COMMENTARY : American Opera : Puccini Couldn’t Have Made It Here

Although opera in America is flourishing, American opera remains as neglected as Cinderella. Since the 1960s, the number of American opera companies has increased dramatically. More than 200 opera companies--62 with annual budgets topping $1 million--present opera across the United States, according to a tabulation in the current Musical America directory. The number of American opera productions, once restricted to the few major metropolises and a handful of summer festivals, has grown beyond the wildest dreams of American conductors and impresarios of a generation ago.

But, after decades of expansion, no significant body of operas by American composers has grown up alongside these burgeoning American opera companies. John Adams’ recent, well-publicized premiere of “The Death of Klinghoffer,” like his inaugural offering “Nixon in China,” is the stunning example that only proves the rule. One cannot but speculate that, without the collaboration of enfant terrible stage director Peter Sellars, Adams’ opera offerings would have been given the usual cold shoulder by the media.

Next month (April 13-21), San Diego Opera will produce Carlisle Floyd’s grand opera “The Passion of Jonathan Wade.” Commissioned by New York City Opera in 1962, this epic about American social discontent after the Civil War was recently revised by the composer for a consortium of four U.S. regional companies. For San Diego Opera, this production will be its first opera by an American composer based on an American subject. Presenting such rare birds makes company directors and opera trustees understandably nervous.

‘Any opera our patrons cannot find in their Kobbe (the standard reference book of opera plots) or is not in the Decca or Angel record catalogues is certainly harder to sell,” said San Diego Opera general director Ian Campbell. “It’s much easier to do a lesser-known opera by a standard composer, for example Bizet’s ‘Pearl Fishers,’ than it is to mount Floyd’s ‘Jonathan Wade.’ ”

The major obstacle to American opera is the unforgiving expectation of American opera audiences, who demand both a classic and a box-office success on the composer’s first try. Opera history is replete with examples that prove the folly of such high expectations. Verdi cut his teeth on 13 operas, including several incontestable duds, before he produced “Rigoletto” and “La Traviata.”

“The contemporary opera landscape is littered with the bodies of one-opera composers,” Campbell noted. “Audiences don’t accept failure or mistakes readily, and too many audiences will not forgive a company for taking risks with new operas.”

Critics howled their disapproval in 1989 when Cleveland Opera’s million-dollar gamble on a first opera by rock drummer-composer Stewart Copeland went bust. Few writers took time to remind their readers that Puccini’s first two operas were decided flops that no major company today wishes to revive.

In a way, the dilemma of the American opera composer is the chicken-and-egg syndrome. American opera impresarios are reluctant to program American operas because they are so few in number and little known. And the number of American operas is scant because composers rarely are given the opportunity to see their operas produced by major companies.

Sadly, Americans have traditionally orphaned even their best operas. Europeans eagerly embraced Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” but Americans debated for 50 years whether or not “Porgy and Bess” really was an opera before it was produced by major American companies. In the mid-century, Americans turned up their noses at Virgil Thomson’s two iconoclastic American operas, “Four Saints in Three Acts” and “The Mother of Us All.” But they eagerly attended respectable runs on Broadway of Italian composer Gian Carlo Menotti’s verismo retreads “The Medium” and “The Saint of Bleeker Street.” (This fall, the La Jolla Civic-University Orchestra will give a concert performance of the rarely seen “The Mother of Us All” at UC San Diego.)

Floyd’s original production of “The Passion of Jonathan Wade” suffered the usual fate of a new American opera. After its premiere in 1962, it was placed on the shelf and forgotten. Its current mode of revival, however, may represent a viable way out of this dead-end syndrome for American operas. In this case, four opera companies will share the cost of the revival, a major deterrent to mounting a fresh production, but the composer has the opportunity to make dramatic and musical modifications after each incarnation.

The new production of the revised “Jonathan Wade” opened at Houston Grand Opera in January to generally favorable reviews, and Miami’s version opened just last week. The Seattle Opera will not stage it until 1992. According to Campbell, the composer, who is directing all four productions, will refine San Diego’s version based on his observations of the nine performances in those two cities. Campbell is now looking for a pair of companies to co-produce San Diego’s next contemporary American opera, which is slated for the 1994 season.

The other hopeful sign is the opera commissioning program of Opera America, the service organization of North American opera companies. “Opera for the 80s and Beyond,” the organization’s first commissioning foray, helped give birth to Dominick Argento’s well-received “Aspern Papers” at Dallas Opera and Washington Opera. Underwritten by a $5-million foundation grant, “Opera for a New America” will continue to help pay for the commissioning, development and production of new American opera in the 1990s.

The fate of American opera, however, will still rest in the response of American audiences. Campbell admitted that his company’s strong commitment to less-familiar 20th-Century opera and opera by American composers will be weakened if people stay away in droves. Perhaps Sellars’ pop directorial style or the musical idiom of cross-over musicians such as Copeland will draw new audiences into the opera house. In any case, Americans will have no operatic patrimony unless they learn to embrace their own.