Opinion | How to Save Opera in America? Make It New Again.

When the acclaimed soprano Lise Davidsen took the stage to sing her first performance of Giacomo Puccini’s “Tosca” at the Metropolitan Opera last week, it recalled a halcyon age: the early part of the 20th century, when opera as a public art form was arguably at the peak of its popularity, and new work by living composers was capturing the imagination of the public.

In 1910, Puccini was in New York to supervise the opening night of his opera “La Fanciulla del West,” the Met’s very first world premiere. With the tenor Enrico Caruso and the soprano Emmy Destinn, household names in their day, in the leading roles, “Fanciulla” was a runaway hit. Tickets sold out, creating a market for scalpers. The response at the premiere was rapturous.

Now, more than 100 years later, with a severe lack of music education in our schools and competition from an ever-expanding array of streaming entertainment options, opera faces its greatest existential challenge.

Many companies, including the Met, are still trying to recover from the losses of the pandemic. We are fighting to survive economically (our European colleagues are better off with substantial government funding), regain our artistic footing and secure new audiences and donors. This is particularly difficult to accomplish because for decades there has been resistance to substantial artistic change from administrators, academics and critics.

After 18 years running the Met, and a lifetime of experience in classical music and opera, it’s clear to me that the solution to sustaining opera is through artistic reinvention, both with new operas by living composers, and reimagined productions of classics that can resonate with audiences of today.

Those of us who know and love opera know the potential of its appeal. It is anything but an outdated art form. As an amalgam of virtually all the performing and visual arts, opera has the singular power to reveal the essence of our humanity.

After Puccini, opera started slipping from its creative peak. Geniuses like Strauss and Janáček followed in the early decades of the 20th century, but with a few exceptions, the second half of the 20th century produced little truly popular opera; composers turned inward, with experimental, sometimes atonal compositions that didn’t appeal to large audiences.

György Ligeti’s “Le Grand Macabre,” an operatic farce about the end of the world that premiered in 1978, was described by the composer as an “anti-anti opera.” It featured 12 automobile horns and an absurdist plot that explores arachnophobia, among other unusual themes. I met Ligeti in the 1990s when I was the head of a record label and visited his Hamburg apartment. He ordered me to quickly shut the door before any spiders sneaked in.

Costs for fully produced operas have always been notoriously high — the average cost of a new production at the Met is $2.5 million — so works that don’t resonate broadly, either musically or thematically, were never a priority.

Most major opera companies, including the Met, with 3,800 seats to fill, decided to sit on the sidelines for decades, rejecting inaccessible new work and relying instead on a core repertoire from the 19th to early 20th century. When companies sought to expand their programming, they often turned even further to the past, to the pleasing compositions of previously out-of-vogue 18th-century Baroque composers like Handel, Gluck and Purcell. No art form can survive and flourish solely on the glories of its past.

Near the end of the 20th century, things began changing with composers such as Philip Glass and John Adams, whose inventive, propulsive scores and intriguing subjects, from Gandhi to Oppenheimer, captivated audiences. Importantly, they also brought new, younger generations of audiences to the seats.

Some midsize and smaller companies in the United States opened the door for a new wave of composers eager to connect with a wider public. This is largely thanks to David Gockley, the visionary former leader of the Houston Grand Opera and later the San Francisco Opera, who commissioned 45 new operas, including Adams’s “Nixon in China.” Smaller companies like American Modern Opera Company, Opera Philadelphia and Beth Morrison Projects have followed suit, winning new and younger audiences with modern compositions. (Beth Morrison Projects alone has presented 56 new works since 2006.)

The largest opera companies in London, Milan, Paris and Vienna have been more cautious, presenting fewer new works. But secondary companies in Europe, such as Vienna’s Volksoper, which recently presented the world premiere of “Alma,” an opera about the life and loves of Alma Mahler, are taking more creative risks.

I arrived at the Met in 2006 with plans to re-energize its audience engagement through new productions of the classics and new operas, but I had to take it relatively slowly or risk shocking our longstanding subscribers and patrons. It wasn’t until we were shut down during the pandemic that I seized the moment for some wholesale change.

Now and in the coming seasons, the Met, taking inspiration from the heyday of Puccini, is presenting more new and recent work than it has for a century — operas with rich melodic scores and contemporary story lines. And I’m proud to say that the average age of our single-ticket buyers, which was in the mid-60s when I began, is now 44.

This fall, we opened the Met season with Jeanine Tesori’s new opera “Grounded,” in which a female F16 fighter pilot turned Reaper drone operator decides to disobey orders rather than inflict collateral damage on innocent victims. We just finished the Met-premiere run of Osvaldo Golijov’s searing “Ainadamar,” about the murder of the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca by the fascist forces of Franco, eerily mirroring the troubled world in which we live today.

I can attest that these operas resonate with audiences. They respond with excitement and emotion. Critics, not surprisingly, are not always enthusiastic. Reviews of new, unfamiliar work can be mixed, negative or at times dismissive. But history has proved time and time again that the status quo on artistic works is often wrong. When Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” had its premiere at La Scala in 1904, it was a critical flop.

Those of us who believe in opera’s artistic and transformative power are committed to something more lasting than the next day’s reviews. We are working to create the circumstances in which opera can thrive and grow. While it means taking greater programming risks than ever before, the greatest risk of all is playing it safe.

Peter Gelb is the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

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