Phantasmagoria: A Sociology of Opera (review)

Phantasmagoria: A Sociology of Opera. By David T. Evans. (Popular Cultural Studies, 14.) Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1999. [x, 489 p. ISBN 1-85742-209-0. $43.95 (pbk.).]

This is a profoundly cynical book, described by its author as "a sociological account of opera's current sociocultural standing" (p. ix). Taking a generally jaundiced view of the current state of opera, David T. Evans (whose background and credentials are not described anywhere in the book) examines the art form from every conceivable perspective, focusing on opera primarily in Britain and secondarily elsewhere in Europe, with only scattered references to opera in America.

Yet even for American readers, Phantasmagoria does provide a wealth of insight into the inner workings of the opera world, mainly in the form of quotations from opera producers (i.e., stage directors), administrators, singers, and critics. In fact, the book is so thickly larded with quotations (duly annotated) that it is often hard to tell when, if ever, the author is speaking for himself. Fortunately, a comprehensive bibliography is provided, should one want to track down the sources of the countless quotations.

Evans seems to proceed from a general sense of doubt about whether producing opera is a good thing. His introduction offers a convoluted attempt to define opera, emphasizing the privileged status of its audience and its "elitist ritual" (p. 12). Chapter 1, "Opera as Music, Text, Drama and Theatre," addresses opera not as a performing art but as an object of consumption. It is a bit difficult to know exactly what Evans is getting at here, particularly in sentences like this:

It is one thing to argue against the formalist aesthetics treatment of music in terms of abstract, "conceptless" principles by proposing that music is sociocultural in origin, composed to formulae related in some way to conventional musical norms, that it is a means of communication albeit of a rhetorically distracted kind, and that hence all music has the potential to acquire locutionary meanings and illocutionary power, but it is quite another to provide the evidence in terms accessible to the less than even highly specialised. (p. 37)

A chapter titled "The Opera Industry" examines the funding of opera companies, mostly in the United Kingdom. Despite the book's 1999 publication date, its statistics seem to date from 1993 at the latest, and Evans does not discuss the notorious political and financial travails experienced by the Royal Opera House prior to and during its recently completed renovation.

Evans explores the phenomenon of corporate sponsorship of opera production and its conservative influences on artistic planning. He also discusses in detail various financial practices all too familiar to American arts patrons: donor categories, "planned giving," ticket-pricing structures, boards of directors, and the role of government funding. (Only one American company, the Metropolitan Opera, is included in the latter discussion.)

Harping on his theme of opera as "fetishised ritual" (p. 153), Evans discounts the notion that opera may be building more diverse, less patrician audiences: "The ascendancy of monetarist policies, requiring greater private and corporate funding . . . appears to have reaffirmed opera as a symbol, club, pastime for those with access to the substantial sums required to put it on" (pp. 153-54). He examines various attempts to popularize opera--its use in advertising, "crossover" recordings, opera tourism, the "Three Tenors" phenomenon, and so on--and quotes several of the highly vocal critics of such attempts.

A chapter titled "The Opera Museum" echoes the often heard lament about the "closed" state of the opera repertory, with much discussion of a survey (citing ten-year-old data) by David Littlejohn, included in the book's appendix, that lists the one hundred most frequently performed operas as reported in the British magazine Opera. The newest work on the list (number 95), Francis Poulenc's Les Dialogues des Carmélites (1957), testifies to the difficulty more recent works have--despite their abundance--in getting a toehold on even the outer reaches of the standard repertory. There follows...