If your only experiences with opera are limited to seemingly endless multi-hour immersions, subservient to subtitles, feeling like the performers might as well be singing a software manual, you owe it to yourself to see how Yuval Sharon works.
“Even if it's music from 400 years ago,” he asks in his new book, A New Philosophy of Opera, “how can the presentation of them still convey a sense of our active dialogue?”
The artistic director of Detroit Opera, and recipient of a MacArthur grant, is as creative in his approach to story as he is ruthless about breaking traditional rules of operatic staging.
When he made his debut in 2018 at Germany’s stories Bayreuth Festival – the first American ever invited to direct there - he won rave reviews for recasting the Grail Knight as an electrician, caught in the deficiencies of the modern world. Arriving in Detroit, Sharon revitalized audiences with works staged against the city skyline, or inside crumbling architectural treasures, He’s infused fresh ideas into both new work and well-loved, well-worn classics.
Sharon said that this constant reinvention might seem radical to some modern opera lovers, but change was what audiences demanded of the art form in its early days.
"Up until the 19th century, it would have been unheard of to do an opera that was, 20 years old. They just wouldn't do it, you know? And they certainly wouldn't do it without cuts, without rearranging things, without transposing things for individual singers. You know, the idea that an audience in the 17th and 18th centuries were just crazed for the sense of novelty.”
In the course of his research, Sharon also discovered how important new and exciting stage design was for opera’s early audiences. They wanted a spectacle—something that Sharon said is just as true of opera’s appeal to modern audiences.
For people newer to opera, Sharon admitted the art form’s approach to storytelling can be a little confusing. It’s not going to be the straightforward, linear approach audiences are used to in television and film. But Sharon made the case that narrative is just one of the many layers of experience that opera offers its audience members.
“If we're coming to opera only for storytelling, I think people are going to be really, disappointed and confused," he said. "So instead of that, it's just thinking, you know, opera creates a space in which there is some storytelling, but there's also things like mood, and there's emotion, and there is landscape, and there are so many other things that are happening inside an opera.”
The Detroit Opera opens its 2024-2025 season October 19 with La Traviata. Yuval Sharon has extended his contract with the company.
“I feel very, very proud of what we've been able to accomplish together so far,” he said. “And so let's push a little further. Let's see what else we could do together.”
