Forget the fat ladies singing — today’s opera is for everyone

Clemency Burton-Hill: 'Opera is being reclaimed as art for the people'
BBC/Jude Edginton
Clemency Burton-Hill4 October 2017
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Say the word “opera” and you may well imagine an oversized, wobbly soprano shattering a chandelier with the force of single note. What probably doesn’t spring to mind is more than a quarter of a million people lining the streets of Milan and singing, as one, the chorus from a smash-hit 1841 opera, Nabucco.

But that was the scene at Giuseppe Verdi’s funeral back in 1901: not only were his tunes the pop songs of the day but his works appealed to people of all backgrounds with their heady mix of passion and politics, love and loss.

Verdi knew, as the great Broadway musical writers would come to know, that when it comes to socking it to an audience there is no more potentially powerful art form than opera, which combines music, drama, stagecraft, design, and vocal and physical athleticism in one intoxicating cocktail.

Somewhere along the line, though, opera has developed an image problem, often assumed to be exclusive, inaccessible and a bit silly, what with the ludicrous plots — the cross-dressing, the lust, the murder, the revenge. But Shakespeare is as guilty of a mad plotline as any opera composer (indeed his work has inspired some 200 operas) and if the acting is good enough — something opera directors are increasingly obsessed by — the suspension of disbelief can be as fully attained in an opera house as at a theatre.

When tenor Allan Clayton sang Hamlet in a new opera at Glyndebourne this summer, one critic said: “Forget Cumberbatch. Forget even Gielgud.” This was the most emotionally astute Dane he’d seen.

No doubt there are hardcore fans who think opera is for the few, not the many, but it’s being reclaimed as art for the people. On Saturday the V&A launched Opera: Passion, Power and Politics, an exhibition which tells the story of Europe through seven operas, from Monteverdi’s game-changing The Coronation of Poppea in 1642 — the first time an opera had been based on real people — to Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsenk District in 1934, considered so powerful by Stalin it was banned for 30 years.

Meanwhile, the BBC’s ambitious, multi-platform opera season in October incorporates performance, documentaries, experiments into the science of opera, star turns and a day of live streaming involving opera companies from across the UK, promising to inspire a new generation of opera lovers. Turn up, tune in — and have your ears opened, your mind blown and your heart broken.

Clemency Burton-Hill presents Verdi’s Otello from the Royal Opera House on BBC4 on Oct 15 as part of the BBC Opera Season (bbc.co.uk). She is also a presenter on Radio 3. Her book, Year of Wonder: Classical Music for Every Day, is published tomorrow by Headline.

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