Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Yuval Sharon wouldn’t mind too much if opera died. That might seem an unusual position for the artistic director of an opera house to take, but not if you consider, as Sharon does, that the next stage in the death of an artform is its rebirth. “Opera comes from a human impulse to collaborate across disciplines and perspectives, and that’s something you see in every culture,” Sharon tells me from New York over Zoom. “If this form of opera dies then maybe that’s fine. Opera would just be reborn in a different way.” By virtue of their age, the classical arts perennially find themselves suspended between two contradictory impulses, that of preservation and invention. Opera has the hardest job of all, largely bound not only by the canon of long-dead composers, but by the style of earlier productions, too. As a result, operas often find themselves reproducing the most superficial aspects of a past staging, attempting to continue a tradition by nodding to the wrong god. Enter Sharon, the 44-year-old artistic director of the Detroit Opera House.“Opera can seem like an outdated, inaccessible and out-of-reach art form,” he tells me. Sharon, who was born in Chicago, was first introduced to opera by his father, who took him to see Verdi’s La traviata in Germany when he was a child. “I did not enjoy it, and I sense there are people who are so intimidated by the judgments that seem to come up when you enter the opera house, and that’s really exclusionary. That’s not a symptom of the art at all. It’s a symptom of how that art is produced.”This is what Sharon rails against. The vague title of his recently published book, A New Philosophy of Opera, belies the forceful energy of Sharon’s argument, arguing as he does for an anti-elite opera that is accessible, spontaneous and legible to the uninitiated. “Rebirth,” he writes, “is opera’s true power, manifested through the act of performance. Every time an opera appears on the stage, it’s not simply replayed but resuscitated, renewed, reshaped.” In 2010, Sharon founded The Industry, an experimental opera company now led by a three-person artistic director co-operative, including him. Five years later, he directed Hopscotch, an opera performed and viewed from inside 24 different cars, which whizzed audiences and performers around Los Angeles. He shocked spectators in 2022 when he staged La bohème at Detroit Opera from back to front, placing the iconic scene of Mimi dying in Rodolfo’s arms not at the end, as in the original, but at the beginning, to foreground “the purity and fearlessness of the hope of new love emerging”.He was offered the job at the Detroit Opera House in 2020, and accepted it enthusiastically, recognising the cultural sea change that was happening across American life. “The pandemic and the killing of George Floyd really made me think, this is a moment where real change is possible in our society and the art forms that reflect it,” he said. “If opera is going to have an impact on the community, how can it lead the conversation around the things people want to talk about, instead of following?”Sharon’s ideas have not always landed. In 2019, he staged an experimental production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at Berlin’s Staatsoper, which for 25 years had performed the work in a reconstruction of the original set design from 1816. “Being booed was a really strange experience for me,” Sharon tells me. He seems good-humoured about the audience’s response on opening night (“Everything that could have gone wrong on opening night did”) but admits the concept was too obscure, and later restaged it with changes. “I thought being booed would be a nightmare experience, but then I had this experience of going up there and being like, ‘I’m standing behind this work and I’m sorry it didn’t resonate with you, but it doesn’t mean I’m ashamed of this work’.”Opera wasn’t always so drenched in the past. In the 17th and 18th centuries, before the canon of masterpieces as we know it solidified, only 15 per cent of opera seasons featured repeated repertoire, with the scores themselves seldom surviving the season for which they had been written. There is change happening — the Met in New York opened its season on Monday with Grounded, a new American opera, as part of a commitment to premiering contemporary work — but a sense of cautiousness remains. US audiences are broadly more conservative in their tastes than their European counterparts, and while some of the Met’s recent contemporary productions have proven popular, others have seen disappointing sales. As a result, there is fear among today’s houses of upsetting the audience (“some companies think making changes will lose them what they sometimes call their ‘base’, as though it’s a political party”, Sharon tells me), which has itself come to expect traditional productions; a self-blinkering ouroboros.“A lot of opera-goers have come to think about opera as confirmation of everything that they know to be true and stable in the world,” Sharon says. “I think that’s a misunderstanding of what opera can really offer us. As opposed to reifying old values and holding on to them and perpetuating them into the present, I think opera is an incredible engine to constantly think of new possibilities.” Sharon’s philosophy is applied to opera-making, but it is undergirded by an idea which has broader applications. He often refers to opera as an “in-between” thing, the result of the tension and dialogue created by the layering of its elements: music, theatre, poetry. It’s here, in this place of ambiguity, where the enchantment lives and, crucially, where the audience must begin their work, not to decipher, but to interpret. Opera or any art that works in this grey zone presents an antidote to a modern culture smitten with realism and that shuns paradox in favour of singular meaning and ready-made answers. Ambiguity has implications for our political culture, too. Sharon draws on the work of Austrian psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswik, whose research on “ambiguity intolerance” after the second world war found that the more negatively an individual reacted to ambiguity, the more they responded to the pleasing order of totalitarian leadership. “Developing a tolerance for ambiguity, then,” Sharon writes, “offered a potent tactic in the effort to rewire a population brainwashed by the era’s fascist governments.”Next year at the Detroit Opera, Sharon will put on Mozart’s famed Così fan tutte, where the four central lovers will be played by robots. In 2026, he’ll be in charge of a new production of Wagner’s Ring cycle at the Met. Opera-goers should be prepared to be surprised or, well, who knows? The pleasure will be in the challenge, in the attempt to understand.‘A New Philosophy of Opera’ is published by LiverightFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
