BIO-OPERA CONSIDERING CONTEMPORARY CELEBRITY

By Jeff Counts

If it’s true that the distance between “wellknown” and “famous” can be measured in scandals, then we are living in a golden age of notoriety. Of course, everyone from every age could say that, and they would have a good argument. But there is little doubt that ours is a time of uniquely instant and complete scrutiny, a society without secrets if there ever was one No good deed goes unpunished in the 21st century, no misdeed undissected, so the price of repute can be very high Especially if your life story is interesting enough to tell on stage.

Recently, opera composers and librettists have been drawn to the big personalities that dominate our attention spans. Operas based on books, plays and other intellectual artifacts are as common as ever, but they are joined now by a rising number of works inspired by the more, shall we say, vernacular print forms like newspapers, tabloids and press releases. A list of these “bio-operas” (think “bio-pics”) would fill too many pages, but there are a few highlights worth mentioning here. Each of them illustrates the test of embodying people whose voices and faces we already know so well.

Thomas Adès, back in 1995, wrote Powder Her Face, an explicit look into the life of Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll, whose marriages, affairs and divorces were front page news during the 1960s. Opera houses have known such characters for centuries, but the sexual frankness of Adès’ tale gave Margaret’s high society antics a trashy, early-television-era appeal.

Speaking of television, Jerry Springer: The Opera may not actually be an opera, but it does expertly capture the cult worship of early 2000s talk show hosts. Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee’s work elicited as many complaints during its 3-year London run as Springer’s own program did in its heyday. The unflinching raunchiness of the libretto wouldn’t raise many eyebrows today, but the juxtaposition of high-brow and low still makes an uncomfortable impression

Gaddafi – A Living Myth premiered in 2006 and it too resists classification as an opera, at least in the traditional sense. English National Opera commissioned the work from composer and electronic music bandmember Steven Chandra Savale, and everyone involved took a beating in the press It was saddled at the time with nothing less than the “redefining” the operatic art form, but most found it as odd and unpleasant as its principal subject Librettist Richard Thomas would return to the gossip pages in 2011 on a project with composer Mark-Anthony Turnage. Anna Nicole replayed the tragicomic story of model-turned-punchline Anna Nicole Smith, the centerfold with the highly public life that culminated in a controversial marriage to an 89-year-old billionaire. Notions of beauty, greed, privacy and grief all vie for our gaze in what Michael White of The New York