20th-Century Opera Repertoire Emerges from Oblivion

By the mid-1980s, the prevailing assumption that opera—a bourgeois relic—had died with Berg, crushed by its past, was widespread. The sacred repertoire and the weight of lyrical enterprise, both aesthetic and social, supposedly barred it from modernity. Yet 20th-century operatic works emerged from oblivion, and directors, often from theater, appropriated Stravinsky, Poulenc, Bartók, Hindemith, and Britten. Alongside these resurrections, the intoxication of freedom quickly faded: what made works original at their creation, like simultaneity of actions, lost its edge in the multimedia era. In retrospect, the concept of musical modernity dissolves into overall dramaturgy.