Category: Articles

Stephen Sondheim Photo by Michael Le Poer Trench

The only thing I have to say about the difference between opera and musical theater is that opera is musical theater that takes place in an opera house in front of an opera audience. This is perhaps not as meaningless as it sounds. The opera audience brings different expectations to what they see and demands different things from the performers, which affects the casting and the approach to the work at hand. When Menotti’s The Medium was done on Broadway, it was a Broadway musical. When it was done in an opera house, it was an opera, even though the cast may have been the same.

Jack Beeson Photo by Dietrich Dettmann, courtesy Boosey & Hawkes

Surrounded by Columbia composers, faculty and students, Stephen Sondheim was asked, “Since a couple of your musicals have been performed in opera houses, why don’t you write a real opera?” Answer: “Because I don’t like their audiences.” Then he asked, “Why don’t you write musicals, Jack?” And I answered, “Because I don’t like their audiences.” Both answers were flip, but there are audience expectations. In musicals, all the words — miked — are to be understood. Opera audiences, used to libretti in foreign languages, are awed when all the compositional and acoustic conditions are in order, and they understand an English libretto, and forget to watch the supertitles. But they have more to listen to than words: more varied, rangy voices, ensembles, and instruments. Imagine a musical in an unknown tongue!

It’s often forgotten that some musicals are through-composed and that some operas have quite a lot of spoken dialogue. Bernstein’s prediction that American opera would grow out of our musical theater was mistaken, but the ‘Rain in Spain’ scene in My Fair Lady and the Kander and Ebb final Zorba scene are operatic.

Philip Glass Photo courtesy Annie Ohayon Media Relations

I tend to call things “operas” that are done in opera houses. I sometimes will call a piece “music theater” instead of opera, because the producer of the work will request that I change the name because people are afraid of the word “opera,” and I always acquiesce. Basically, I don’t care what you call it…

I sometimes do pieces in small theaters, like In The Penal Colony, which is clearly an opera but is being billed as “music theater” in a new production at CSC. They prefer to call it “music theater” because it fits in with their programming philosophy. However in my catalog it’s listed as an opera, and will be billed as an “opera” when it is presented at the Staatstheater Darmstadt. It’s totally a practical distinction. It’s what the producers and audience feel most comfortable with.

Sweeney Todd was done at City Opera and I think of it as an opera, whereas other works by Sondheim are more clearly musical theater. But it’s quite subjective, isn’t it?

Elizabeth Swados Photo by Rosalind Lichter

I don’t think those words apply anymore to the creations of this time. “Opera” and “Musical Theater” are terms that come from specific times in history and we need new terms for our life in the present tense. New forms are fusing and colliding with old forms and it’s an exciting reinterpretation of theater and music.

Dominick Argento Photo by Tom Foley, courtesy Boosey & Hawkes

When I think of opera, characters such as Figaro, Iago, Octavian and Mimi come to mind. When I think of musical comedy, songs such as “Old Man River,” Some Enchanted Evening,” “Tonight,” and “Send In The Clowns” come to mind. This is because operatic music is primarily concerned with defining characters and creating atmosphere, whereas the tunes of musical comedy are essentially decorative and ancillary. Notable exceptions exist on both sides of that distinction but the fact that the opera composer–unlike the musical comedy composer–is always the orchestrator permits, through the accompanying instrumental tone color and timbre, a much greater focus on the character’s persona. “Old Man River” is a beautiful song and practically any orchestration of it is adequate to make that point. “Iago’s Credo” is not especially beautiful (it was never meant to be) but its orchestration is indispensable for limning Iago and what drives him.

Musical comedy composers can specify the tempo of the songs but the pace of the drama, its point of view, color, etc., is determined by another party, the stage director. The piece can change significantly as it moves from production to production. In opera, tempo and atmosphere, character and situation, from beginning to end, are controlled by a single mind. That sort of artistic integrity explains why I believe La Bohéme will still be playing somewhere in the year 2100 while Rent will be a footnote in Broadway history.

Mark Adamo Photo by Christian Steiner, courtesy G. Schirmer, Inc.

Even if we limit discussion to contemporary American work, we first need to define terms. The musical play, as defined by Rodgers and Hammerstein, extends from Oklahoma through Fiddler on theRoof to Ragtime. The songbook-style musical comedy, covers most of the Rodgers & Hart, Gershwin, Berlin, Comden and Green, and Jerry Herman shows: a new example is The Full Monty. With the latter, opera has little to do at all. With the former, one primary difference is that the books of the serious musicals are, for the most part, infinitely more intelligent about how to combine music and words for dramatic expression than most contemporary opera libretti, which are, bewilderingly often, written by writers experienced in every kind of writing except the theatrical.

But the theatre doesn’t encourage musical sophistication, only the sophisticated use of unsophisticated musical materials, which is why the only possible place that music-heavy shows like Rent or Les Miserables could be called operas would be on Broadway. The musical thinness is understandable, given the unreliable skills of that category “singing actor,” which has covered everyone from elegant croaker Rex Harrison to opera-singers-on-Broadway Alfred Drake and Barbara Cook. And the musical’s up-from-songbook history has sown, if not active resistance, than striking disinterest in the idea of symphonic or motivic development as analogous to dramatic process. Conversely, American opera hasn’t always encouraged theatrical sophistication, just the musically sophisticated elaboration of theatrically often simple-minded ideas. The skill-sets of the usual performers are again germane here, because the category of “acting singer” has included everyone from Lauren Flanigan to Luciano Pavarotti.

As economic quantities, obviously, they’re part of different cultural categories: Musicals belong to the business of theatre, which retains its shimmer of populism despite $80.00 Broadway tickets, while opera belongs to the business of “elitist” classical music. There are technical differences, too. Musicals are amplified these days (though ‘twas not ever thus): operas not, for reasons good (few know how to do so either appropriately or creatively) and ill (the new fundamentalism about the sacrality of the acoustic voice, a catechism about as sensible as loyalty to gut strings or the fortepiano.) Composers orchestrate their own operas: theatre composers almost never score their own shows. Most actresses sing about a fifth lower than their operatic counterparts, with more use (and abuse) of the chest voice; men sing about a third lower (though A Little Night Music calls for tenor high-B’s.) Opera singers are invariably better musicians, and generally have broader ranges and more (unamplified) dynamic and timbral control. Theatre singers are generally, though not always, more methodical and resourceful actors. There are, for the composer and librettist, no other substantial artistic differences at all. When I composed Little Women, I imagined writing the libretto for Broadway and the score for Lincoln Center, much as, I imagine, did the writers of Porgy and Bess and Candide. In every production so far, the farce scene that most regularly plays like that of a musical comedy is, coincidentally, the scene most driven by twelve-tone recitativo secco. When talking about opera and musical theatre, the operative word has to be AND.

Diane Wondisford

The differences that exist between opera and music theatre, have to do with form, dramatic structure, scale, style, and tone. In opera, the story is conveyed through aria and recitative, very rarely unaccompanied spoken word, and sometimes the dance.

In the creation of a music-theatre piece, artists borrow from many forms and structures. Sometimes, a music theatre piece will take the form of “the musical” where the story is carried in song, spoken dialogue, and dance. Often music and text are equal partners on the stage; i.e. poetry and jazz. Music-theatre composers often reach into more contemporary musical idioms, i.e. popular song, world music, hip-hop, etc.

As opera companies include time-honored American musicals in their repertoire and theatres produce opera, the distinctions between the two worlds are becoming blurred. Composers look to the operatic form through the prism of contemporary music to create their new work and have arrived at interesting fusions; jazz opera, for example.

For my part, I think the most compelling new music-theatre work combines the best of both worlds. It is happening on a chamber scale, where all of the elements – music, theatre, dance and the visual arts – are combined in highly theatrical ways. Scale in this context supports experimentation and risk.

Grethe Barrett Holby Photo by Arthur Elgort

In Music-Theater, the music is in the theater; in Opera, the music is the theater. It is not only that generally opera is through-composed and that most often all the lines are sung. It is that the composition and performance of the music not only embodies, but expands, lays open, determines, re-explores, and makes extraordinary discoveries about the emotional and theatrical life of the characters and the drama. Comic or tragic, or anywhere in-between, the music is the medium from which all else flows. And it brings us to places in the characters and the drama we would elsewise never go.

The artists that sing the music are generally skilled musicians with vocal instruments that are highly trained. However, as we are pushing the envelope of opera, let us never think that opera is defined by 19th century aesthetics ­ neither compositionally nor vocally. I instinctually know what I consider opera, and make that call again and again for American Opera Projects and for my own personal projects. I hope that I am always brave enough to take risks that will sometimes miss the mark, and at other times break down barriers and blaze new trails. But whatever I do, I can’t change the fact that it all comes down to the extraordinary power of music and beauty of the human voice to open and release my soul. That, for me, is Opera.

I’m writing this from Washington, DC, where I’ve just seen and heard a new production of Coyote Builds North America, one of my two music theater works with writer Barry Lopez.

Coyote was premiered in 1987 at Perseverance Theater. Since then, it’s been produced two other times, touring throughout Alaska and New England. Until now, I’ve always played an active role, as a percussionist and music director. But tonight, I was in the audience.

Not surprisingly, this gave me a new perspective on the piece and got me thinking about the differences between the music in the theater and the concert hall. The most obvious difference is story.

In the theater, the story is the primary metaphor from which the music grows. But how is the story told? What’s the role, if any, of singing? Of spoken text? How much of the story can be told without words?

Composers today are answering these and related questions in a startling variety of ways, creating vital new forms of music theater that – as Barry Drogin observes- as yet have no names.

In Coyote, a storyteller tells contemporary versions of traditional Native American stories, in English and (in the new production) a touch of Cree. But the stories are also told in instrumental music for a small chamber ensemble. My intention was for the music to do more than simply illustrate or amplify the language, to be an equally strong text that reveals different dimensions of the stories.

The ideal – from the ancient Greeks to Robert Ashley- is a perfect marriage of equals between music and story. Is this possible? Or, like most partnerships, is it a constant process of compromise, of give and take?

In addition to Coyote, my catalog includes two other evening- length theater works and a shorter musical play for children. Still, I’ve never thought of myself as “theater” composer. My primary concern has been the integrity of the music, and my own vision of the story.

It hasn’t always been easy for me to step back and allow a stage director, choreographer, lighting designer, set and costume designer, and other partners in a theatrical production team to make the piece their own.

But by its nature, theater demands collaboration. Working in the theater has challenged me – sometimes against my own nature- to become a better collaborator. Ultimately, I think it’s broadened and strengthened my work.

What are your perspectives and experiences with music in the theater?