L.A. Opera Repertory: Repetitive Stress?

After giving the matter serious thought, I have renewed my subscription with the L.A. Opera next year. I have become increasingly unhappy with the repertory that it is offering, but I have been a subscriber since the first season and am reluctant to call it quits just yet.

The repertory has deteriorated into a steady repetition of the same small number of warhorses, and the commitment L.A. Opera showed in its first few years to covering a broad range of different kinds of opera has disappeared. I was so excited during those initial seasons, since it seemed I was finally going to get to see operas I had heard or read about but never imagined would come my way: “The Fiery Angel,” “Alcina,” “The Trojans,” “Idomeneo” and many classics of the 20th century--Britten, Janacek, Berg and so on. Of course, I like Puccini, Verdi and Mozart as much as the next person, and was glad to see again operas that I had already seen plenty of times; it made for a nice balance.

But in the last seasons the repertory has gotten ever narrower--like the Met in the ‘50s, only without Zinka Milanov, Renata Tebaldi and Jussi Bjoerling. Next year is the worst so far--only two operas that are new here, and otherwise just things that L.A. Opera has produced over and over. “Madame Butterfly” again, for God’s sake! Am I really going to have to see “Madame Butterfly” every other year for the rest of my life? Even the warhorses the opera overexposes come from a peculiarly short list: no “Turandot,” no “Aida,” hardly any Wagner, no Russian opera at all.

It especially angers me to read about the astonishing productions that Esa-Pekka Salonen, Peter Sellars and the L.A. Philharmonic are doing elsewhere in the world, and to know that I will probably never get to see any of them. Some people can run off to Salzburg or Paris to satisfy their curiosity, but we local opera-goers are pretty much stuck with what L.A. Opera brings us.

Los Angeles is operatically naive, but not theatrically naive and not stupid. In the long run, the L.A. Opera will develop the kind of audience it programs to.

If it teaches this eager but naive audience that opera consists of a small number of tuneful, sentimental favorites, then people with a sense of adventure and curiosity will stay away, and the opera will become trapped in its repertory by an audience with a pops concert mentality.

It doesn’t have to be that way, and it didn’t start out that way. But I’m getting discouraged.