The photo at left is airborne Gerard Mortier, the future head of New York City Opera. I had this photo on my bulletin board for about a year of undergrad.Mortier was one of the instigators of Kaija Saariaho's L'amour de loin, an opera that I was doing a lot of research on at the time. Mortier had not only commissioned the opera, but had put on the Peter Sellars production of St. Francois D'Assise that had convinced Saariaho that "if they could put it on that way"... she could write an opera.
What a great example of how to administrate (administer?) your way to great new opera. You want the best composers writing your opera, not just the ones who feel a stylistic affinity to Madama Butterfly (which I happen to sing in and love). But to get that, you have to present a wide swath of the repertoire that already exists. The 20th Century classics and all that.
I could scream for the number of fabulous composers my age who give me "I don't really see myself ever writing an opera." If companies don't create an environment of dynamic, evolving theater before the commission, everyone gets confused about where the boundaries of the art form lie. Saariaho thought she would never write an opera because she thought her style of composition would never be viable under the theatrical construct she thought that opera required. Because she saw a great production of St. Francois, she's working on number three.
Postscript: I wrote this waaay before the insane Mortier debacle at NYCO. I still stand by the ideas here. Zachary Woolfe's awesome piece in the Times last month said better (and post-disaster) some of what I was trying to get at in 2007.
