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Why Now? Why Opera?

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Why Now? Why Opera?

Excerpts from "Saints in the Limelight: Representations of the Religious Quest on the Post-1945 Stage." by Siglind Bruhn. Pendragon Press, Hillsdale, NY 2003.

In a time when trust in the availability of support from on high seems annihilated by the overwhelming powers of materialism, and when the traditional frameworks for orientation appear less convincing than they did even in the first centuries of the Western world's "enlightenment," humans struggle all the more desperately with the eternal questions, searching for answers on which it might be safe to build a life. Saints are models insofar as they characteristically keep their eyes fixed on a goal that transcends the material, mortal life. They stand not only for the yearning that aspires to the absolute, but also and prominently for the ability to eclipse allegedly given limitations.

When the supremely secular genre of opera features saints as music-dramatic protagonists and the quest for a religiously meaningful life as its main subject matter, it presents general audiences - as against "the converted" in Christian congregations flocking to an oratorio performance in their church - with a kind of "experimental humanology." In depicting saints, operatic composers express their need (and that presumed in their listeners) to learn from, to be inspired and encouraged by prototypes who realize the spiritually oriented life as one form of the human potential. In dramatizing how these protagonists fare in quotidian and all-too-human circumstances as well as under the onslaught of corrupting and threatening forces from without and within, authors confront their audiences with dramatis personae who behave courageously despite their fear, who struggle for certainty in the midst of doubt, who see to a perceived task at the cost of great hardship and abuse, and who in order to follow their inner voice are ready to sacrifice happiness, safety, and sometimes even life itself.

During a mere half century, more than thirty composers from sixteen countries in Europe and North America have felt drawn to this subject matter. This would seem to suggest a phenomenon that expresses a significant contemporary concern. Music as the least material among the arts may be best suited to a portrayal that includes an ineffable component. Nonetheless, each composer has had to rise to the challenge of conveying unconventional (sometimes even abnormal) lives and uncommon guiding concepts not as manifestations of individual or collective madness, but as messages from which even secular audiences have much to learn, as dimensions that pertain to the great ambit of humanity yet await to be conquered ever anew.

Humans are beings with a horizon. As such they not only have the hope for transcendence, but the task of identifying and pursuing the path that leads toward and beyond this horizon. Their challenge is to focus on what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "transcendence without religion," and to translate their striving into a language not fraught with preconceived religious formulas and images that might block the way to genuine experiences. Opera, as an artistic genre that has never been coopted and appropriated by traditional expressions of religion, is perhaps particularly suited to foster this aspect.