Dialogues des Carmelites is among my favorite operas for its depictions of faith and fear. Christianity - especially Catholicism - likes to depict martyrdom as a courageous show of faith in spite of fear, but usually fails to show the real fear that any person would feel in the face of certain death. It is a better image in the church's mind to show the power of faith, rather than exemplify real, flawed people that flee in terror from the very thought of death.
It is one of the reasons why Shusaku Endo's novel Silence is so moving for me. The two priests in that story follow a somewhat similar journey to Blanche and Constance of tested faith and fear in the face of real persecution. The end results of their journey are fascinating.
Yeah, she becomes a martyr almost by accident. And the priest (and I think one of the nuns who isn't rounded up with the others?) watches them all go to the guillotine but doesn't join them himself. I think about that too.
This is perhaps a dumb question, but with operas like this and Nixon in China, which were written within the past century, these haven't entered the public domain, right? Is that a factor in which contemporary(-ish) operas get staged a lot and thus enter the "canon" - or is there already a consensus forming around what work from our lifetimes will last purely based on artistic merit? (Is there an equivalent of the thing Legitimate Theatre companies will do where, in lieu of staging a play about contemporary issues by a living, royalties-seeking playwright, they'll do a "modern-day" staging of Julius Caesar where all the actors are dressed like coal miners wearing maga hats or whatever?)
Not dumb! I don't think public domain status is really a factor in what gets staged — operas written post-WWI are less frequently staged simply because they're generally less popular with audiences. Usually, in the season of a major opera company, familiar and popular works (La Traviata, Butterfly, etc) subsidize the more contemporary works, which are a tougher sell. The Metropolitan Opera has recently had some success with new works, but that's a rarity and they've usually been able to attach star names. It's definitely common to do "modern" or unconventional stagings of older works — in some parts of Europe you're more likely to see a non-traditional staging than a traditional one — but those can be risky with audiences too. A new opera has a tough time entering the standard repertoire. I think the sign is whether it can regularly fill seats in regional houses, a decade after its premiere, without a big name attached.
Dialogues des Carmelites is among my favorite operas for its depictions of faith and fear. Christianity - especially Catholicism - likes to depict martyrdom as a courageous show of faith in spite of fear, but usually fails to show the real fear that any person would feel in the face of certain death. It is a better image in the church's mind to show the power of faith, rather than exemplify real, flawed people that flee in terror from the very thought of death.
It is one of the reasons why Shusaku Endo's novel Silence is so moving for me. The two priests in that story follow a somewhat similar journey to Blanche and Constance of tested faith and fear in the face of real persecution. The end results of their journey are fascinating.
Yeah, she becomes a martyr almost by accident. And the priest (and I think one of the nuns who isn't rounded up with the others?) watches them all go to the guillotine but doesn't join them himself. I think about that too.
This is perhaps a dumb question, but with operas like this and Nixon in China, which were written within the past century, these haven't entered the public domain, right? Is that a factor in which contemporary(-ish) operas get staged a lot and thus enter the "canon" - or is there already a consensus forming around what work from our lifetimes will last purely based on artistic merit? (Is there an equivalent of the thing Legitimate Theatre companies will do where, in lieu of staging a play about contemporary issues by a living, royalties-seeking playwright, they'll do a "modern-day" staging of Julius Caesar where all the actors are dressed like coal miners wearing maga hats or whatever?)
Not dumb! I don't think public domain status is really a factor in what gets staged — operas written post-WWI are less frequently staged simply because they're generally less popular with audiences. Usually, in the season of a major opera company, familiar and popular works (La Traviata, Butterfly, etc) subsidize the more contemporary works, which are a tougher sell. The Metropolitan Opera has recently had some success with new works, but that's a rarity and they've usually been able to attach star names. It's definitely common to do "modern" or unconventional stagings of older works — in some parts of Europe you're more likely to see a non-traditional staging than a traditional one — but those can be risky with audiences too. A new opera has a tough time entering the standard repertoire. I think the sign is whether it can regularly fill seats in regional houses, a decade after its premiere, without a big name attached.