Yuval Sharon Lecture 2 "Burn Down the Opera Houses!" | Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Family Lectures

Deborah Nelson:

Good evening and welcome to the second of the three events in the 2025 Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Family Lecture Series. I'm Deborah Nelson, Dean of the Division of the Arts & Humanities. Thank you so much for being with us tonight. I want to be brief because I cannot wait to hear Yuval Sharon continue to explore the idea of anarchy at the opera, which he so masterfully introduced last week.

The Berlin family Lectures, now in their 11th year, are indebted to the foresight and generosity of Randy and Melvin Berlin, whose support enhances our community and amplifies the scholarly impact of the University of Chicago. Every year, the Berlin Family Lectures allow us to host one of the world's most distinguished scholars, writers, or creative artists to deliver an extended lecture series, participate in the university's intellectual community, and develop a book for publication with The University of Chicago Press.

In just a moment, I will welcome to the stage my colleague, Hans Thomalla, to introduce Yuval, but before I do so, please allow me to mention a few housekeeping notes.

First, I want to preview that next year's Berlin 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 the recipient of too many awards to name here. Dates for the 2026 Berlin Family Lectures will be announced soon. Be sure to sign up for email updates at our website, berlinfamilylectures.uchicago.edu.

Tonight, after Yuval's prepared remarks, he'll be in dialogue with Hans Thomalla and then take questions from our audience from those in person and those watching online.

And lastly, I hope you'll join us in the same space next week for the third and final lecture, which will close with a rare performance of John Cage's Europera 5. You don't want to miss that.

Hans Thomalla, who I am so very happy to see in person since he's been in Berlin for the year, joined our faculty last year as the Helen A. Regenstein Professor in the Department of Music and the College. He is a remarkable artist and inspiring teacher and a truly wonderful colleague. A composer for music for the stage, Thomalla has written four operas: Fremd was performed by the Stuttgart Opera in 2011; Kaspar Hauser premiered at the Freiburg and Augsburg Opera in 2016; and then the two operas, Dark Spring and Dark Fall, were both performed at the Mannheim Opera in 2020 and 2024 respectively. He is the recipient of many, many awards, including the Christopher Delz Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2024 Koussevitzky commission from the Library of Congress. This academic year, he has been a fellow at the German Academy Villa Massimo in Rome.

Without further ado, please join me in welcoming Hans Thomalla.

Hans Thomalla:

Thank you, Debbie.

It's a great honor and great pleasure to introduce Yuval Sharon at this occasion today. And anybody remotely familiar with the field of opera reading about Yuval Sharon must immediately recognize that his biography is clearly one of the most distinguished imaginable, both in regards to quality or a standing of achievements, but also in just pure quantity of his creative output. He has won MacArthur Genius Grant, was the Musical America Director of the Year 2023, and he won the Götz Friedrich Prize 2014, which is one of the most important awards for younger directors in Europe, if not in the world, today.

In Europe, he had created new productions for some of the most established opera companies, such as the Bayreuth Festival, where he produced Lone Green in 2018, the Vienna State Opera or the Frankfurt Opera. And in the US, he has produced such groundbreaking works as a reverse-order La Bohème about which he quite fascinatingly writes in his book, and Orfeo at Santa Fe, but he also has developed an incredibly broad catalog of contemporary works and projects often in collaboration with some of the leading composers of our time.

Sharon is both active as a stage director and as a director/founder/creator of opera institutions. He was co-artistic director of The Industry in Los Angeles and has been director of Detroit Opera for several years now. As I'm sure most of you know, he has been announced as a director of The Met's new Ring production, probably the most impressive, and if I may add this, the most intimidating assignment a theater artist in this country can receive here.

For me, it is quite fascinating to see how Yuval Sharon moves seamlessly between what one could say mainstream opera and the truly experimental endeavors, and how he seems to have both the force and the sort of Ulysses-like wit to bring the most experimental ideas and production processes to these, what we used to call, supertankers of opera because they hardly are able to change their course into the slightest uncharted territories.

But Yuval Sharon is not only a director and producer, but also an author, as we know and we will have a book signing event after this, of his wonderful book, The New Philosophy of Opera, which I highly recommend. It is a window in his quite unique thinking about opera and his way to constantly sort of question and redefine the relevance of this field today, but it is also mainly an attempt to share his enthusiasm for the new and experimental, and I read it a bit like a seduction into opera as something that can be new and different.

Before I give now the floor to Yuval Sharon, I want to make two very brief personal observations. I remember that I was very excited when I first discovered his work several years ago, and I had often felt that a bit disappointed that the really innovative projects in American opera, for example, the collaboration between Peter Sellars and the early John Adams or Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, but also the sort of more fringe or off-the-mainstream projects of Meredith Monk and somebody like Robert Ashley, that these activities never really made it into the mainstream or never really changed its course. And Sharon's appearance in the field marked the fundamental difference for me because from the beginning, he had sort of the genre as a whole in his focus. His works are never just sort of one-offs of visionary storytellings, but seemed to ask more generally, what does story in opera mean today? Whose story? In what works? What forms? How do we need to transform institutions, opera companies, production processes?

And the second aspect I want to point out, it is, I think, clear that Yuval Sharon deeply reflects on the two elements which in the dialectic relationship seem to drive opera as an art form, which is the work and the institution. But when I started reading his New Philosophy of Opera, I noticed a third element about which he seemed to deeply care, which is the audience. And he does not bring up the audience in the way that opera conservatists sometimes sort of call upon this strange body in a way to argue against presumed expectations or wishes of the audience against modernization, and neither is the audience addressed in his work in a slightly arrogant way that we sometimes see as sort of "Let me educate you" by contemporary theater artists.

It's quite the opposite. In the tone of his writing, I sense a deep and really true care about the audience's potential, about the human condition as something that needs ever-new forms of presence and representation on the stage, and that has almost unlimited desire for experimentation, play, transformation, for experiencing oneself and one's stories in new ways. And this deep and true belief in the audience and its potential can be experienced in both his writings and his work, and I find it very inspiring.

I look forward now to Yuval Sharon and what he wants to share with us tonight. Thank you.

Yuval Sharon:

Good evening, everybody. Thank you for that beautiful introduction. I'm so, so honored by that. And tonight's lecture is entitled... It's still about anarchy, so if you're here last week and you were hoping I was going to change the topic, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but you came back, so here we are. Let's keep going on this topic and go into what I've called Burn Down the Opera Houses! is the name of this particular lecture.

So just to recap, last week I looked to define both anarchy and opera as a method to articulate what the two concepts have in common. And after engaging with the writings of several different anarchists, I found myself drawn to a definition of anarchy that calls us to see the world in an expanded vision that allows us to recognize the limits of our kind of fenced-in reality and tries to expand that limit, that anarchy reminds us that our given circumstances are not inevitabilities, but contingencies that demand our constant change and adaptation for the prosperity, not of us as individuals, but for the prosperity of all humanity.

And I have to say that after years of directing operas in venues ranging from the Vienna State Opera to the Millennium Park Garage here in Chicago, I've realized that opera for me is ultimately a precarious and multitudinous field of artistic abundance. It's a hurly-burly of simultaneous activity that has, like anarchy, the potential to expand our minds, but also our senses and our hearts. So defined in these ways, I think you can say that anarchy and opera might seem unexpectedly simpatico, and yet the institution built up around opera would prefer that you equate opera with empire rather than with egalitarianism.

So in this lecture, I'm going to investigate how two of the primary vessels for opera, and that is the opera house and the musical score, tend to have a calcifying effect on the art form, and how my own experiments beyond the opera house and beyond the conventional musical score have pointed me towards the possibilities that I explored last week in defining an anarchist opera.

And I think the best way in to this definition and to this conversation is to start with this notorious interview by the conductor and composer Pierre Boulez, as there has hardly been a more... Here he is with, even though Frank Zappa is here in the foreground, that's Pierre Boulez in the background. There's hardly been a more anarchistic cry in the history of classical music than his call to blow up all the opera houses, and that's part of where I got the name of this particular lecture, but I'll get to that in a second. And it gets us close to that kind of image of the Molotov cocktail thrower that I showed last week, the chaos-sowing anarchist that I talked about in the first lecture, and maybe that kind of image that you get when you hear the word anarchy.

I made great efforts last week to dispel that image in favor of something more utopian and something more egalitarian that I wanted to connect, but tonight I want to riff on that incendiary comment of Boulez as a launching point for understanding the structural limitations at play in opera today and how that very structure excludes a lot of the positive attributes that I connect to anarchy, how it also inhibits the kind of free expression that I would like to see more of at the opera.

So let's start by unpacking that particular quote of Boulez, which is really just one of the great Boulez invectives against classical music. He has so many others that are maybe a little less popular but are just as good that I just want to name real quick before I move on. There's this one, "All the art of the past must be destroyed." So that's a great one. There's also, "I believe a civilization that conserves is one that will decay because it is afraid of going forward and attributes more importance to memory than the future." I mean, these are just like... I mean, if these don't make you think of anarchy, I don't really know what will. And one that might really, I could have summarized, might summarize my last lecture very well, "We need to restore the spirit of irreverence in music." I think this is fantastic. I think that's very true.

But the quote about blowing up the opera houses is probably his most famous, and it comes from a 1967 interview he did in the German magazine, Der Spiegel and the quote goes like this, "Only with the greatest difficulty can one present modern operas in a theater in which predominantly repertoire pieces are played. It is really unthinkable." Sorry. "The most expensive solution would be to blow the opera houses up, but don't you think that would be the most elegant?" So that gives you a sense of what Boulez meant by this sentiment, but I think the context is really important here.

So the interview starts with Boulez trashing an intendant, which is the German term for an impresario or general director. He's trashing the intendant, Rolf Liebermann, who is the intendant of Hamburg Opera. They'd just brought an opera to New York in '67 by Boris Blacher called Incidents After a Crash-Landing, and Boulez had no kind words either for Blacher or for Liebermann, who said that "an intendant," and this is another great invective of his, "an intendant must not institutionalize and cultivate his own bourgeois mediocrity." So it's just really, he really pulled no punches.

So he goes on then to say, "Will he ever write an opera for the stage?" And he says, "Well, I would like to, but I don't know if I will yet." So the interview kind of keeps goading him to sort of explain, "Well, what kind of opera would you write, and who would you write it with, and what would the subject be?" and those kind of things. And they go on to directors. He has nothing nice to say about directors, hates most of them and says that if he's going to work with an opera director, it has to be one that is not burdened by any operatic tradition.

And then finally, it comes around to say where is he going to perform, where would he perform an opera, and could it happen in one of the currently quite conservative opera houses? And that's when Boulez seems to really flip out and says, "Absolutely not," and replies, "now we come to the reason why there are no modern operas today. The new German opera houses may look modern from the outside, but inside they have remained extremely old-fashioned and only with the greatest difficulty," here's this quote, "can one present modern operas," et cetera, et cetera.

And then after this particular quote, he goes on after the interviewer says, "Well, I don't think anyone is going to go along with your plan to blow up the opera houses." And he says, "Well, one can play the usual repertoire in the existing opera houses, Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, up to about Berg. But for new operas, experimental stages absolutely need to be incorporated. And this apparently senseless demand has already been widely realized in other branches of the theater." And by this, Boulez means that some of the spoken theater in Germany already were creating not-proscenium-based spaces for new work to happen.

And he continues to say, "The burden of having to present a 'successful' opera or accessible opera no matter what would happily fall away, and on such a small stage, you could risk everything while the big opera houses could continue to exist." So this is really important because he kind of is giving away that he doesn't actually want to blow up the opera houses. He is saying, "You could preserve the opera houses. Just give us a secondary space where we could try new things, where we could experiment. Then," as it says here in this quote, "the big opera houses could remain." So in a way, it's kind of like a ransom rather than a rallying cry, "Build up an experimental space for me, and then you could do whatever you want with all the old repertoire as you'd like it."

So I have to say, when you look at the context, it's actually a little disappointing because it's always presented as like go to the barricades, blow up the opera houses. But when you look at it more carefully, in the end, it's kind of a bit of advice on practical matters. It's not as much a philosophical demand for new beginnings as much as a really more practical advice about how to create more experimental pieces.

So I'd like to revise the quote and say that I... And just go out and say that I do not believe in blowing up opera houses. I consider that an act of violence and innocent people are likely to get hurt if you do that. What is left behind in that situation is a crater, so I'm not advocating for that. However, if you burn them down instead, then what you get is actually an act that could be considered more of a phoenix-like approach, something that could allow for something new to emerge. And also, to be totally honest, we could consider it symbolically. Okay? We don't need to actually go through it literally, but I think there's something to be said about burning akin to the control burn of an overgrown forest.

If you're unfamiliar with the term control burn, it can sound really paradoxical, like how do you control a fire, kind of like anarchic opera, probably. The act of control burning though is planned under specific conditions to achieve ecological and land management goals, including ecosystem restoration, improving wildlife habitat, and managing invasive species. And control burns in nature remind us that, at least according to National Geographic, that fire can be rejuvenating. It returns nutrients to the soil in the ashes of vegetation that could otherwise take years to decompose. And after a fire, the additional sunlight and open space in a forest can help young trees and other plants start to grow. Some plants, such as certain pine species, require fire before the cones or fruits containing the seeds can release them. These cones or fruits need fire to melt a resin that holds the seeds inside. And as a result, without fire, these species cannot reproduce.

So what a beautiful image to consider for the opera, which is how can we think that maybe every few years, like the forest, if we find a controlled way to do it, how do we allow new light to enter into the overgrown, dark wood that has grown? That's the sense I'm going to explore in the remainder of this lecture, but we'll also look at least at one theater that was supposed to have literally burnt down as an aspirational act of transformation.

So when I posit burning down the opera house as a way of clearing growth, you can see that resonance right away with the anarchists who advocated for the constant flexibility and the constant reorganization of social power to ensure that society does not get rigid and become exploitative. The so-called anarchist environmentalist, Murray Bookchin, who I mentioned in my last lecture, even used the example of the controlled fire as a model of human interaction in our habitat. In his essay Second Nature, he writes about the Native American custom of controlling fires as an example of mindful cohabitation with the natural world. Bookchin's vision of peaceful anarchic coexistence focuses on our organic growth with only the least necessary control applied to ensure mutual survival of all species.

In fact, there's also a whole branch of anarchists known as the evolutionary anarchists following in the footsteps of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Proudhon was the first to call himself an anarchist, but after surveying the catastrophic results of the French Revolution where violent insurrection was replaced first by a repressive government and then by a society that equated freedom with private ownership, he began envisioning a society that would become more cooperative by degrees, and the anarchists that followed in his wake advocated for gradual and nonviolent methods in contrast to the revolutionary approach of the more notorious anarchists. Those methods include direct action and cooperative initiatives, the building of mutual aid networks, and developing alternative institutions. And those are the type of anarchists whose slogan might be something like, "Burn it down, but keep it controlled." And I would say that that's where I situate myself in the spectrum of anarchy, and especially as it relates to operatic anarchy.

So to think about the metaphoric burning down of the Opera house, let's think about what the architecture of the opera house really represents as a restrictive force for the creative process. I've covered some of this ground in a chapter on site-responsive work in my book, A New Philosophy of Opera. And in that book, I talk about the proscenium arc as defining the way that we engage with live performance, the same way that we sort of do with a film as something that happens behind a frame.

And the proscenium arc, if that's an unfamiliar term for some of you, it's the threshold that demarcates the world of fiction from the world of reality. From the spectator's perspective, it precedes the scene, which is where we get the word proscenium, it's pro-scenium, meaning before the scene, and it masks all of the machinery that creates the illusion of theater, all the lights and the whatnot. And almost all operatic performances take place safely behind this archway that creates a picture of a faraway and floating world.

And this is a picture of the very first proscenium arc that was erected by the Duke Ranuccio Farnese in Parma to celebrate his son's wedding in 1619. It needed an extra level of spectacle, so it needed that sense of the faraway, it needed that sense of the illusion. And so he decided, "Let's create an archway where we can hide all of the mechanisms that we're going to lift and lower all of the machinery." Now, when you go to visit Renaissance and Baroque theaters, all of their proscenia are just so extraordinary and glamorous, and they have the names emblazoned of the generous benefactors who built them, and you can't help but notice how awful the sight lines are from anywhere because of this proscenium, it becomes so enormous. And so it stands in the way of actually seeing the stage, which would be an impossible frustration in our theaters today.

I mean, look at the theater we're sitting in right now, nothing blocking your approach of this particular stage, and there is no proscenium here in this one. So this is a lovely... this is part of why I feel so comfortable in this particular theater because there's no gap between me and you really, just this slightly heightened stage. But when you have this proscenium, you are erecting a distance. And then in opera, you have the additional distance of this huge gulf of the orchestra pit that separates you, the world of the stage, and the world of the performance.

The other thing that happens with the proscenium is the employment of a perfect vanishing point of perspective that can be appreciated only from one real space. If you can't quite tell in this picture, I'm really realizing it's a bit blurry, but the illusionistic space created by the columns and then the backdrop really can only be appreciated if you are sitting right square in the middle, which is the seat of power, it is the central spot for really the king. And in that spot everything is perfect, and everyone else around there is getting a skewered view of reality. And now think what it must have been like to be a member of that society, and you're sitting there with the king, but you're all reminded of your place in society very, very powerfully because there you are all the way off to the side, you can barely see the show while the king is enjoying it absolutely perfectly.

And this is how the architecture of the theater becomes a perfect mirror of the kind of society that king is wanting to impose on society. And this is part of how these architectural spaces actually embody a kind of ideology. It's therefore a kind of silent contract with the audience. And attending theater becomes a rehearsal for being in the world where the space where we view a representation of society prescribes a model of reality, not so much for the world behind the proscenium, meaning that world of fiction, but for that world in the audience.

Now, this is a lot of information here, but this is a chart that tells you about the seating capacity of European theaters and American theaters. And I want to talk about this because for a couple of key reasons, I have to say, when I see American opera houses versus European opera houses, I tend to think that in American opera houses that you can tell are so much larger than European ones.

Take a look at, for example, Metropolitan Opera as the largest one in America, 3,800 seats. Compare it to the Prague National Theatre at 965 seats. Really the biggest one listed here is Royal Opera Covent Garden at 2,200 seats. And there's really like, I don't know, Washington National Opera, 2,300 seats.

Okay, so what's the point of saying this? Don Giovanni by Mozart was premiered at the Prague National Opera for 965 seats. It is performed regularly at the Metropolitan Opera for a theater that is so much larger. And what happens when you take a piece that is written in a way that the director, Peter Hall said so beautifully in his book, Exposed by the Mask, written in a hall where you are meant to see the eyes of the actor. When that is transposed from a theater that... I think this is a theater that I think is 400 seats just to give you a little bit a sense of scale. When you go from that theater to a theater that's so much larger, think about what needs to happen to make sure that the original effects that Mozart had in mind could still somehow still read, everything needs to somehow scale up.

Okay, so for example, let's say that you had, at the Prague National Opera, let's say you have a chorus of, I don't know, 20-something. At the Met Opera, if you want to hear that chorus, you have to get it up to at least 50. It's the kind of thing that suddenly everything is so much bigger, the sets have to be bigger, the gestures have to be bigger, the makeup has to be bigger. All of these things have to start to fit the architecture as opposed to fit the work. So the work is now made to kind of wag the dog as the saying goes. And that's something that becomes a really complicated dance as you start to work on any particular opera, especially in America. The container of these larger than life auditoriums start to have to feel like they are multiplied at an enormous range.

And one of the things that is so challenging is that in the European houses that are still quite intimate, you still have a possibility of opera being either the aristocratic art form, that was what I discussed last week, the aristocratic art form in smaller venues or the carnivalesque art form that happened in Venice, that sense of an either or. But in America, you have a one-size-fit-all approach. It needs to work in a theater at this size all the time, and everything needs to be at that level. Oh, and by the way, they all need to still be done somehow unamplified. Now, don't get me started on this. You can read my book if you want to go down that road, but even at the Metropolitan Opera, Mozart's music, which was written for an unamplified voice in a 900 seat theater needs to somehow still be heard perfectly in a 3,800 seat theater. So that, like I said, is a rabbit hole we're going to skip for tonight.

But if that operation on stage is elephantine, imagine what happens behind the scenes. The operation around a 4,000 seat auditorium is so outsized and requires so many micro levels of management that these theaters start to resemble small countries. Rehearsals and rehearsal planning start to take on the precision planning of a military maneuver. And I've once been asked to discuss with a completely straight face exactly what will need to happen on stage from two o'clock until 3:30 on a day three years in the future, as if I am supposed to know at this moment with an urgency, with an utmost urgency.

Hours of chorus time or hours of orchestra time translate into fixed operations that start to treat these operas more like cookie cutter products of some grotesque assembly line. And the only way to create in these circumstances is to resign yourself to this kind of hierarchical model that I showed last week. This is something that I discussed in terms of opera, which has so many different authors, at least so many different interpreters that this feels like an imposition on the nature of opera, but when you have so little time and you have such big forces at play, you find yourself by default needing to go to this because at least you can get it done, at least it can happen in this kind of period.

And that's how we got to a state that can echo the anarchist, David Graeber in his book with David Wengrow, the Dawn of Everything, which I referred to last week. How do we find ourselves in such a restricted position that when it is that we're committed to an art form that can be so many different things, so many possibilities.

And so that's why I became motivated to explore site-specific opera, especially with a company I founded in Los Angeles called The Industry, and performing in situations with no proscenium arc. And that's where I saw an escape from the limitations of the force perspective by putting opera in moving vehicles, in train stations, in parks. And I'm going to talk about one of the productions in just a bit, but part of that is escaping some of those restrictions to see if what could happen instead of working backwards from the theater into the work, letting the work dictate everything about the realization. And that's been the major goal of a company like The Industry.

As opposed to saying to a composer, "You need to work with this size orchestra, this size chorus, this size space, these many hours of rehearsal," quite the opposite; "What is it you want to create? Where do you want to create it? Who are the right forces for it?" Everything gets dictated based on the wish of the people who are creating, and it has resulted in a very different kind of operatic experience.

Now, the other very strong alternative to site responsive work like The Industry would be an alternative like the Bayreuth or Festspielhaus as a theater that was created as something oppositional to everything that was happening in opera in Wagner's day.

Now, I mentioned last week that Wagner and Cage as unlikely... I mean, this is probably the only lecture where you're going to see a picture of Wagner and Cage on the same slide, and I'm going to talk about both of them. But in this lecture, I'm going to talk about Wagner, and next week's is all about Cage.

I have to say that Wagner, one of the main things I hope you'll take away from this, if you don't already know, I know there are some true Wagnerians in this room, and so this will not be news for you, but for some other people who really associate Wagner with right-wing fascism, Wagner was a tried and true anarchist. He was absolutely considered a politically dangerous person as this wanted poster, a real wanted... This is not AI. Some of the other images were AI, I admit, but this one is not. This was, states right at the top, a politically dangerous person, but not for a right-wing ideology, for his connection to anarchism and for his participation in the Dresden Uprising of 1849, which was a turbulent finale to a year's worth of uprisings in the city and political agitation.

He befriended the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Bakunin was one of the very first anarchists who came to Dresden in March of 1849 and would later be considered the chief instigator of the riot of 1849, who apparently rented an apartment across the hall from Wagner, and infuriated Wagner's wife, Minna, at the time because the two would constantly be drinking and making hand grenades together. And 30 pages of Wagner's biography is dedicated to Bakunin. So he wasn't just a passing acquaintance. Wagner was really inspired by this particular anarchist.

Bakunin is best known for his text, God and the State, which picks up on Marx's 1844 line, religion is the opium of the masses. And he makes the twin authorities of church and state a narcotic that humans must overflow. This is a line from this particular book, which is basically a revision of Satan, and thinking of Satan, not as we commonly think of Satan as the origin of all evil, but actually the best friend of mankind because Satan is the one that encourages us to think for ourself. And that is something that religion does not want us to do according to Bakunin. And so that is something that religion was built up to suppress us from having our freedom of thought the same way to Bakunin the state is trying to do as well.

Now, I found this so fascinating because Wagner is interested and befriending Wagner and interested in these ideas exactly as he's writing his most romantic opera. In fact, he titled it Big Romantic Opera, Lohengrin. And this is the opera that I did in Bayreuth. And so I was thinking a lot about Bakunin and this anarchist impulse in Wagner when I was creating my production.

And I'll just talk briefly about this production. Maybe in the Q&A, if there's questions, I could talk about it more. But there are two principle female characters in this opera. There is Elsa pictured here, and there's also the character of Ortrud. And Ortrud is always depicted as this kind of evil influence on the impressionable young, naive Elsa. And she kind of corrupts the innocent Elsa and ruins her chance for a fantastic marriage to Lohengrin. But in my mind, I really started to realize that Ortrud is depicted for Wagner the same way that Bakunin describes Satan as the best friend of humanity, as the person who is actually to try to wake Elsa up from her kind of slumber and to try and encourage her to think for herself, to ask questions, to not just blindly obey this new man.

If you don't know the story, Lohengrin appears, well, we don't know his name is Lohengrin. That's part of the suspense of the opera is that he appears and says, "You must not know my name, but you must marry me anyway if I free you." So she says, "Okay, sure, that sounds like a good idea, but okay, no problem." But Elsa says, "If you don't know his name, what else do you not know about him?" And that plants the seed of doubt. And in a traditional production of Lohengrin, that's often seen as a kind of poisoning of Elsa's purity. But I really think that Wagner was actually saying that was an important moment of awakening for Elsa. And act three when Elsa confronts Lohengrin and says, "This is not love, this is not what I am looking for, this is not a true and free love." And she resists it and demands his name that that's an act of liberation, and that Ortrud's responsible for it.

Now, Ortrud, like a lot of anarchists confuses, she lets the ends justify the means. And that's where I think she goes too far the same way that Bakunin did, the same way actually that Wagner did in his way. But nevertheless, that impulse towards more freedom is what I think Wagner's actually trying to create here. And again, if you know the opera of Lohengrin, you also realize we're introduced in the opera to a total unification of a religious fundamental state where the king is always praying to God, and there's always these long, long, long prayers constantly.

So this was, in my mind, a big part of what Lohengrin was really about, and also fundamentally about the institution of marriage as an institution of exploitation. Lohengrin is the opera where the most famous wedding march comes from, which people still play in most weddings, which I find so grotesque because actually it's like an ironic moment in the opera that it starts act three, and you know in the audience at this point, this marriage is doomed, and yet it's a quite sweet little << dah-dah-dah-dah >> I mean, we all know this music and it's become such a cliche, but in the opera, it's a sign of real impending doom.

But what is so fascinating is that Wagner is critiquing this institution of marriage as this kind of oppressive force, especially as it relates to the imposition on the woman. And I find that so amazing, especially as it relates to a figure, an anarchist that I mentioned last week, Emma Goldman, who writes in her essay, Love and Marriage, marriage is primarily an economic arrangement, an insurance pact. And she also writes something that, I mean, Wagner could have said this; love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful molder of human destiny. How can such an all-compelling force be synonymous what that poor little state and church-begotten weed, marriage?

I mean, this is really could come straight from not just Lohengrin, but also Wagner's next opera, which began as a kind of... Oh, before I get to that, I should say part of this story is that Wagner never got to see the premiere of Lohengrin because he was considered a politically dangerous individual and had to flee Dresden, and so it premiered without him while he was in exile in Zurich.

So again, something that we really do not think of when we think of Wagner is his connection to left-wing and anarchist politicians and political thinking, I should say.

But while he's in exile, he starts developing this dream of a mythic piece, which is resistant, or actually probably better put, oppositional really to all of the operatic trappings of his day. And this single opera would be a transformative and even redemptive act for a future people.

The concept for this work started as one piece, but then gradually grew and grew and grew kind of backwards until it became an enormous four-part cycle that we now know as the Ring Cycle, which is an epic. That's, I think, probably the only comparison in Western culture might be Dante, Divine Comedy in terms of its scope and ambition and breadth. And although this entire enormous cycle can't be so easily reduced as an anarchist cycle, there are a lot of anarchist elements in this piece, and I'm thinking about it a lot, as you can probably imagine.

Wagner knew Proudhon, who I mentioned earlier, the French anarchist, he knew Proudhon's work very well, and he specifically knew the very pithy phrase, most famous phrase of Proudhon's; property is theft. Very easy phrase to remember, a good rallying cry. And if you think about it, that feels like a very adequate description of what happens in Das Rheingold, where it's all about property and it's all about Alberich's property, this ring that gets passed from person to person and the possession, and how the possession turns humans or not humans into beasts, into characters that can only resort to violence. And that seems to happen over and over again.

But also the Ring Cycle is fascinated with this oppressive institution of marriage. And the most rigid and reactionary figure in the entire Ring Cycle is the goddess of marriage, Frigga, who's the wife of the chief god, Wotan, and in Valkyrie, she's positioned to be the work's primary obstacle.

The last opera of the cycle, Götterdämmerung, my God, we have a double wedding in that. So you know it's trouble. And there's also just the treachery of forgetting who we are, and that's the forgetting potion, which forces us to get married. It's just the worst.

The one example of free love is an incestuous couple that defies the marriage bond, and that's the real sticking point. And even today we think it's really tricky figuring out how we relate to Sigmund and Sieglinde, brother and sister, twins who fall in love, who Wagner wants us to sympathize with.

Now, I want to hypothesize something here, I'm going a little on a limb because I don't have a lot of evidence here, but David, I know we will talk about this at some point, and if somebody here has some good proof of this, I'd really appreciate this. But this particular picture is of the German anarchist, Max Stirner, who was coincidentally born in Bayreuth, and he participated in discussions with the young Hegelians, and has this very famous book called The Unique and its Property published in 1844.

And Max Stirner, and the evidence is a bit murky, but it's believed that Wagner knew this anarchist's writing, and some even think that Wagner recommended Stirner to Nietzsche, who Nietzsche was very inspired by Stirner.

Now, Stirner, in this particular book, talks a lot about incest because he says that incest is something that is an example of what it means to break all the bonds of bourgeois common behavior, and something that we should also allow if it is the consenting choice of two adults. And he was, of course, being outrageous maybe, but he's kind of testing his readers saying, why are we so conditioned to dislike things with such a knee-jerk reaction? Why don't we think about it? Why don't we not just jump at this, but process it and consider what free love actually means? I don't think Stirner actually did act on any incestuous desire on his own part, but he did basically say that there are other forms of desire, much like Wotan does in act two.

So the point being that anarchist thinking is all through Wagner, and maybe some of the things that we still don't understand about the Ring Cycle might only be understandable in relation to the anarchist thinking of his day.

By the way, this is a picture of... if you're wondering what this picture was, that guy smoking and leaning was Stirner drawn by Engels. So Stirner was no slouch. He was in good company. If Engels is drawing a picture of you, you're not a forgotten member of society.

But here's what I really want to get to. I was talking about architectures, I was talking about the architecture of the theater, and Bayreuth came into the world as the product of the Ring Cycle because in 1850, as Wagner is imagining this Ring Cycle, this is a letter from Wagner that he wrote to his friend, Uhlig in 1850, and he's describing this project; I would erect, in a beautiful meadow near the town, a crude theater of boards and beams, built to my specifications and equipped only with such decor and machinery as is necessary for the performance of Siegfried. At the new year, announcements and invitations to all friends of the musical drama would go out to all the German newspapers with the offer of a visit to the proposed dramatic musical festival. Anyone who responds and travels for this purpose to Zurich would be assured an entrée, naturally like all the entrées, gratis. In addition, I would invite the young people here, university, choral societies, et cetera. When everything was in order, I would arrange, under these conditions, three performances of Siegfried in one week. And after the third, the theater would be torn down and my score burnt. To those who had enjoyed the thing I would then say, 'Now go do the same!'"

So, what a great letter. And safe to say that unfortunately or fortunately, Bayreuth is still standing. If you read Cosima Wagner's Diaries, you would be led to believe that it's because they had a lot of debts to pay. And so Wagner was then forced to write a new opera, which was Parsifal, to pay off the debts of making the theater in the first place. But of course, I think we all knew that once the theater was built, he was not burning this theater down. And he was surely not burning this score.

Under Cosima's eyes then, the theater which Wagner imagined as something that was going to be incinerated as part of the first performance, started to become a little bit more like Lenin's Tomb, like it was, became a kind of mausoleum. And over the course of Cosima's very, unfortunately very long lifetime, she really formed it into a place of conservation. Again, we can think of Boulez's quote at the beginning of being fearful of all cultures of conservation. That's what Bayreuth really did become.

So I just can't help but wonder what would have happened if Bayreuth remained an active imagination instead of an institution? What would've happened if we could all have just thought, "Wow, wouldn't it have been amazing if we could have been there in 1876 for the first ring cycle?" And we'll never know because it's gone. Now, maybe the score still exists and we'll get to that in a moment, but that experience of what that theater was will never be repeated again.

Now it's early in my process for developing a new production for The Ring for the Metropolitan Opera, so I need to say two things here. One, because I know this is being recorded, I have no intention of actually committing arson. I'm not going to burn down the Metropolitan Opera as part of my production.

And the second thing gets... Thank you. The second, the notion though, I will say that the notion of burning away this work, which is at the core, it's that the kernel of the idea of what Wagner was interested in, in the beginning of this process. That is a fundamental aspect of what me and my team are discussing, as it relates to The Ring Cycle. So I'm going to have to leave it at that because we're still developing, but just wait because [inaudible 00:50:53] is four years from now, so give us a little bit of time.

It gives me a chance to just reflect on that central tension that animates so much opera, as well as so much anarchy really. In last week's lecture, I discussed anarchy's lack of permanent effectiveness, not as a design flaw, but as a feature, and using Occupy Wall Street's short-lived existence as proof. And that was Sophie Scott-Brown saying that anarchists ideally fail forward. And I had mentioned kind of jokingly, "Well, failing forward is what I aspire to do with all my productions." And so I had someone afterwards say, "I didn't understand that comment. What do you mean you're actively trying to fail? What is that about?" And so I just want to take a second to explain this.

What I meant by that is failing to achieve a kind of eternal perfection, the notion that a production or any kind of operatic performance could ever aspire to eternal relevance, is something that I actually don't even think of as a goal. Instead, and I do think that operatic authorities would have you believe that they are tending an eternal flame. But the opera anarchist knows that a production is more like an emergency flare. It's brief, it's bold, and it's colorful, and it illuminates one possible pathway before it sputters out. And the idea that the theater would be torn down, as Wagner said, that might be easy to understand, because that's architecture, that's something material. But what about that second part... Oh, this is the flare, sorry, I meant to show that when I was talking about the flare. This is AI. Okay? This is an AI picture.

Anyway, so the theater being torn down, I think we can understand that. But what about the second part of Wagner's letter to Uhlig, "The score will be burnt"? So that gets to the point of the second edifice containing the music, and I'm realizing I don't have a ton of time left for this very important comment, so I'm going to see if I can move fairly quickly so I can leave some room for questions. I think even more than the Opera House, there is this edifice of this score, which looks like this as we all know. But turn it 90 degrees and it starts to resemble prison bars. And I think that the danger of the road veering 90 degrees is an ever present one in opera.

In many ways, the visual language of music invites people to actually twist those lines, and thereby twisting themselves into prisoners, if I can use some anarchist language for a moment. And for those of you that know the phrase, "Confusing the map for the territory," I actually think that's the best way to think of the relationship between the score and the actual opera. Because the map is obviously not the territory, but a reduction, it's an impression, an approximation to aid in all communication. And it leaves out a ton of critical information in order for there to be room for interpretation. And like all communication, that interpretation does open itself up to potential misinterpretation, but that is also what it means to impress something into a two-dimensional space, when what we're looking for is to unpack it into three dimensions. The score, in my opinion, is a two-dimensional map, but we confuse it a lot for the territory in opera. And that I think has come at the expense really of the interpreter.

Very briefly, here's pictures of, the very dawn of notation was much more open-ended. And it reminds me of what Emma Goldman said, and I mentioned this last week. When she described that when she's talking about Ibsen, that it's not just Ibsen, but also the interpreter, that both of them work, what she called a double channel that affects both mind and heart. And at the origin of opera, that is really how it used to be. This is a copy of the score of Monteverdi's Coronation of Poppea, which you can see there's almost nothing on the page. And in my book I talk a lot about the aria from Coronation of Poppea, Addio Roma, which when you look at it looks so boring, and if you perform it with integrity and with your full emotions, is one of the great arias in all of operatic literature.

The person that really shifted this, very quickly, I'm just going to make a shout-out to The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon for this, because this was a great reference in charting how we went from that medieval notation to notations that became almost like Holy Scripture. And that's really primarily thanks to Rossini. This is where we started to get this shift into really loving and really prizing the composer above all. And that's how we got to this operatic hierarchy that I showed you last week, which is the composer very, very high in his own mind, or usually his unfortunately, just up to usually even above the impresario.

And the thing is that, why I don't like this is it reminds me of other forms of hierarchies that are very religious in tone. This is a picture of The Mystical Tree of Life in the Kabbalah, for example. And there's a very similar sense of a trickle-down effect from the top, which is the closest to divinity, all the way down to the lowly people who get the least reflection of divine light.

Now, just as a brief comment, there was for a while, a little bit of freedom left in the operatic score, which is known as the cadenza. Here's a picture of a cadenza from La Traviata. And the cadenza was a little carnival-esque moment of freedom that kind of broke away from the strict rhythm of music and allowed the singer, the orchestra usually drops out and the singer gets a little bit of freedom. And this used to be an improvised moment. And today it's really quite rare.

I'm really sorry, I think I'm out of time for this. But I have this amazing clip of Edita Gruberová playing this scene in which the cadenza starts to become something so anathema to opera that it can only be used to show people going insane. I wish I could play it, but well.

[Video plays of Edita Gruberová in Lucia di Lammermoor] All right, everyone earned some singing, I think, after. Now here is what I wanted to briefly talk about with this. This is now, cadenzas are now a very familiar trope in operatic language at this point. So Donizetti wrote, Lucia di Lammermoor, knew that this was something he could rely on his audience to understand. But what kills me about this is that it was all written out now. So the moment that's supposed to be free, the moment that's supposed to have the most of the opportunity for improvisation is also completely structured and organized. And that makes me insane. And I just wish that those were moments that we really did let singers rip, and let them really show their own personality in really strong ways. I miss the sense of improvisation in opera. I feel like there is something missing in this world that everything is so hyper controlled. And it doesn't have to be always musical improvisation. I do wonder about maybe there's scenic improvisation to make up for the fact that the machinery of the music can't always change, but why not some musical improvisation as well.

Surely jazz ensembles with their loose structures that let each instrument step forward and riff freely, that surely gives us an example of what musical forms might be like if we introduce improvisation into these structures. And I have to say that this leads me to one thing to call back to Pierre Boulez for, because funny enough, in that same article that I mentioned in 1967 Spiegel interview that Boulez did, he actually talks about an opera that I don't know anything about, Gunther Schuller, an opera called Visitation, which fused jazz with Schoenberg's twelve-tone techniques. And the interviewer thought that this was a new frontier for opera, and this caused Boulez to react so annoyed and say, "Well, 50 people have already told me about this. And it's 50 people have surely already tried amalgamating jazz with western music. It doesn't work. There is a written music which relies on fixed rules and specific intellectual aspects, and then there's another music that lives from improvisation. Schuller's opera is a failure because jazz loses its characteristic quality of being improvised."

So it just goes to show you that even forward-thinking musicians like Boulez who are saying, "Blow up the opera houses," they can also show a remarkable failure of imagination when we look back at them 50 years later. And it's not just that inability to imagine improvisation and avant-garde musical techniques, but also that dubious distinction of jazz and western music and all of what that carries with it. And to be fair, I don't really know Schuller's opera, and maybe it is a failure, but there are operas... Oh, sorry, that's the quote. I read it to you. There are operas like Anthony Davis's X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, that do manage to fuse improvisation and twelve-tone techniques.

And as a last story, before we turn it over to question, answers, I want to give you an example of where I did introduce improvisation in many ways, and where it absolutely saved my butt as a director. This is a production that I did with my company, The Industry, called Sweet Land. And this took place outside, in temporary structures. It was a very complicated story to describe. This was the synopsis. The reason it looks like this is because the audience started together and then was split into two different groups, went to two different auditoriums, experienced two different stories, came back together, split again, and came back together. On one side, they experienced a story of westward expansion that we called The Train. And on the other side, the story of a kind of potlatch that we called Feast, and this was a kind of mythic meeting of two groups that we called both the hosts and the arrivals, a look at colonization, American colonization, but also just the mechanism of colonization more globally.

And this was an entirely consensus-based project with two composers, two librettists, and two directors. And we also had throughout this entire piece, two different characters, two different singers representing one character known as the coyote. And one of these two coyotes is pictured here, a very unique singer named Carmina Escobar. Carmina is really primarily an improvising musician who does not really do notated music, instead responds in her own way to the music as it happens. And the composer, Raven Chacon, who is now a Pulitzer Prize winner and also MacArthur Fellow, really wanted Carmina for everything that she would introduce into this fixed and closed realm of the musical score. So of course the process wasn't easy because we needed people with different musical processes to somehow work together and fuse together, but it really did make the project richer and it really did save the show. This is Carmina's program note in the program.

And the reason it saved the show is because we were outside in the park on the very first night, and you can imagine electricity, and bathrooms, and all these normal things that a theater has become really complicated when you're doing shows in a site responsive way. So it's opening night and the power goes out in one of the shows and I think, "Oh, my god, what are we going to do?" Now, last week I said, "Oh, doesn't everybody love it when something goes wrong in the theater?" Well, guess who doesn't love it when something goes wrong? The director.

So I'm sitting there watching and going, "Oh, god, what are we going to do?" And I'll tell you what normally happens in an opera when something goes wrong, most singers tend to freeze, and most everybody kind of freezes, and it's usually up to the stage management to try and figure something out backstage. Okay? Carmina, who is a master improviser knew exactly what to do with total calmness, because we actually did, funny enough, managed to have prop flashlights as part of the show. She just totally calmly picked up a flashlight and walked around and illuminated each of the singers as they sang, and she saved the entire show as if it was what was originally created. And if, I mean the levels of meaning that that act had with what the scene was, it would take me a whole other lecture to get into. But the fact that it was so cool for her, and so easy, and not something that stressed her out, that was all part of her muscle memory as an improviser.

And what I want to say is that this form of hierarchy that I showed last week, when you have this form of, let's say it's not even a hierarchy obviously, I should obviously rename this slide. This is organization, operatic organization, where the singers have a sense of ownership over what it is that they're creating. When something goes wrong, they know what to do, they have a responsibility to the performance and to the rest of their group. So if the machine breaks, they don't have to wait for some master engineer to wait and figure out what went wrong, they just start turning the gears themselves and they keep things in motion. That's the kind of anarchist thinking that I love so much.

Now, could something like that have happened with an artist who's emotional and psychological preparation for the role, could it have happened any other way? It probably could've. But in the case of Carmina, it was just so special, and just felt so right, and reminded me why this kind of approach is so inspiring. And what I mentioned last week about opera and theater as a workshop of social fantasy. It's like I got to see what it must feel like to live in a society built on a very excellent John Cage-ian word, which leads us to next week, interdependence, which I think of as the perfect anarchistic word. Not independence, not dependence of course, but interdependence, that we're all reliant on each other.

Yeah, I know. Thank you. And again, I'm kind of playing, I'm not really worried about Beethoven. I feel he's just going to do fine. The Boulez quote that you, and the aesthetics that stand behind it, which you kind of deal with interestingly, both ironically a little bit, but also I think his modernist agenda still drives you quite a bit. And I'm not sure if you're aware, there was a famous lecture by Luigi Nono about the contemporary music today in Darmstadt where he attacks both Cage and Boulez, another name, for this radical modernism that anything goes on the Cage side of improvisation. And then the complete burning everything down and starting from scratch on the Boulez side.

And he said, actually ghostwritten by the very young Helmut Lachenmann at that time, important opera composer too, he argues that we need a more dialectic relation to history. That just starting from scratch is just going to create new institutions, which to be honest, we see a little bit with IRCAM or these institutions that come out of Boulez practice and that we need rather maybe more great Guerilla sort of approach, like turn the opera house upside down, which is probably more expensive even than burning it down. I'm curious, how do you feel about this?

Yuval Sharon:

I think that's so true. I mean, I don't agree with Boulez's idea that we don't need the past works anymore. And I've spent a lot of time working with works from the past, but I try to think about them as works of the present. And that seems like a radical idea for a lot of people that these actually, I don't feel beholden to what the pieces were. I feel totally obligated to what these pieces are right now. And of course, as I kind of mentioned, you kind of have to posit the future every time you're working on these productions and thinking, well, what is this going to mean in two years? This Ring Cycle starts in three years. So it's like, what do I want to say in three years? But I have to start planning it, but I have to kind of project the idea. And that's way more important to me than the 1876 Ring Cycle or even the 20, when was the last Ring Cycle? Oh, 2008 at the Met. Anyway, that's not as important to me either. No, 2026, no, 2028, excuse me, 2028 through 2030.

That's my responsibility is this work and that time. So yeah, I mean, I think you're right that, and it doesn't mean that past perception doesn't matter. It just means that, okay, it's there and it's I'll take it in and then I kind of have to forget it. And yeah, so it's a complex relationship. I think you're right that a cut and a cut and burn is challenging. But the thing is, though, that in American opera houses, and I think so many of us are familiar with American opera houses, it's so much about recreation of the past. And that's where I think we're really stuck, that I still feel like we're still advocating for something that in Europe is so accepted. Or more accepted or whatever.

I missed the first one, so I hope the question won't be redundant to the people who've been here before. Because you mentioned the core and architecture as being the limiting force toward opera, and would you say that maybe there will be more of a holistic approach? And so what do you think about also the libretto and the stories about this? And also on the other side, the relationship to the public, for instance, as we are today all seated and calm and just listening, would you think that that's also maybe a theme to maybe delve more into into the opera?

Yuval Sharon:

Completely. That's a great question. And one aspect I did cover last week, which was I did try, even in this series, like a speaker series, last week the pictures had a bit of an anarchic relationship to what I was speaking about. Sometimes they had absolutely nothing to do with what I was saying. And at the very end, I sort of just asked the audience, well, what did you think when you saw this particular picture that had nothing to do with what I was saying? And how did that give you a chance to make your own kind of neural pathways from what you hear versus what you see and take some power away from me as the speaker and put more power towards you as the audience member, which is ultimately the real goal for opera, I think, which is on the receiving end.

And I talk about this quite a bit in my book, which is trying to figure out how, instead of feeling like the director or the composer or the librettist, we are the ones with the answers. And we're going to give those to you again in this kind of hierarchical way, top-down approach. Instead of that saying, we're going to offer you this field of impressions in this myriad kind of forest of images and sounds and ideas, and we want them all to resonate, but they can resonate for you in a way that's very different from how it resonates for the person sitting next to you. And that's beautiful. And that means it might mean something for me, but I don't need you to understand that for it to work, for example. So I think about that quite a bit. So I'm glad you brought that up because I didn't have time to talk about that last week, and I also didn't talk about something that a number of people asked me about.

So I'm also glad you asked me about the librettist because in those hierarchies that I showed, the librettist in the traditional hierarchies, the librettist is always under the composer and kind of left off to their own. And I put it that way because that in practice is often what ends up happening. The librettist, sometimes we don't even see the librettist if they're living. We don't even, sometimes they don't even show up. The composer just works with them in some room somewhere, and then we just get these words. And in some ways, I think a lot of operatic institutions would prefer it that way because it's one less artist meddling, making a mess of things, causing anarchy. And that's something that I really dislike. It's also, and I am very guilty of this myself. We always call it Mozart's Don Giovanni, and we always call it Puccini's La Bohème, and we always call it, you name it, it's always the composer's opera.

Now granted, with very few exceptions really, the composer is taking a written score and then setting it to music and then deciding. Let's say for every 10 minutes the librettist spends, the composer is probably spending about 10 hours. So it's like it's true that in terms of amount of work, it's not an equal amount of work, but the librettist is somebody who is kind of an initiator of this entire apparatus of an opera. And I don't think it's enough credit. It's why I really do advocate for this kind of circular operatic structure in which the librettist plays an essential role. Even if, okay, the librettist being in rehearsal may not always be necessary, but I think is always wonderful. Why did you choose this word? Why did you, it's sometimes too late to change things, but it doesn't mean that that person's voice isn't necessary. So yeah, that's a little bit of the libretto question, but it could have been a whole other lecture. But I appreciate that question.

Hans Thomalla:

Well, thank you all for being here tonight, and we see you next week. Thank you.

Yuval Sharon:

Thank you.