it, is not a contemporary art, not something that you lose anything by missing. It is most often a luxury. But opera loses something when it is limited to the few who appreciate spectacular performances of 150-year-old works. The most pathetic moment in Rob Ford was early for me, when baby Rob sings about losing the self-assurance of youth, of a world that revolves around him. Clever and funny, it also brought a partisan audience (momentarily) closer to their enemy. There are few arts that do tragicomedy so well.
Starchy staples of international opera no more effective now
So opera can change perspectives, and this is partially why classic works have survived, for their timeless themes of love, loss and the position of the individual in society. Many of the 30 works or so that are the starchy staples of international opera can do this, but none of them is more effective now than when they were written. Embalmed, they lose affective power, and their dominance as big traditional productions in the repertoire may be harmful to the art.
It will be difficult to go back to the museum after a taste of a living art, of composers, librettists, singers and producers working together to create something remarkable. Do we really have to?
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