“The Twitter Opera approaches, and it begins.”
“This is a dress rehearsal of a story of a man kidnapped by birds, featuring a talking cat. It’s an imaginative sequence of events born out of the twitterverse.” (CNN)
An Opera director gave the world of twitter three weeks to write its own masterpiece. Two composers then spent three days looking through 900 tweets and setting them to original music.
The result was a 20-minute opera called Twitterdammerung which debuted at London’s Royal Opera House on September 5th. High art’s newest attempt to get the public in on the act is sparking reaction on both sides of the pond.
We’re taking a look at perspectives from the UK's Channel 4 and the Daily Telegraph, Canada's The Globe and Mail and Toronto Star, as well as CNN
First let’s go to Channel 4, which focuses on the Royal Opera’s aim to recruit new opera fans.
“The main aim was not to delight existing opera lovers, but to open it up to a wider and possibly younger audience as part of the Royal Opera House’s contemporary program R0H2.”
“I tweeted and therefore I can now come to the opera and this is my first time at the opera and now I’m less terrified of it.”
A columnist in Canada’s The Globe and Mail takes the stance that this experiment is one of many in a crisis of participation in our cultural lives.
“I wouldn't want some dude off the street taking a drill to my teeth, or a lawyer fixing my roof, or a carpenter doing my taxes. Why do we insist that art - serious, quality art - can be made by anyone who's got a passing interest but no discernible skill? […] It devalues artists to think that we can decide to be them for a day.”
CNN looks at the result of the creative process on Twitter, calling the plot disjointed and lyrics nonsensical.
“People were following tweets and you could see that someone was trying to take it in a certain direction but other people that were tweeting wouldn’t let them, so they keep coming in and going off at a different angle. And, having no idea of plot you cannot take the storyline any further than the next 140 characters allow you.”
A classical music critic in the Toronto Star wrote that those in charge of the project deserve a pay raise for mixing opera with no-strings-attached fun.
"What the Royal Opera House should be proud of is that it understood something many organizations miss when it comes to using new technology: it's not the process but the result that matters. In other words, Twitterdämmerung isn't noteworthy because it was carried out on Twitter but because the final product was genuinely entertaining."
Opera critic Igor Toronyi-Lalic wrote a review for the Daily Telegraph saying compared to other contemporary operas the work fares surprisingly well, but it was marred by the blatant marketing.
“Of course, in the end, one could not block out the noxious premise of this stunt. Accessible opera for the masses? Why not try a performance of Carmen?”
So is mass participation in high art necessary to attract new fans or is the watering down doing everyone a disservice?
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