Emma Shires
The Royal Opera House’s recent commission from Mark-Anthony Turnage, Anna Nicole, has been the talk of the British opera scene since well before its premier. With every performance sold out Anna Nicole made opera news worthy again after it has been sidelined by popular music in the British press ever since the 1980s. As a result the country's music critics were out in force for the opening night creating the sort of excitement that, as someone educated during the noughties, I never dreamed classical music could evoke. The Royal Opera House kept up this hype by littering the foyer, corridors and auditorium with pictures of the infamous playboy pin-up. Most notably, as all the papers noted with either horror or excitement, the red curtain was replaced with a pink one and Anna Nicole’s face grinned at us from the Queen’s usual spot.
As an opera lover who has long been wondering how to encourage others to take an interest in the art form the excitement for me was not found in the risqué plot, foul language or sexual content but the hype itself. I love opera for the very reasons that some of Anna Nicole’s audience found the work so offensive. Opera has always been a spectacle; over the top and voyeuristic. A glance at some favourite operatic femme fatales finds Anna Nicole in good company. One could argue that the popularity of the operas in which sexy Carmen, Violetta, Salome and Lulu find themselves in is due to the slightly perverse attraction we feel towards these characters. In these instances I have always thought it odd that certain people are happy to see these stories played out in opera but would find them repulsive if they figured in a TV soap. Opera has thus allowed many to hide their normal human curiosity about such openly sexual creatures as Carmen or Lulu behind a facade of high culture.
Now that Anna Nicole has pushed opera across the invisible line separating it from popular culture opera lovers, and indeed those who assumed opera was stuffy and closeted, do not know where to look. I for one could not be happier that this path has been taken. Popular and classical music are no longer the arch enemies they were painted as being at the turn of the twentieth century by the philosopher Theodor Adorno. The two genres have been drawing from one another for centuries with some of the most famous composers such as Mozart, Chopin and Shostakovich borrowing forms from popular dances and rhythms from folk music. Similarly Copland and Gershwin drew on jazz influences to infuse their music with exciting rhythms and unusual harmonies. On the other hand in popular music musicians like Paul McCartney and Frank Zappa have shown a strong awareness of classical music traditions, incorporating modernist ideas into their own output. Turnage’s opera is clearly a further case in point. A number of reviewers, see John Allison for the Telegraph and Alexandra Coghlan for The New Statesman, argue that the work’s musical language reveal it to be a work of musical theatre rather than opera. Turnage’s allusion to the theatrical language of Bernstein and Sondheim is clear in Anna-Nicole’s jazzy rhythms and lilting melodies. However the work also draws on Stravinsky and the modernist British tradition of composers like Birtwistle in its use of dissonant harmonies and in the haunting lines of Anna Nicole’s arias. The result is thus a truly post-modern opera in which, like his operatic composer peers Adès and Adams, Turnage demonstrates how ridiculous it is to divide music into popular and classical in the twenty-first century. In my experience, although arguably being a music graduate I come from a somewhat biased perspective, music lovers do not listen to just popular or just classical music but dip into anything that captures their imagination with little concern as to how it may be labelled. Turnage’s opera thus perfectly encapsulates this atmosphere.
Before the Anna Nicole hype I cannot say I was ever interested in the real Anna Nicole Smith’s life the subject matter for this cross-genre work could not have been better. It is thoroughly modern and draws on a number of modern issues that its audience could associate with; the pressure to look good and be noticed, the greed for wealth and need for instant gratification of physical hungers for food and sex. All of these desires result from the very nature of our mass-produced, media-obsessed capitalist society, making Anna Nicole a character we can all identify with on some level. The subject matter of the work thus shows that opera to be thoroughly modern and yet following operatic tradition by its ability to shock and titillate. Three cheers to Turnage and the Royal Opera House for being bold enough to make the move. I cannot wait to see which composers will dare to follow.
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