Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for its Future, Caitlin Vincent, Scribner, £20

We live in topsy-turvy times. Whereas until fairly recently arts practitioners, administrators and academics would have acted as natural advocates for their particular art form, this can no longer be taken as a given. Rather than defending the arts against ignorant charges of elitism or irrelevance, many within the arts world have capitulated, and spend a great deal of time weakly hand-wringing about the historic sins of their sphere. Time and again, one finds oneself wondering whether many people in the arts world actually like art.

The American opera singer turned director and librettist Caitlin Vincent admits in the introduction to her book that she struggles with this question, eventually concluding that ‘I do like opera. I love opera. But I also hate it.’ In career-related terms, her antipathy is understandable. The best bits of this book give us an insider’s view into the practical challenges that face the aspiring singer: years of training, young-artist programmes and competitions, all at huge cost with no guarantee of a big break. And with companies increasingly hiring on the basis of looks, or even social media following, no wonder many talented musicians walk away.

Vincent writes compellingly about all this, and I particularly enjoyed her detailed explanations of the inner workings of the audition and rehearsal process. She shares useful data about different regional funding models and writes clearly about how an opera company puts together a season. I wish she had called her book The Secret Life of an Opera Singer and focused on the internal workings of the industry and on exposing the harsh professional realities behind the glamorous façade.

Perhaps that wouldn’t have been commissioned in today’s risk-averse publishing world, in which arts books are considered a hard sell unless they take a fashionable political stance or the author has a celebrity ‘platform’. And so Vincent also undertakes a rather different sort of exposé: a ‘problematisation’ of opera itself. She argues that opera falls short as an art form for our times. Vincent tells us that she wants to ‘save’ the art form, though struggles to define precisely from what. She then proceeds to set out the ways in which opera ‘teems with issues’ that ‘exclude’ and ‘alienate’.

Enemy number one, predictably enough, is ‘the Canon’ (ominously capitalised). Formerly regarded as a harmless enough, loosely defined body of artistically significant works of enduring popularity, the musical canon has latterly been rebranded as a malevolent gatekeeper that excludes worthier works from being performed. The mechanics of the canon are certainly worth interrogating, but Vincent takes a reductive approach, writing that the canon makes her think of a ‘darkened room, dripping wax candles, and a group of mysteriously cloaked figures’. She then takes a whistlestop tour through all of the other big ‘issues’ about which musicologists obsess – race, gender, operatic updating and so on – as if these are novel conceits. In fact, anyone who has studied, written about or taught operatic history over the last 30 years will have rehearsed these topics ad infinitum.

It is obvious why the sensationalist ‘opera wars’ theme would have grabbed the attention of a commercially minded editor or marketing team. Unfortunately, however, it is a premise that constantly demands hyperbole and flattens nuance. In this artificial framework, opera’s history is a story of combat, sidelining its numerous instances of collaboration. The entire opera world is, we are told, founded on antagonistic tussles, between music and text, conductors and directors, singers from different racial backgrounds, and audience members. A tension between the old and the new, in various manifestations, is a recurring theme, and it is hard not to notice a whiff of ageism in the pitching of enlightened Millennials and Gen Z audiences against ‘Boomers’ and members of Gen X who are ‘still alive and kicking’ and prone to ‘frenzied teeth gnashing’.

Vincent divides the opera audience into two factions who are, apparently, engaged in ‘a bloodbath’: ‘the Regietheater crowd’ and ardent traditionalists who will tolerate no deviation from the composer’s intentions. Perhaps American audiences really are this ideologically divided, but most European opera-goers surely deserve credit for being rather more open-minded. The numbers who really think every single performance of La bohème has to be set in 1830s Paris (to cite one of Vincent’s examples) must be minuscule, and perhaps audiences rejected a notorious recent production set on the moon because they thought it plain ridiculous. Even more concerning is Vincent’s non sequitur that because some people want to see period dress and realistic staging, they are also defending racist staging practices that she claims are ‘commonplace’ in Europe. (Are they? Blackface is surely reviled and outlawed almost everywhere today.)

Other simplistic binaries abound. Audiences are portrayed as antagonistic to modern operas – yet the enthusiastic response that has greeted recent new works such as Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Festen would suggest otherwise. Vincent knows where her allegiances lie in the supposed battle between contemporary innovation and the big bad canon, writing, ‘new operas… provide a glimpse into ourselves that Mozart and Puccini can never really give us’. But if someone immersed in the opera world cannot see the universal, timeless messages to be found in an opera such as La bohème, I don’t know what to say.

This, then, is a book engaged in its own internal struggle: illuminating and well-informed when discussing ‘the business’; predictable and one-dimensional elsewhere. ‘There’s no escaping the broader culture wars’ when it comes to talking about opera, Vincent claims, but I wish she hadn’t embraced the predictable tropes of social media, which demand we pick a side and cry foul if something does not seem immediately ‘relevant’ to the concerns of the present. In her introduction, Vincent writes that, ‘there’s so much more to the story [of opera] than the stereotypes of overweight women in metal breastplates or “rich people” audiences’. There is indeed, but, unfortunately, this account of opera as riven by internecine conflict is more likely to reinforce stereotypes than to dispel them. This is not the way to ‘save’ opera.