Trends in American Opera

After listening to A View from the Bridge this week, it began to occur to me that one could divine a few trends in the operas that we have been studying this semester. It seems to me that one could begin to identify three separate branches of the ‘American opera style’, if one can really say that there is any unified sense of style in American opera at all.

The first group is minimalism. I’m going to set that aside for a bit because it is clearly its own category apart from the majority of the other works we classify as ‘American Opera’.

For the time being (because I can’t find more concise labels at the moment), I will call the other two categories “rural-themed” works and “urban-themed” works. Perhaps these are extremely naïve labels. What I mean is that on one hand we have operatic works by composers such as Copland and Floyd that are influenced by and encompass the music of the South and the Mid-West, of wide-open prairies and folk music. On the other hand, we get works like A View from the Bridge which are categorized by a certain edgy, gritty, claustrophobic feeling and a clear Jazz influence. I would argue that “rural-themed” works stem from the symphonic folk-influenced tradition of Copland, tending towards more lyric expression and that “urban-themed” works tend towards what we hinted at as being closer to a new verismo style (possibly more influenced by musical theater traditions). In any case, both of those categories aim to integrate popular, idiomatic music and sound into the operatic genre.

Despite those differences, over the semester we have seen many similarities between the operas we have studied. All of the operas have put a premium on finding that balance between the drama and the music that would make the work accessible. In the case of A View from the Bridge and Willie Stark, I would argue that the balance tipped toward the text, whereas in The Aspern Papers and Satyagraha the balance tipped toward the music. We have noticed the influence of film that has pervaded operas in terms of production design, acting/text setting style, marketing, and choice of medium (i.e. operas that were turned into films). Film influence is also clear in the apparent move of opera toward realism, wherein the characters seem closer to our own lives than elaborate fantasy or mythic characters (where have all the heroes gone?) and where happy endings seldom exist.

[Note: This idea of the division between ‘rural-themed’ and ‘urban-themed’ was sort of spurred by the observation that A View from the Bridge seemed to me to be a sort of citified version of Copland’s The Tenderland. Secondly, I have no idea where Aspern Papers falls in terms this rough division]