Anna Nicole The Opera

You might have seen that “Anna Nicole, The Opera” will be debuting in London next February.  This production is from the creator of “Jerry Springer, the Opera” which came out 2 or 3 years ago and has been mounted several times in the U.S.

If the “Jerry” production is a guide, this will be a serious attempt to do opera, meaning that it won’t be a parody of opera.  It will be real opera performed to a libretto about very pop subject matter.  “Jerry” in fact got pretty decent reviews on Goldstar when it appeared, and it was always popular.

But the “Jerry” opera was trading on absurdity and could fire away all it wanted at its subjects.  Jerry Springer himself is a genial enough target, and I’m sure he’s delighted to be mocked in this way.  After all, no one is more in on the joke about the Jerry Springer Show than Jerry Springer.

But Anna Nicole isn’t that kind of figure.  She shared some qualities with a Springer guest to be sure.  Even after she died, there was a paternity controversy.  But she was also a specific person who had a truly tragic life.  She was a lost soul and probably not that smart.  So how will the show be played?

“It’s not going to be a horrible, sleazy evening,” Elaine Padmore, Covent Garden’s director of opera, told the Guardian when the project was first announced one year ago. “It’s going to be witty, clever, thoughtful and sad.”

So while at first blush, this appears to be somewhat exploitative, the question is, what is the proper subject for opera if this is too exploitative?  People don’t tend to think of opera as having contemporary subject matter, but since operas can be written about things happening now just as they could one hundred or two hundred years ago, what should operas from today be about?

The debate over health care reform?

Not likely.  As the writer of the Toronto Star article I linked above says, the other shows in the season with “Anna” will hardly be Mousketeer fare: “shares the season with Madama Butterfly (an exploited, abandoned bride who murders herself), Tosca (a madly jealous singer who murders her would-be rapist then kills herself after her lover is executed) and Cosi Fan Tutte (described by Star critic Peter Goddard as the Mozart version of ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’).”

Who knows if the show will be any good, and it’s even less likely that it will still be performed in a couple hundred years, but it’s certainly a worthwhile topic of a modern opera.  At least, if you judge by operatic tradition, which runs toward the scandalous and messy.

And what are the other effects of performing an opera like this?  First, it shows that opera isn’t preserved in amber and that all opera doesn’t come from a long, long time ago.  That can’t hurt.  By performing it in English, you take away the language barrier for the audience you’re primarily performing to (English and, I assume eventually, American audiences), and give it the immediacy that opera would have had for people years ago.

In short, it’s easy to mock this or assume it a trifle, and it may very well prove to be, but you’re also spurring the creation of new original intellectual property (which is desperately needed now) and drawing more people to the form.

It may not be comfortable for those who just want another season of Madama Butterfly and Cosi Fan Tutte, but that endless repetition can’t go on forever.

And maybe Anna Nicole isn’t the most likely source of salvation for the ancient form of opera, but maybe they thought that about Madame Butterfly at the time too.