What is opera for our times? The power of abstraction may hold the answer

Opera has been part of Western music culture since it was created at the end of the 16th century. It combines music and theatre, and evolved from an Italian group of scholars, musicians and poets known as the Florentine Camerata, inspired by the discovery that ancient Greek theatre was often sung.

It could be the combination of two key elements of human expression – singing and drama – that has ensured its survival.

Operas from throughout history are being re-staged and re-envisioned around the world. Giuseppe Verdi’s 19th-century La Traviata is the most performed opera, with about 900 performances a year worldwide.

Staging an opera is traditionally an expensive enterprise, with acting, costumes, make-up, a variety of scenography, and large numbers of performers required in specialist venues, making it out of reach for most composers, and few opera companies are prepared to invest in new work.

Opera is also blighted by gatekeepers and entrenched biases. The storylines of historic operas feature racist and sexist values out of step with our times.

Further, music has evolved beyond orchestral instruments, with electronic sound synthesis, amplification, sound art and new performance techniques not necessarily suited to traditional opera houses.

Perhaps these are some of the reasons why alternative visions of opera are proliferating worldwide.

Abstraction to highlight issues

New operas retain key social issues at the heart of their creation and staging. The opera text, known as the libretto, was traditionally adapted from plays or poems. Many recent operas redefine this concept of libretto by removing text completely to leverage abstraction as a way to contemplate important issues.

The defining qualities of opera – action, singing and music – don’t require a traditional narrative storytelling technique, and can be replaced by more conceptual and experimental approaches.

An example is US composer Ashley Fure’s opera The Force of Things (2018), an “opera for objects”. It features only two singers and a choir of subwoofer speakers. There’s no “stage” – the singers move among the audience, and sing without words.

The nature and pace of the work is intended to mirror the effects of climate change – slow and drastic. The work’s performative intimacy and low-frequency sound world, often sounding at the cusp of human hearing, create an effective and powerful alternative to the blunt news headlines and political debate.

Read more: The future of music notation in a digital world

Operas feature a range of voice ranges and colours, known as tessituras. These are historically aligned with gender – tenor, baritone and bass for men; and soprano, mezzo-soprano and contralto for women. There were even castrati – male singers whose voice was more like a woman’s, due to castration of the singer before puberty.

Today, male singers known as sopranists sing in a traditionally women’s range, and alongside transgender opera singers, bring new tessituras to the operatic sound world.

Moving beyond classical music

Contemporary operas are bringing singers beyond classical music to the stage, creating avenues of access to the form, and completely different sound worlds.

In my own opera, Speechless (2019), I turned a government document into a graphic music score, removing the words and having the singers create sounds instead. The graphic notation means any style of musician or vocal soloist can read the notation, whether or not they had been trained to read Western classical music.

As a result, improvisors, folk musicians, pop and metal vocalists can participate.

Speechless aims to communicate my personal response to Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers, but also incite others to consider the plight of asylum seekers worldwide.

For the recent European premiere of Speechless in Hamburg, Germany, I chose a choir of Ukrainian refugee singers with various musical backgrounds to link the theme of the opera to where it’s staged, as Europe is filled with people displaced by the war.

The singers create sounds that communicate emotion to people irrespective of languages spoken – rather, they communicate speechlessness.

As many suffer compassion fatigue with the ongoing barrage of bad news stories, the multi-dimensional nature of opera, combined with concepts of abstraction, can provide a powerful way to think differently about key and complex problems affecting us today.

Opera will continue to thrive if it remains relevant to the concepts and approaches of the communities of our time.