Ambivalent Engagement: contemporary opera between populism and the postmodern

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Hauke Berheide
Amy Stebbins

Abstract

Today, the relationship between opera and society could best be described as ‘displaced’—at least in the German-speaking countries. As an institution, opera has become a ‘Repertoirebetrieb’ that hires living stage directors to make popular works from the 18th and 19th centuries palatable through their scenic recontextualization, despite the racism, sexism and otherwise questionable ideology of these works. The critical approach of this mode of stage direction creates space for the discomfort of ideological regression and, at the same time, fends off such discomfort, ultimately saving the work—untouched in its musical and textual structure—for the enjoyment of and commercial business with that regression. At the same time, these institutions also commission and perform new operas, which disappear after their world premiere, never to be integrated into the seemingly closed opera canon. These new operas suffer, in particular, from two ambivalences: i) the institutional ambivalence of opera houses towards these works; ii) the ambivalence of the new operas (and their creators) towards their audiences, which manifests, for example, in a kind of prejudice against categories such as narrative, identification and pleasure.  


In this article, German composer Hauke Berheide and US-American director/librettist Amy Stebbins propose an aesthetics of ‘ambivalent engagement’ as a conceptual framework for constructing narratives in contemporary opera. The article begins with an historical overview of the aesthetics and institutional parameters of postwar opera in the German-speaking context, giving particular attention to its role in the public sphere. To this end, it refers to operas by Helmut Lachenmann, Olga Neuwirth/ Catherine Filous, Beat Furrer/ Händl Klaus, Anno Schreier/ Kerstin Maria Pöhler, and David T. Little/ Royce Vavrek. Using examples from their own opera Mauerschau (Bavarian State Opera, 2016), the authors show how the reflexive and intermedial character of opera lends itself to large-scale narratives that call attention to their own inner contradictions. In this way, Berheide and Stebbins seek to demonstrate opera’s unique potential to make current issues, such as the rise of neo-fascism, sensorially understandable without slipping into the populist affirmations particularly present in contemporary American opera.

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Author Biographies

Hauke Berheide

Hauke Berheide is a classical composer known especially for opera and Lied. Recent commissions include: The People Out There (Oper Frankfurt), Hölderin Lieder (International Hugo Wolf Academy), and Icaro(Duisburg Philharmonic). Awards include: the Munich Opera Festival Prize, the “Rome Prize” (Villa Massimo), The Missing Link Prize of the Psychoanalytic Seminar in Zurich, Music Theater NOW, and the NRW Förderpreis. His work has been performed by ensembles such as the Düsseldorf Symphony Orchestra, the Hamburg Philharmonic, Ensemble Modern, and by musicians such as Oksana Lyniv, Axel Kober, Maximilian Hornung, and Michael Boder. He studied with Manfred Trojahn, and José Maria Sanchez Verdú. (Stand 2021)

Amy Stebbins

Amy Stebbins is a director and librettist working at the intersection of contemporary opera, new media and scholarship. She has created world premieres for institutions like the Oper Frankfurt and the Bavarian State Opera. Fellowships include: the German Chancellor Fellowship, the Academy Opera Today, and the Fulbright Association. Together with Hauke Berheide, she co-founded New Opera Dialogues, an artist-led platform for international exchange about contemporary opera. She also serves on the jury of the Academy for Theatre and Digitality. Her publications address issues in new opera, identity politics, and stage acting. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and a B.A. from Harvard. (Stand 2021)