Deborah Nelson:
Good evening. Welcome to the 2025 Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Family Lectures. I'm Deborah Nelson, Dean of the Division of the Arts and Humanities. It is such a joy to be here with all of you tonight, especially Randy Berlin and her family, and with the visionary Opera Director Yuval Sharon.
Now in its 11th year, the Berlin Family Lectures have quickly become one of the world's premiere public lecture series in the arts and humanities. Each year, we're able to invite a monumental talent to enrich our campus and community life with a series of lectures that are then developed into a monograph published by the University of Chicago Press.
But before I introduce Yuval, I want to turn over the podium to another special guest with us tonight, my colleague Katherine Baicker, who serves as the university's 15th Provost. Provost Baicker is responsible for academic and research programs across the university and oversees the university budget. A leading scholar in the economic analysis of healthcare policy, she is the Emmett Dedmon Professor at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy, where she served as dean for five years prior to be appointed provost. Before coming to the University of Chicago in 2017, Provost Baicker was the C. Boyden Gray Professor of Health Economics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Social Insurance, the Counsel on Foreign Relations, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In her free time, Baicker's research focuses on the effectiveness of public and private health insurance, including the effect of reforms on the distribution and quality of care. Her research has been published widely in leading journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, Science and Nature, among others.
Welcome, Provost Baicker. Thank you for making time to be with us tonight, and helping us celebrate the Berlin family and Yuval Sharon.
Katherine Baicker:
Thank you, Debbie, for that warm introduction, and for your dedicated leadership for the arts and the humanities here at the University of Chicago. I am so excited to be with you here today for the 11th Annual Berlin Family Lectures. This is a wonderful occasion for our university to celebrate so much of the intellectual breadth that comes from the arts and the humanities, and the silo-spanning work of so many of our faculty, and to be able to have such a distinguished guest here today.
I am grateful to you, Yuval Sharon, for coming. Your recognition brings much luster to the university and to the lecture series, and offers a wonderful opportunity for all of our faculty and our students to interact over the course of your residency here. Your transformative work in opera and artistic innovation is something that I think we're eagerly looking forward to hearing about here and in a series of lectures over the coming weeks.
This was all possible because of the philanthropic generosity of some of our most important donors, the Berlin family. They've been instrumental in advance arts and humanities here at the University of Chicago over a range of endeavors, including this really important lecture series. Randy and her late husband Melvin have demonstrated remarkable generosity, supporting not only the arts and the humanities, but also the social sciences, the college, the law school, really bridging the whole span of the university. Thank you, Randy, for being here. Along with their son John Berlin, his wife Susan Berlin, along with their grandson Jesse Berlin and his wife Fernando Soledra. Thank you for being here. I'm also grateful, Randy, to your service on the Arts and Humanities Advisory Counsel as a member and as a former chair. It is wonderful to have you all with us today.
These lectures offer a platform for creative thinking and engagement with leading lights from around the world. We invite the world's most distinguished scholars, writers, or creative artists to deliver an extended lecture series, to participate in the university's intellectual community, and to develop a book for publication with the University of Chicago Press. You can all have a souvenir at the end of all of this. There may be a little delay.
Yuval is the model of the kind of thinker and creator that this series was envisioned to bring to campus. I will quote, if I may, from the 2017 MacArthur Fellowship citation praising his innovative opera work. "Sharon's dedication to realizing both contemporary and canonical operatic works beyond the constraints of traditional presentations is infusing this dramatic musical genre with a new vitality and attracting a new generation of enthusiasts and patrons." He's also here at UChicago, a Global Solutions Visiting Fellow at the Neubauer Collegium, another great institution, to bring together people from across the fields at the University of Chicago. It's generated a new production of Wagner's Ring Cycle, which is one of the most ambitious works in the history of opera, at the Metropolitan Opera. The first installment Das Rheingold is slated to be a highlight of the Met's 2027-2028 season, with additional installments forthcoming. That is a really exciting preview of things to come.
Thank you again, to the Berlin family, for your visionary support of this work here at the University of Chicago. I invite you all to of course enjoy this lecture, as well as May 13th and May 20th, and to attend the Europera 5 performance on May 20th. Thank you so much. I turned the podium back to Dean Nelson.
Deborah Nelson:
Thank you, Kate. Before I introduce Yuval, I want to share with you that next year's Berlin Family Lecture speaker will be the internationally-acclaimed writer Yiyun Li. She is the author of 11 books that have been translated into more than 20 languages and a recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award, the Windham Campbell Prize in Fiction, and a former MacArthur Fellow. The dates of the 2026 Berlin Family Lecture will be announced soon. Be sure to sign up for email updates at berlinfamilylectures.uchicago.edu.
I could not be more excited to introduce Yuval Sharon, this year's Berlin Family Lecturer. I want to echo Provost Baicker's gratitude for the Berlin family's vision and generosity that have made tonight possible. Thank you, Randy, for being with us tonight and for help making UChicago such an incredible community of scholars and artists.
Tonight's event, as well as the one next Tuesday, May 13th, will be in two parts. A prepared lecture from Yuval Sharon, followed by a conversation with the audience. The third and final event on May 20th will consist of a lecture and a performance of John Cage's Europera 5, directed by Yuval Sharon and produced by members of the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies, and sung by two of Yuval's longtime collaborators.
Tonight, and again on May 13th and 20th, we have a special and rare opportunity to hear directly from arguably not only the single-most influential opera director of this century, but also an artist and theorist who's remarkable powers of attention, interpretation, and imagination suggest profound truths about the ways in which humanistic research and artistic creation can both remake an art form and our capacities as an audience. Sharon's work has expanded the possibilities of opera. He has transported the traditional opera house into new terrains, such as parks and train stations, placed audiences in moving vehicles, and continues to create a space in which inherited assumptions between artists and audiences are actively renegotiated. His genius renews and restores the art. The smart, stunning, and emotionally powerful. It renews and restores us. Our capacity for wonder, our range of emotional intelligence, and our ability to engage and make sense of the beauty and anarchy of being.
Yuval Sharon's ever-growing accomplishments and awards would take too long to list, but it does seem a bit impolite not to mention a few. He is currently the Gary L. Wassermann artist director of the Detroit Opera, as well as the founder and co-directory of The Industry in Los Angeles. From 2016 to 2019, Sharon was the first artist collaborator at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In 2024, he received the Gotz Friedrich Prize in Germany. In 2017, a MacArthur Fellowship. And in 2023, was named Musical America's Director of the Year.
Sharon is also at work on two productions for The Metropolitan Opera. His Met debut will be a new production of Tristan and Isolde that will open next March. And Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle, a four-part epic widely acknowledged as opera's most ambitious work. This will be The Met's first new production of the Cycle in nearly 20 years, starting with Des Rheingold as the highlight of the 27-28 season.
We are especially fortunate that the Berlin Family Lectures have allowed us to bring Yuval Sharon to the University of Chicago this year. In addition to these public lectures and the closing performance of John Cage's Europera 5, the book he'll produce with the University of Chicago Press, Yuval has also been able to have an extended collaboration with our scholarly and artistic community. As the Global Solutions Fellow at the University of Chicago's Neubauer Collegium, he has worked closely with faculty and graduate students to generate the conceptualization and framework of the Ring Cycle that he'll produce at The Met.
As many of you know, this year we have formally renamed what was previously the Division of the Humanities to the Division of the Arts and Humanities. This change formally acknowledges two exciting things happening at UChicago. First, teaching and research in the humanities have remained a core pillar of the university's transformative educational experience, as well as its stature as a leading research university. Second, arts excellence at UChicago has exploded in the last 30 years, with our arts faculty becoming some of the brightest stars in the field. Indeed, you need look no further than the halls of this very building, the Logan Center for the Arts, on any given day to see the vibrancy of the arts at UChicago.
It is especially fitting that we welcome Yuval, as he presents the 2025 Berlin Family Lectures for the Division of the Arts and Humanities at UChicago. Sharon is an exemplar of our university's vision for the arts and humanities, engaging an expansive scope of human history, language, culture, and art. And creating life-changing examinations of who we have been, who we are, and who we might become, both individually and collectively. Without further ado, please join me in welcoming Yuval Sharon.
Yuval Sharon:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Hello. It is so wonderful to be here. Thank you so much for attending. It's an honor to be invited to deliver this lecture. I just want to thank Debbie and everybody that's part of this amazing series. Extending this invitation has meant a lot to me. I've been thinking about it for about a year-and-a-half. It coincided with the publication of my book, which I'll get to in a moment.
I want to start with the title of this series, Anarchy at the Opera. I chose Anarchy at the Opera, not Anarchy and the Opera, or Anarchy Outside the Opera. But really, Anarchy at the Opera, meaning that it is seated right next to other forms, like hierarchy and monarchy. It's performing on stage alongside these more polite and predictable forms of classical techniques and within the compositions. I want to introduce myself as your Opera Anarchist.
If you came to these lectures because you were wondering what on Earth an art form like opera might have to do with anarchy. Opera with its high society and high culture, what could that have in common with a political movement maybe better known for disorder, and even violence. I hope you'll leave thinking that opera might actually be a quintessentially anarchic art form. At the very least, I hope you'll agree with me that opera would be so much more exciting if we could introduce more of an anarchic quality into the performances.
Anarchy, I think for most opera lovers, and I know there are many opera lovers here in this room, when you hear the word anarchy, you probably think to yourself it's the opposite of what we love about opera. Anarchy, it might be considered in most thesauruses as equivalent to chaos, and mayhem, and mischief. Opera, on the other hand, is a home for correct behavior, correct singing, correct music. Opera seems to leave no room for the organic, the chaotic, the unpredictable emergence of what is authentically human.
Most opera performances tend to rely on a rather clockwork method of delivery in which everything is well-rehearsed and furnishes a respectable recounting of a set and finished musical score. The cliché and sometimes the reality goes that the opera house is where the well-healed will go to remember that everything in the world is in its right place.
But I don't know anyone who doesn't love it when something goes terribly wrong in a performance. Like when a singer's voice breaks, or when a trumpet cracks on a solo line. Or a prop falls and rolls into the orchestra pit. Or the livestock suddenly relieves themselves on the stage. These are the moments where the veneer of orchestrated perfection really cracks. It's the pressure and the messiness of real life finds its way in. The events on stage are suddenly scaled back to our level of humanity and there's a humbleness in that can be actually really inspiring. Because in the end, all of us are just dealing with the same sense of time, the same sense of gravity, and the same sense of physics, which can sometimes seem suspended in the world of opera.
To want more anarchy at the opera, that doesn't necessarily mean to invite more mistakes. It does mean though to open up a space within a very determined world, a highly determined musical world. Maybe there's room in that world for improvisation, for spontaneity, even pure chance. And to look for those opportunities to break down the barrier between the audience and the artist, allowing for a sense of a mutual recognition to take place.
But I won't be able to get anywhere without first defining both anarchy and opera, because most of these terms carry a lot of cultural baggage with them. That's going to be the main thrust of this particular lecture, is to parse those ideas out.
When you hear opera, I've already shown you a few maybe common images related to opera, but here are just a few more that might come to mind. It's a lot of people in gilded auditoriums and boxes, but of course it's usually a soprano dressed kind of like this one that you see down here. These are not the images that I think when I hear the word opera. I know a lot of people, they hear that word and 16th Century, 17th Century Italy really starts to come to the fore. It evokes refinement, exclusion, detachment from the world. I hear the word opera and I imagine the grace of 24 cars zig-zagging around Los Angeles. It prompts me, when I hear that word, to want to include the whole messiness of the world, lifting up its crazy beauty as a way that I think only opera really can.
Similar to this, you might hear the word anarchy and think of images like this. I hear the word anarchy now, after having done some research, and I think more of something like this. I think of a patch kind of like this that you might see around. Friendly neighborhood anarchist sounds maybe like an oxymoron. But I actually think that the issue is that anarchy is a really notorious word, a worldview that I have been describing as, maybe quite politely, but much maligned. It might more frequently conjure up those images of the Molotov cocktail being thrown, rather than the egalitarian societies that I think some of those other images might include. To be fair, both of those images are not entirely inaccurate because, after all, it was a professed anarchist who assassinated an American president.
But in a similar way, it would not be inaccurate to assign to opera both that image of the elite and stratified entertainment in stifling auditoriums, or the kind of performances that I believe really are at the heart that the future of opera could be. I could point all I want to the image of opera that's dynamic, and energetic, and surprising, non-hierarchical, but I can't deny that the word and the concept carries both of these terminologies.
When I released my book last September called A New Philosophy of Opera, the goal of the book was to offer audiences a 360-degree view of what opera is really about right now. Looking at it from the political context, the social context, the spiritual context. The economics of opera. That part's a comedy, really. But the experience of opera and the making of opera, thinking about it in all of those ways. I think the chapter that probably I heard the most feedback to was the chapter that was titled Towards an Anti-Elite Opera. Everyone, it seemed, had an opinion about this particular chapter.
I heard people say things like, "Thank you for acknowledging the biggest stumbling block that keeps me from actually going to the opera, is this image of elitism." Then I've heard also, "But you know, with so much pandering in our society and so much appeal to the lowest common denominator, isn't there one place where we could just be taken somewhere else?" Those are maybe the two extremes, but I never heard someone deny that the word opera and the notion of opera carried with it a sense of elitism.
The most generous reaction that I got ultimately repeated what I wrote about in the book, which is just because that's how it appears does not mean that that's how it has to remain. I began the chapter with a purposefully provocative question. That question is "Is opera a pall bearer or a standard bearer of the status quo?" This, for me, hearing the response to my book, I thought this really feels like the prompt for this series of lectures. Again, it might, for real opera lovers, this could be a bit of a paradoxical thought.
Which is how could it be that an art form that is so expensive to produce and so reliant on the generosity of a wealthy population, how could it possibly ever undermine the status quo without endangering itself? If it lobbies a protest to the existing order, it probably does so only in the most polite and sanctioned way, usually to an audience that has no real incentive for changing its structure. I had to take a step back as I prepared for these lectures to think about the origins of opera. There really is, at its beginnings, a kind of multi-directional approach that people took. There was really two in particular.
There was, on one hand, this elite art form that was developed in Florence and Macchia. It was performed for aristocrats by aristocrats, and usually in praise of those aristocrats that paid for the performance. This is one of the origins of what became opera. But it wasn't that much later than the kind of image that you see here. That we get another image of opera that developed in Venice. This was an entire complex of commercial theaters that popped up, each clamoring for new operas at Carnival time. This was, as everyone knows, Carnival time is the 10 days before Lent, which has a real anarchic function in society. This is the narrow window of freedom and social license where social hierarchies are briefly overturned. The people who thronged in Venice to celebrate Carnival proved a ready audience for the city's unique spectacles which became known as operas. The nescient commercial opera houses like this one, the Teatro San Cassiano, capitalized on the city's Carnival atmosphere by offering elaborate productions, scandalous plots, and music designed to appeal to very rowdy crowds.
From the very beginning, opera somehow embodied both of this. This tension between the status quo and the wild, anarchic, Carnivalesque overturning of the status quo, both seem to exist. I think that ambivalence is still at the heart of opera as we know it today. If anything though, it seems like it's that aristocratic side of opera, in the Janus head of opera, the aristocratic one is the one that really looks out to us the most. That other, more Carnivalesque, more popular, that seems to have migrated into the world of maybe commercial musical theater potentially.
Where can we uncover that Carnivalesque quality in opera today? The impulse of the Carnival-esque was maybe best summarized by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin who said that, "It didn't so much bury the status quo as it necessarily temporarily suspended it, but its effect was nevertheless powerful as it helped everyday people imagine other social possibilities," and imagined our organization as temporary and changeable.
So the twinning of carnival and opera I think of as not just fundamental to opera, but actually to all of the live arts. By live arts, I mean theater. I mean ballet. I mean anytime where we're all in the same room together, sharing space, sharing oxygen. The performer and the audience member is in this exchange. That's what I kind of call the live arts and I find that to be the space for ... This is a very different kind of form of community building, a 3D audience for a film. The difference, of course, is that a film, because it's a mediated image and you're not sharing the space with the people that are performing, there is a sense of a distance that is so different from when you come into the theater.
The similarity here is that you're sitting next to strangers sharing space with them as well to watch other humans represent a person or a community or a history, and that invites us to enter into a dialogue about who we are and what makes us who we are. That made the theater, according to the German playwright Heinrich Müller, a laboratory of social fantasies. And I love that idea and that concept of the laboratory of social fantasies because I think that's where the carnivalesque and opera really coincide.
When we talk about theater, we always talk about them as plays and there's something in the name of the play that reminds us of the game logic that is at the heart of what it means to produce and to create theater. We are playing something out for an audience. There is a sense of exploration. It doesn't mean we should take that lightly. It doesn't mean that we should kind of consider it trivial. We're working something out as a community and we're exploring possibilities. So that notion of the laboratory of social possibilities and social fantasies becomes really crucial if we want to take that kind of thinking into our real world and see about other possibilities.
The live arts then become a place where we forge and dismantle and question and strengthen our relationship to each other and to our social world. And that's part of why the live arts and especially live theater has always been so much more dangerous and threatening to authority than film or, I think, even ballet. There's something about theater and, I think by extension, opera that is a threat somehow to authority. The most notorious American anarchist, Emma Goldman, recognized this potential in the live arts and specifically in the plays of Henrik Ibsen. She saw contemporary drama succeeding "in driving home great social truths, truths generally ignored when presented in other forms."
And there are a lot of anarchists who really focused on playwriting, but Emma Goldman was unique in focusing on the performer and focusing on the interpreter because they offered a kind of, what she called, "double channel," which affects both the mind and the heart and forms the strongest force in developing social discontent, swelling the powerful tide of unrest that sweeps onward and over the dam of ignorance, prejudice, and superstition. Now I couldn't find anywhere where Emma Goldman talked about opera and I have the feeling she might not have loved the art form of opera, but I think that she would have to agree that the mechanism of delivery in both the theater that she loved so much and opera is actually the same. Because where Goldman saw a double channel in theater, meaning the writer and the interpreter who talked to both your mind and your heart, opera offers a multichannel experience because there are so many different artists who are working together to weave something brand new together.
So when we hear the word opera now, we tend to think of a very specific and recognizable genre. Maybe we think about the institution that is producing the opera. But when Italians heard the word "opera," they might have experienced something more like this. "Opera" in Italian just means "a work," meaning there's something about it. There is something undefinable about opera. There's something that doesn't know whether it's just music or just poetry or a kinetic sculpture or choreography. It is something in-between all of these things. And like all things that are in-between, there is an opportunity to be really subversive. In resisting categories, we in the audience have to figure out our own relationship to the work as it's unfolding in real time.
And it's that fluidity and that unpredictability what my friend, David Levine, has called opera's unsettled quality and what I like to think of as its instability, that we can really understand how opera, like the spoken theater, can be what Müeller described as a laboratory for social fantasy, even if the institutionalization around the art form would like it to be a laboratory that sticks to pretty risk-adverse experiments. That is where the outcome might already be known because it's always been done in a certain way and where the social fantasy might be pretty limited when there are so many fantasies that we can explore in opera and there's so many ways in which we could explore it.
To talk a little bit more specifically about how I got interested in anarchy, you might be wondering, "What is a nice, Jewish boy from Naperville, Illinois talking about such unruly things as anarchy?" I want to tell you how I got really interested in it. I got interested because I read this fantastic book called The Dawn of Everything a couple years ago. David Graeber, who actually studied here at University of Chicago, he worked with the anthropologist David Wengrow on this spectacular and sweeping study of human history. Graeber, in particular, was a very charismatic and probably one of the nicest anarchists apparently that you could ever imagine, and he played a central role in the Occupy Wall Street movement and is often credited for coining the term "the 1%," as in, "Why does 1% of the world population own 44% of the wealth?" So he had a very important role to play in that movement.
And even though his most famous book is about debt, this particular book struck me so powerfully because with Wengrow, it's an exploration of different kinds of social organizations throughout history that are different from the ones that we see. The questions that they are posing to us is when did we find it so acceptable to allow for inequality in our society? Even in this liberal and neoliberal world order that we have, why is it kind of a given that there will always be people who suffer, people who don't have what they need, and people who feel left out? Why is that? Has it always been this way or is another way possible? They disrupted the cliche and the chauvinistic claims that the Western world's current democratic structure is the pinnacle of advanced government by going way back and looking at prehistoric social gatherings to see that there were examples of so much more equality and mutual aid that were possible.
And their big question throughout the book is when did we get stuck in thinking about only one way of organizing ourselves and being a society? We surely are more imaginative than that. We can surely think about other ways to live together that doesn't have to leave anybody in the cold. The one community they described, just to give you a couple brief examples, there was a community that changed leaders every season. Well, not every season. I'm sorry. There'd be one for summer and spring and there'd be one for fall and winter because they realized based on seasonal climate, different leadership was needed and the social organization around those two leaders adapted. There are other leadership models that they depict in which the houses are arranged in a circle and leadership just changed house to house. When the baton was passed to you, you were the leader for a little while.
This notion of shared authority and shared leadership, there were so many examples in this book that I just found so completely staggering. But I have to admit, and maybe some people in this room might be seething at the thought that I'm mentioning this book because there are many people who find this book to be, well, faulty at best, inaccurate and misleading at worst. But I want to say that even if every society that they described was a total flight of their fancy, that if this was just a fantastical grouping of what they wish society could be, I think they would still have made a really important point.
A quote from the book, "We are projects of collective self-creation. And what if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people from the beginning as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight and conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves." And the result of having such a narrow storytelling is that, in their words, "We impoverish our history. And as a consequence, we impoverish our sense of possibility."
So I found this so thrilling and it made me think a lot about opera too because I kept thinking opera is a space where we often don't see what is possible based on how we are so set on doing things, but I'm going to get to that in a second. Before, as I was reading this book, I started to realize I didn't know very much about anarchy, David Graeber is a kind of professed anarchist, but realized that actually the roots in America for anarchy go quite deep. There is, maybe most famously, Henry Thoreau's document, Civil Disobedience, which has had a big upsurge in popularity recently.
There's a sentence in the book that says, "The best form of government is no government at all, and that's the kind we will have when we are ready for it," and it's a sentence that kind of captures the entire anarchic paradox because sure, it would be great if we could live in a society where we didn't need the same kind of restrictions and rules. But what about greed? What about crime? What about other forms of selfishness? How are we going to regulate that? We'll get this when we are ready for it, but when will we be ready for it and how will we find ourselves ready for it?
I was then surprised to hear that one of my two big musical obsessions, John Cage, actually set that bit of Thoreau to music in his piece called The Songbooks. And another one of my big musical obsessions, Richard Wagner, had a passionate interest in anarchy. In fact, so much so that he was considered politically dangerous and had to flee Germany and go into exile because he was close with the anarchist Bakunin and participated in an attempted revolution. He spent all of the time writing The Ring Cycle in exile based on a connection to anarchy. So I'm going to get to both of these particular musical minds in a moment. I'm actually going to talk about Wagner in the next lecture and the final lecture is going to be all about John Cage, which I'm very much looking forward to.
But in the meantime, I started to realize, "Okay. Maybe some of these thoughts are not as far off as I might think. Maybe they're already sort of in the ether and I just need to listen to them a little more." So I decided to look into it a little bit more by visiting an anarchist bookstore in London. If you've ever been to one of these bookstores, it makes you feel really like you're a criminal. This one is hidden down an alley and I felt like I was entering a contraband shop, like TSA was observing me and was going to revoke my global entry just by buying a book there. But I really had to think to myself, "Am I starting to go down the path of radicalization? What is the next step here? Am I going to become a terrorist before I know it?"
But thanks to the great algorithm in the sky, I started getting some fantastic podcasts delivered to me all about anarchy and different ways of thinking about anarchy. There was one in particular that I loved by the podcast The Gray Area and the philosopher Sophie Scott-Brown who defined anarchism really simply. It's simply a belief or a commitment to a lack of permanent authority, which she said gives us carte blanche never to agree with your fellow anarchists. If you're an anarchist, then by nature you're unclubbable. I thought that was a great word. Unclubbable.
So that can be a lot of relief. I don't even have to figure out how to make a Molotov cocktail and find myself maybe sympathetic to notions of anarchy when you put it that simply. It's a belief or commitment about the permanence of authority. That was a really useful line for me to hear. Also, a book by Ruth Kinna called A Government of No One, in which she described anarchy and defined it as, "Being anarchist means challenging the status quo to realize egalitarian principles and foster co-operative non-dominating behaviors." Also, something that feels like, "Yeah, I can get behind that. I really do believe in that."
I kept going in my research. Briefly, I'll tell you about some of the books I read in this topic. Sigmund Engländer, who was a 19th century writer and journalist, wrote this book called The Abolition of the State and this, for me, was really a crucial step because I realized that it wasn't about the lack of laws. Actually, Engländer, like many anarchists, realized, "Of course, we must have a contract with each other on how we are to behave and live with each other." The only difference that Engländer is trying to articulate is that those laws need to adapt. As we are learning to adapt with each other and as the moment, as the time that we're with each other requires us to think differently about what it means to be in society with each other, that is what should define leadership and define laws.
And again, this is where I found all of this so compelling as it relates to opera because I really think that opera seems to constantly operate from a seemingly rigid set of rules. In some of the more formulaic operas of the 18th and 19th century, there were these really fixed guidelines about everything related to the structure to what's the alternation between a recitative, which is usually the dry setting of just the story, versus the aria, which gets to be the emotional experience. This became so fixed that audiences started to really, on one hand, get the great benefit of being able to read what was happening. There was an enormous amount of legibility.
And then there's also a great sense that some composers could play with it. For example, a 20th century composer taking some of these old musical forms. Stravinsky very self-consciously, but subversively took those forms and made his own opera of it called The Rake's Progress, which maybe at first listen feels very rigid and very closed in its formulas, with a lot of jokes, with a lot of humor, and the possibility of looking at the past from the perspective of someone who was trying to make sense of it all. But there's a curious hybrid that has emerged when they're not as self-conscious as something like Stravinsky's version of it. We have now 21st century stories being told within rules that haven't changed that much from 300 years ago. There's a lot of the same structures in place, even as the stories that we want to tell are shifting drastically.
So the question really does become, "Why are these rules still so firmly entrenched even when we do a new opera today and who exactly is it benefiting?" So again, there is the great benefit to the audience who gets the sense of, "I know what's going on. I know how to read this particular opera as it unfolds," but I really do wonder what happens to an audience that learns to think of the art form only through the narrow confines of one accepted formula. Imagine the narrowness of imagination that takes all of the various elements of an operatic production, the singers, the orchestra, the dancers, the scenography, the architectural space takes all of those together, and then only gives you this one way of thinking about it. That's something that, to me, feels like a limitation.
And perhaps the best anarchist to give us an image for this limitation is the Italian Errico Malatesta who, in his essay, Anarchy, describes it so powerfully as a person who is born with his legs bound and actually has never known the world to be any different. He just imagines that that's how he was born and that was the right way to be, and so he learns to live with his legs being bound. This is how he writes it. There is in what Malatesta is writing about that feels incredibly powerful because he also talks about what are the social conditions that keep this bound man to stay in his bondage, as opposed to wanting, yearning, and imagining to be free.
So this is an iconic image, really, of the anarchist movement and with good reason because it really recalls two other emblematic images that precede it and one that has anteceded it. The first one, of course, is Plato's Cave, this allegory of prisoners that are misperceiving the reality of projected shadows which becomes a mechanism for understanding both the limits of human cognition, but also the possibility that our perceptions are being manipulated to someone else's benefit. There is also Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose thinking was most connected to the spirit of the French Revolution and who described humanity as originating the state of perfect innocence until laws and private property and hierarchical government destroyed all that. And his way of putting this was that once we had all of these mechanisms of society, that "we all ran towards our chains, believing that we were securing our liberty; for although they had reason enough to discern the advantages of a civil order, they did not have experience enough to foresee the dangers."
Now the images from this that we are probably more familiar with, of course, is from the 1999 film, The Matrix, where the character of Neo has offered a choice between swallowing a red pill and awakening to truth of the world or taking a blue pill and staying in blissful ignorance and only ever understanding reality as a simulation. Now this might trigger a lot of negative connotations right now because there are a number of movements throughout the world, mostly reactionary, who have taken this kind red pill/blue pill imagery and used it for their own ends. And I think this leads to a really important distinction that I want to make because I had a friend as I was preparing these lectures say, "Well, yeah. But isn't what we are experiencing right now in the federal government a kind of an anarchy? There must be some connection between the chainsaw wielding and this notion of cutting the state apparatus. There's got to be a connection there, right?"
And I think what my friend meant is that what we are experiencing now is chaotic, but it actually just, as a matter of fact way, has nothing to do with anarchy and everything to do with authoritarianism. Those are completely different. Anarchy does not want authority. Anarchy wants authority when there is the need for leadership. It wants that leadership to be constantly changing and never static. So the method may be chaos, but the result is not anarchy and that, to me, was a very helpful switch in my mind to understand those differences. And to clarify that a little better, the anarchist and philosopher Noam Chomsky has a great quote about this. "Anarchy as a social philosophy has never meant 'chaos.' In fact, anarchists have typically believed in a highly organized society, just one that's organized democratically from below."
And what I love about this and what brings me back to this notion of opera is that he's talking about something that the very first anarchists really were motivated by, which is a concept that was first started by the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin who wrote this book called The Conquest of Bread, an important book that basically said the function of society is mutual aid, that we need to be basically there for each other and support each other. Kropotkin also attempted to draw the connection between anarchy and anthropology by changing the conversation away from humanity's inherent wickedness and more towards thinking about humanity's will to cooperation and wanting to support each other.
This is a brief quote from him that I'll read. In The Conquest of Bread, he writes, "What we do want is to arrange things that every human being born into the world shall be ensured the opportunity, in the first instance of learning some useful occupation, and of becoming skilled in it; and next, that he shall be free to work at his trade without asking leave of master or owner, and without handing over the landlord or capitalist the lion's share of what he produces." So what he is positing there is ultimately something that may be more warmly summarized by the writer Robin Wall Kimmerer who talks about our connection to each other as a mutual flourishing, and that all flourishing is mutual, as is written here on a T-shirt and is a fantastic, I do not know if Kimmerer is an anarchist or not, but a lot of what she talks about in terms of cooperation is at the heart of what my favorite anarchists really are talking about.
So after delving deeply into this world, I have to now share what to me, the definition of anarchy is, again, it's a personal definition, but I think anarchy calls us to see the world with an expanded vision, to recognize the limitations of our fenced in pastures. And it reminds us that our given circumstances are not inevitabilities, but contingencies demanding constant change and adaptation for the prosperity of all humans. So now to bring it back to opera, the notion here is exactly what Heiner Müller said about opera as the place where we can see that and theater and the live arts as the laboratory for experimenting with that.
And I want to give you just a brief overview of how operas tend to be structured. So opera in many ways does have a very strong hierarchy in them. So in order to produce the operas as efficiently as possible, opera companies are usually not incentivized to explore alternative possibilities to this particular organization. So it seems quite opposite to what Müller was talking about. We have a very top down structure, a ladder of subservience, and the individual rungs of this ladder are not necessarily encouraged to flourish. They are encouraged to obey. The director and the conductor in a way form a kind of bottleneck. There's a lot of power that's kind of stuck right about there. And I just want to point this out because we could say that this is a really wonky structure. We could say, "How is someone supposed to really figure this out? What happens when the director and the conductor don't get along?"
And in fact, most hierarchies up until now have been a little bit different. I would say this is maybe a more generous hierarchy because it introduces the notion that the director and the conductor have a kind of shared leadership quality, but I think that it used to be that it was more like this. Okay, so the conductor was right there, the director was way over there, and then there's all the people involved in the technical part, which the conductor doesn't care very much about. And then this is the kind of hierarchy that actually in many ways, a lot of American opera houses have still some residual belief that this is how things are supposed to go.
Now in Germany for example, there is a kind of different hierarchy that has emerged. This is one in which the director has taken a very leading role and that the precedence taken by production and by directing is so high up that it does put the music kind of off to the side. Not very interesting. Okay, maybe we put a little dotted line between the conductor and lead singers to acknowledge some influence, but for the most part, we want to think that this is our show. The way that maybe some conductors previously used to believe that it was their show.
But in the 19th century, things were also quite different. We had the lead singers think that it used to be more like this, that it was really about them, that the composers should write pieces tailor-made to them and who they are, their star quality. There's everybody else involved who knows where the director is somewhere somehow just involved in the theater-making process. You can imagine that this leads to a lot of really complicated situations and why I think when people think of opera rehearsals, they tend to imagine a lot of conflict and a lot of egos battling for each other.
We have this format, which is the diva format. We have the director format, which is the, well, it's another diva format I guess, but the G-teater, as the Germans would call it. And then there's the conductor format. Now, I've been involved in a lot of different productions where one of these hierarchies are kind of the assumption, this is just how it works and that's how it's going to continue to work. And I'll tell you the big reason why is because to talk about how leadership is supposed to work takes time and it takes care. And when you are trying to produce an opera in when generous, maybe four weeks, five weeks, six weeks, and people are coming from all over, it tends to be let's fit you in to the system and let's let the system run. Let's not stop in a moment and actually talk about how it is we want to create what it is that we create. Let's just do what we know we do. And that's what yields a kind of automatic thinking.
To go back to this particular structure, we could see this as a flawed system, or we could see this as a sign that we're trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, that actually opera needs more shared leadership. Why is this the only bottleneck? Why isn't everything a bottleneck? Why isn't every moment a conversation? In fact, why can't we think of opera more like this? Why can't we structure the way we create an opera in which we are all working together and in which every element is given a sense of importance? Now, that's not to downplay the important role that a director plays in terms of decision-making, in terms of the conductor's role in decision-making. What I call here the impresario, which might be the artistic director or might be the general director in opera houses that is one in the same person.
I'm so happy in Detroit that is not the case. And the president and CEO of Detroit Opera is here. Patty Isacson Sabee, and she can surely tell you that shared leadership is not easy, but the conversation and the dialogue makes for something that feels much more representational of the kind of world that we want to be seeing in which it's more participatory from all angles. I think that this kind of situation really is possible. And in the next lecture I'll talk more about some of my experiences creating that. One of the things that I look for going into any operatic production is how can I build a sense of consensus? Now, consensus can be a pretty, I guess looked down upon word in so many ways. And I will go back... Oh, by the way, sorry. This is probably what most people think an anarchic opera structure looks like.
So you can't do this, right? You can't have this kind of creative process. Some people do, but if you are going to actually marshal all the forces that make an opera happen, there's going to have to be some light leadership. I don't think you need to do it with an authoritarian fist. I think you can do it with a warm embrace that lets everyone feel welcome, but this is not what we're going for. When I talk about an anarchic operatic organization, I really am talking about this. I'm talking about the notion of a circle and a shared space where everyone listens to each other. Consensus though brings us to the Occupy Wall Street movement. And I just want to, again, David Graeber was part of this movement, very central in this movement. And what was great about this movement when you look at the documentation from it, is how much decision-making was participatory and how much of it was consensus-based.
In an article called This is What Democracy Looks Like, the writer A.J Bauer described Occupy, "... as organized by a myriad of smaller undocumented conversations among new acquaintances where the Occupy movement realized its democratic potential. That is the occupation of Zuccotti Park enabled the kind of politics where people approached one another as equals, recognized one another's distinct humanity and common interest and drew a plans to act upon that interest." But we in the arts sometimes really struggle thinking about what consensus-based decision-making is like, because this is what we think of when we think of artists. This is like the 19th-century romantic idea that artists are these solitary geniuses, a cliche that we still carry around with us, but it's just not accurate. Especially that circle that I showed you is much more accurate to what opera is all about.
I just direct is what I like to say. I don't play the tuba, I don't sing. I don't know how to operate the flies. Everyone participates in the making of it. And I'll tell you that every single time someone calls one of my productions a Yuval Sharon production, I kind of wince because I'm like, yeah, I get it. I'm the director. But to think of all of the people who are then put in a kind of subsidiary position under me does not at all feel like the way that I like to create projects. And there's something in the way we talk about the work that we create that still needs Caspar David Friedrich and this notion of the lone genius. Whereas I really, in this lecture and other lectures I've been giving, I really am trying to encourage us to think about genius as something that is a condition and that is a circumstance, and that is something that is mutually and collaboratively created at least as long as it's a live art and a collaborative art.
So I see consensus and artistic creation in an art form like opera as being a necessity. And the downside of consensus for those people that hear that word and think, "Well, you can't possibly actually get anywhere with consensus because here's how consensus makes a horse. This is what a horse looks like when a committee comes together to make a decision." So I totally hear that, and I believe that there are committees that go around in circles and nobody really gets what they want. There is another great anarchist, Murray Bookchin, who was a sworn enemy of this kind of decision-making because he worried that this minorities in favor of a metaphysical consensus group. But there are many roadmaps for consensus that do not have to appeal, do not have to mean that we meet in the middle where nobody is happy. We could actually find consensus that looks different in a lot of different ways.
There is a UK-based workers co-op called Seeds for Change that offered a fantastic consensus handbook, which I think of as an incredible way to think, to organize any creative conversation. And it shows that it's not, the point of consensus is actually not to convert other people to your method of thinking, but to open yourself up, to listen to everyone who is part of the process. Again, it's a time-consuming process. In most operatic performance, practice, you never have time. So this kind of stuff tends to be, "Well, it would be nice, but we got to get to staging act two." There is a way to rethink our operations to allow for more of this to happen. Now, another critic might say, "Yes, but Occupy didn't last. Occupy was so temporary and maybe had no impact on the world." I have to then quote Sophie Scott-Brown again when she put it really well, and she said, "Anarchism constantly fails, and if it doesn't, it would fail." She's got a good knack for these kind of statements.
Because anarchism is supposed to be a dynamic way of thinking. So if you ever got something like an anarchist community up and running and it didn't fail, then all you would've achieved was collective groupthink that would get stagnant and that might be great, but that's not anarchism. Anarchism is about, as she says, "failing forward". And I actually think that might be the best way to describe the kind of work that I like to do. My productions ideally are failing forward from one to the next in the sense of their validity is very temporary. It's only about the moment in which they perform. And once they perform, we move on and we try and look for other ways of creating these operas. She continues by saying that, "Did something like Occupy actually fail or did it arise in a moment, meet that moment, speak to that moment and then move on? Because that's life. Anarchism is forgiving yourself the need of thinking of political success as permanency."
And you could hear that, and maybe you might recall a kind of existential dread that Samuel Beckett is famous for where he says, "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." That notion that we can't ever help but almost like be Sisyphus getting the rock up the hill only for it to roll back down again. Or you can think of it as the power of what opera and all the live arts are really about, which is this notion that they're constantly being reborn. And in my book, I talk a lot about the concept of rebirth, and I think that's connected to what failing forward means.
It's basically because any performance art is inherently as we know evanescent, and for all of opera's posturings of unchanging validity and it's signaling always to the eternal, we have to embrace what is temporary and contingent in opera's identity. That's how we can create a sense of what that anarchic quality is, because we're leaving a door open to the moment we're living in right now. So instead of just performing these old works exactly the way we know them, the windows open up, the doors open up, oxygen comes into the space, and we're experiencing it all completely differently. As opposed to feeling like we have a duty and we are obligated to this particular format in doing the kind of work that we do. Now as a director, I'm thinking primarily about production and the fact that productions have a shelf life of if I'm generous, like 15 years, maximum, maximum, maximum.
Now, there are some really amazing exceptions. There is Ruth Berghaus's production of Rossini's Barber of Seville, and this premiered is at the Staatsoper Berlin, believe it or not, it premiered in 1968 and they still perform it today. So this is kind of an outlier, something that actually still does feel like it has a great validity. Of course, the Metropolitan Opera where I'm going to be spending a lot of time in the next few years. This production of La Bohème by Franco Zeffirelli is from 1981, and there's also his production of Turandot from 1987. These are huge box office draws. I don't think they're ever going to change them or get rid of them. And this is a rarity though as pieces that are still holding on. And I think despite what traditionalists might say about that, that is a really good thing because it means that each and every time that we do operas, that any of the operas, we get to inflect them with new ideas.
Now, try to imagine if you are your, maybe some people in this room are what you might call an average opera goer. Like maybe you go a couple of times a year and maybe you don't go to see opera anywhere else. Maybe you don't go online to look up different performances of operas like those of us in the profession do. So maybe this particular production of Turandot or that production of La Bohème is the only one you ever see in your lifetime, and maybe you go back every couple years. And guess what? It's the same sets and the same costumes and the same staging which articulate the same ideas. Now, if that was the case, how would you react if suddenly the next version of La Bohème looked like this? This is not an AI image. This is Claus Guth's production of La Bohème from the Paris Opera, which had an element set on the moon.
Now you can see why if the only version of La Bohème that you ever knew was the Zeffirelli version, if you were suddenly confronted with this, you would go apoplectic. You would just lose your mind because what does this have to do with Puccini and what does this have to do with La Bohème? And that is the problem. When we don't think of the transitory aspect of live production that constantly renews itself, we become just like Malatesta's bound person who cannot see the freedom beyond the bound legs. We are stuck imagining Bohème only the way that it was once conceived, once and only one time, and suddenly that's the way it is now going to be performed for eternity. That feels to me like exactly the kind of narrowing that I always try and resist, and which I feel like a deep connection to anarchy in exploring.
To wrap up my comments for today, I just want to take a couple of minutes to talk about the aesthetics of opera as it relates to these particular images. I'm sure there's going to be a big question of like, "Well, what does... ". I've shown you the graphs of the hierarchy of anarchic opera, the circle as opposed to the latter, but what does it actually look like in practice and what does it sound like? So to give you a little preview for what it sounds like actually what it looks like, the third lecture is going to conclude with a performance of John Cage's Europera 5, which I think of as the quintessential anarchic opera. I'll introduce why before we do it, but I really hope you'll come to see that. I think that's going to be super exciting. But let me give you just a couple examples from work that I've done recently in Detroit to give you a sense of what an anarchic reading might be like.
This is an image, speaking of La Bohème, this particular production of La Bohème was in reverse order. So we started with Act IV beginning to end, then Act III beginning to end, then Act II, beginning to end and ending with Act I beginning to end. To make sure the audience could follow this reverse order, we created a character called the Wanderer, and the Wanderer first kind of gave you a sense of where you are in the timeline, but he also very importantly interrupted the music at crucial moments and would say, "Well, what if Mimi left instead of turned around? What if she didn't drop her key? What would've happened? What if Rodolfo didn't do this or... ?" Moments in the score where we wanted to open up the potential of what happened instead of falling into the inevitability of what happened from one moment to the other?
And I think one of the real goals of an exercise like that was how do we hear the piece different? How do we experience La Bohème different, which feels like it gets so few opportunities to be done in a different way. That is something that, this is a picture from Act II, which we leaned heavily on the carnivalesque, to give you a sense of just the wild freedom of what it means to fall in love and what that feels like. And more recently, in fact, just last month, this is a picture of my production of Mozart's Così fan Tutte in which the four principal lovers were artificial intelligence, and they were all the robotic creations of Don Alfonso as a final test to see at what point will these, especially to women, when will they break and when will they lose their fidelity? This also required a lot of manipulation of the music and the text so that the ideas that we were presenting could come through as strongly as possible.
The Act II finale was interrupted with Don Alfonso being killed by his robotic creatures, and the opera ended rather abruptly with his murder. Which I thought would lead to a lot of booing, but actually in Detroit led to a lot of applause. So just goes to show you that you never quite know how it's going to work, but in terms of what defines kind of anarchic reading, I really have to say it's different from just changing, let's say the window dressing. Like let's say we put Carmen in a shopping mall. Let's say we put, let's see, recently a production of Lucia Di Lammermoor that took place in a border town. What ends up happening in those, those can sometimes be very effective and very eye-opening, but what tends to happen is a set of correspondences. So okay, Carmen is going to be like the teenage girl who goes to Hot topic and Don Jose is going to be the security guard.
There's like a kind of one-to-one connection between the external reality and then the music and the libretto and the text and the performance of the piece stays more or less intact. I think to truly get at the potential of opera, but to really define what an anarchic opera is all about, I think you do have to not be so afraid of taking the composer and the librettist and putting them in the circle as opposed to at the top of a hierarchy. Meaning, we just get to see Mozart as he was in his time. Meaning, in my opinion, more of a proto-anarchist. I think he was a real punk in so many ways, as opposed to the cherub who is proof of the sign of God, as most people talk about when they talk about Mozart. Unlike the anarchist who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand, placing the composer inside the circle is actually not a destructive act, is not an act of violence. It is a profound act of love because it says that this material and these ideas have so much more to say if we don't blindly obey.
Now, to wrap up, there's one more example of a kind of anarchic reading, and luckily it's not one that required you coming to see this Così or coming to Bohème. I could go into great detail about how those worked, but all of you have just now heard me give this lecture, and I would have to say that there are moments where this lecture took on some of the elements of what an anarchic relationship is between text and image. So you might've noticed there are times where I put up images that synced up perfectly with what I was saying, that was reading a quote by Kropotkin example or various things along the lines. But what did you think when I put this image up? What crossed your mind when this suddenly appeared? Were you suddenly thinking, "Well, who is this guy? Why is he talking to me? Why am I listening to him? I think he's full of BS and I'm now convinced I want nothing to do with anarchy and maybe also nothing to do with opera.
So why did I do this? Because I get excited about moments like this in which you as the listener become actually an active participant in thinking through these ideas because you have to somehow draw a connection between this bizarre image and what I was talking about at that particular time. Maybe you found a connection and good for you. If you did, please tell me what it was. Or you were left in a kind of ambiguous state where you had to sort of say, let me think about this. I find that an act of empowerment as a director, I don't necessarily try to just invoke nonsense, but I certainly want to think about ways in which I can invite you into the process of thinking with me and thinking with all of us as we're creating this project.
So introducing this ambiguity into the proceedings, I've opened up a space for all of you to engage with these ideas on your own terms. And the hierarchy between me as the speaker and you and the listener is now disrupted, and I suspect it'll be very hard for you from now on to go to another lecture in which you only see images that correspond exactly with what the speaker is saying. Maybe you will be actually reassured by that and continue to be reassured, but maybe you'll start to find yourself a little restless and bristling and feeling like the speaker is exerting a dominating restriction on your way of experiencing the world and your sense of yearning for a different way of doing things is awoken. If so, then congratulations. You are becoming an anarchist. Thank you so much.
Deborah Nelson:
Thank you so much, Yuval. So I would like to start with a question. So based on your incredible career so far, one might assume that you were a lab experiment at the Berlin State Opera or the Vienna State Opera or the Met, but it turns out that you grew up in Naperville.
Yuval Sharon:
Yes.
Deborah Nelson:
You are a local boy. So can you give us a portrait of the artist as a young man, how do you go from there to here? What is your early experiences of opera? How did Chicago feed that or even how did Naperville feed that?
Yuval Sharon:
Yeah, well, my mom and my brother who are here could probably give you a better sense of this, but I remember my dad, who is no longer with us, but when I was growing up, really wanted me to play the piano and he was insistent that I play the piano and I actually found no pleasure in it. I had a really hard time practicing. I had to play a lot of Bach two and three part inventions. Those made me insane and I just begged him, I don't want to do this anymore. But he kind of insisted. He kept going and he also started to show an interest in opera and started taking me to the opera and I was 13. So the lyric plays a very formative role in my interest in opera because all my first experiences were all at the lyric. In fact, the second opera I ever saw was Siegfried, which was a tall order as a thirteen-year-old to experience Siegfried, but I actually kind of liked it when I was 13.
I liked it better than La Traviata, which was harder for me as a thirteen-year-old. In any case, growing up here and going to the lyric, and I was also... My mom in particular was a big film lover, so she would take me to great classic films and I felt like I was just kind of taking it all in. And I always saw opera living in that continuum with film, with theater, with all the other art forms as opposed to something too rarefied and too much on a pedestal. And I think that kind of ease of... I think that ease really did factor into thinking about opera the way I do today. I also remember that it was always sold out at the opera and me and my dad always had to wait and hope that someone was returning a ticket. Luckily, someone always was, but to me, opera didn't seem unpopular because I would go and it was always full. So I think now we're dealing with opera in a very different way as we're figuring out how to relate to our audience in a different way.
Deborah Nelson:
Right.
Yuval Sharon:
Yeah.
Deborah Nelson:
Interesting. Do we have any questions so far?
Speaker 1:
Well, thank you so much for that talk. One thing, both the title and now the content makes one wonder is why anarchy at the opera instead of say socialism at the opera, Marxism at the opera. And one way of getting at that I want to go down is maybe where an anarchist analysis differs and where it Marxist analysis might say something else. And so I want to go to maybe your great foil here, which is Theodore Adorno who's really doing Marxism at the opera, and he says that the distinctions between high and low culture have disappeared in the 20th century, that something new has replaced this distinction, this kind of uniform culture industry.
And so when people are saying there's too much pandering in opera or like what you were saying about Carmen at the shopping mall, those kinds of productions, I wonder if what they're pointing out isn't a problem with this kind of low culture tendency of opera, but maybe they have a problem more with this kind of middle brow tendency of it, that it's bringing high and low together in an unproductive way. So it's wondering, is this a meaningful distinction maybe between anarchy at the opera, which just has this binary between authority and the carnival or authority in the lower classes, or can you see even through anarchism, this kind of disappearance of high and low?
Yuval Sharon:
That is such a great question. I'm going to have to really think about that in preparation for next week's lecture. So thank you so much for that. I think where I find myself fascinated by anarchy and maybe less so even if I can find things in Marxism or socialism that I find inspiring. Nevertheless, with anarchy, it's this sense that there's no... Every time you do an opera, for example, to draw to opera, it should be its own new creation, right? As opposed to relying too much on what we already know works. It's like taking the tools that are already here and responding to them, not responding to your wish of what they are. That flexibility is something that I want to see a lot more in opera. What you just described about high and low culture is so crucial. I did want to talk a bit about Adorno and culture industry as it relates to all of this.
Next week's lecture I think will end up addressing one of the biggest challenges, which is we tend to... That the theater itself, the opera house that we perform in when it's always the same, it does end up creating... One way to talk about it is middle brow. You can also say Xeroxes of Xeroxes where details start to get lost, where it's like things are not sharp. It's like things are done just well enough that they get to stage as opposed to really having been thought through. I personally don't find the binary high-low culture very productive because there's ways in which when you look at Shakespeare, when you look at Dante, you look at all of these incredible artists that we still engage with their work today. They were always talking about the person with no education and the person with the highest education that both had to be invited and no one would call Shakespeare middle brow.
No one would've called Dante middle brow, but by Dante deciding he's going to write in the Italian of his time so that people could understand it, right? And yet he's talking about the most learned things ever. It's like he captures the whole universe in that Shakespeare does that too, opera has that potential. And I think opera its best can be something, and I do always think about this, if you have never been to the opera and if you know this opera inside and out, both of those people should have something to get from a performance that I'm working on.
Deborah Nelson:
Can I ask a follow-up just in a very specific way, this sort of the ephemerality? So you could imagine the very, very, very successful production of opera in moving cars becoming Xeroxed. So can you say a little bit about that opera and... Yes.
Yuval Sharon:
Absolutely. And this is a big topic for next week too, is the hopscotch, the opera did in Los Angeles that took place the... Yes, thank you, Betty. That was-
Deborah Nelson:
Some people were there.
Yuval Sharon:
And I'm glad you were there because actually it will never be done again. At least I'm not doing it again. I've done it and it was really hard, but that is what all opera should feel like. It should feel like, it's not like, oh, you know what? I missed that opera. It'll come back in a few years almost exactly identical to the one that just happened. No, you had to be there because this was the one time that all of these forces coalesced. That's what I mean about the evanescent and the transitory aspect of opera that I just feel like to me is very connected to anarchy in its wish for all leadership to always remain temporary.
Deborah Nelson:
Yeah, because you can't imagine COVID produced the production. Are you pretending it's COVID again, right?
Yuval Sharon:
Right.
Deborah Nelson:
I mean, it would maybe be interesting to see whether change context, what it would mean. But it was so of the moment.
Yuval Sharon:
Well, I totally agree, and I mean, I think a lot of people here, I've recognized some people from when we did Twilight Gods in the Chicago parking lot at the Millennium Park, the gotcha demo and the last part of the ring cycle as you're driving through from level to level, which we also started in Detroit, came here to Chicago. Yes, we could do that even though it's not COVID anymore. It could be fun, but we would want to redo it. We would do different things, and sometimes I will go to the opera and feel like there's the illusion as if nothing has changed, as if the outside world has just gone away and we now entered this space. There's this clip from Family Guy that I can't believe I'm going to reference, but I am because it's really useful, which is like Peter has this cutaway where he is like, oh, it's like the beyond section of the Bed Bath and Beyond.
And he goes there and he goes, oh my God. And he loses himself and it's like a vortex. I saw that clip and I was like, that's what happens to most people when they go to the opera is they go, oh my God, we're in this weird space that has nothing in relation to what the rest of the way that I live my life. And so opera can take you amazing places, but you need to be grounded in our reality because that reality outside the theater has been a driving factor in every decision that was made on the stage. And I think acknowledging that only makes opera more audacious and more exciting.
Speaker 2:
I wonder if you could expand on something that came up later in the lecture and it was the role of the audience. And I was thinking of that when the operatic hierarchy graph came about. I was like, that's weird. The audience is not there. And obviously it's something that it's important in your work, and it got me thinking how you're imagining the role of the audience changing once anarchy gets at the opera or to the opera. And of course, some of the models that come to mind are something like La Scada and the audience just yelling and protesting loudly and sometimes throwing objects at the singers of the performance not going that well. The other model is one that you offered for us today, adding elements, components, gestures, and either the production or the staging that sort of break down the authority of everyone who's on stage or who's behind stage and responsible for the opera. But I'm wondering if there's other ways in which you're anticipating this anarchist energy at the opera will change the audience. And if you wouldn't mind sharing that with us.
Yuval Sharon:
I am so glad you brought this up because... And I'm not trying to dodge the question, but it is a big part of my talk next week, so I hope you'll come back. And I'm very interested in, again, this is partially conditioned by opera houses which create these gulfs between the space of the auditorium and the space of the stage. And I'll be talking a lot about Wagner next week and the idea that it is this kind of illusionistic space, Wagner being the first person to turn down the lights in the house so that you disappear as if your body has evaporated into some mystical image. That can be very powerful too. I'm not saying that that's fully wrong. What I'm saying is wrong is it shouldn't always be like that every single time. Let's do that with Wagner because that actually works really well with what he created sometimes, but why are we subjecting new composers to try and do that, say, we love when that happens, so please do that.
As opposed to, well, how do you want to engage with the audience? What kind of world do you want the audience to come into? What's that relationship like for you, new composer, new director, new librettist, new everybody? I think that that's what I really am after. I think the more that we're flexible in the creation process and the graphs that I showed were really all about the production process and the creation process with the notion that the audience will arise and adapt to those particular pieces. I mentioned in Detroit that in Cozy, I had no idea how people were going to react to us changing the ending and the ending coming earlier than in the score. And I was kind of like, okay, well, last time I did Mozart, I was booed mercilessly. So is that going to happen again here in Detroit? And no, in Detroit, everyone applauded.
And one of the things that was really moving for me is like, oh, well, but I've been building this kind of audience for five years to kind of think about opera differently, take them into parking garages and into open air amphitheaters and into a number of other places, and it builds a curiosity that has been very exciting there. So yes, I'll talk a lot about that next time. But for me as a director, I think actually all the artists involved in opera, we do actually fundamentally care about the work that we're doing having impact with the audience. I just think that we sometimes think if we do it the way it's always been done, then we will get the result we've always gotten over the years. And I just don't quite believe that. I don't think we can rest on the laurels of how things have worked in the past.
Deborah Nelson:
Okay. We're going to have one last question, but I want to say a couple of things. I want to thank Randy and Berlin and the Berlin family for being here. There's a few quick reminders. Lectures two and three will take place here on May 13th and May 20th at 6:00. I hope you'll join us to continue the conversation. Next week on May 13th, Yuval will sign copies of his book, A New Philosophy of Opera, and we will be giving copies away to a few lucky random guests. On May 13th, we have a special offer for you Chicago students. All students in attendance will receive a commemorative anarchy at the opera, and we'll get a chance to talk to you all. And of course, please do not miss the third and final lecture on May 20th, including the performance of John Cage's year opera five featuring students and staff on the production side and two of Yuval's collaborators on previous parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 of the opera cycle. One last question?
Speaker 3:
I've been thinking a lot about the usage of opera or other performance media in direct resistance. So we're living in a time where status quo is not... What is status quo? When you see the federal government being pared down to whatever it's being pared down to, and you see millions of children in Africa dying because they can't get the biscuits from USA that they had been getting up until this time. And I'm just a simple parish pastor, so I think about these things from that standpoint as well. But are there people these days who are leading efforts, perhaps operatic, anarchic efforts that are... Because I feel like this is really one of the only ways that you're going to be able to effectively challenge authoritarianism is through a creative anarchy.
Yuval Sharon:
I completely agree with you, and yeah, I mean, I will simply say that the arts, again to the quote that I came back to a few times, Heinrich Müller saying that the arts are the laboratory of social fantasy, meaning in the way that we organize ourselves when we create an opera or create a performance. And when we create this relationship between artists and audience, we are exploring different ways of being together. And in that process where everything else feels stuck and where we don't feel like, okay, well, this is the way things are, you're in the theater, and you go, well, maybe it doesn't have to be that way. It doesn't mean just... You don't have to be an artist to have that kind of reaction in the theater. Elizabeth Carothers was here who was the executive director of the New Bar Collegium. We were talking about theater today.
And I was so struck by the fact that she was like, oh, theater is so hard for me. I have a difficult time going to the theater because I just empathize so much with the person on stage. And that funny enough for most people is like, that's the power. For some people, it's overwhelming. And I think in Elizabeth's case it must be a lot to take to experience that. But that is that power. When things are abstract and we read about them in the newspaper, it's easy to detach ourselves and to distance ourselves from it.
And then when I really, to me, that image that we are right now, me and you are sharing oxygen in this cycle, in this room, and that means we're sharing a lot of other things, like our thought process. Our biologies are starting to get in sync with each other, and it lets us start to think, well, now when we leave this particular space, how do I want things to be different? And each in our own way, I'm not a politician. I'm not trying to overthrow the government, but I am interested in opera being... My sphere of influence and my sphere of interest, being a place where we can imagine a different way of doing things. And it sounds like you're doing the same. So that's the purpose I think.
Deborah Nelson:
We'll continue the conversation next week. Thank you very much, Yuval.
Yuval Sharon:
Thank you all.