Opera's Inconvenient Truths in the Anthropocene Age: CO2 and Anthropocene

For three weeks in July 2015, the stage of Milan's Teatro alla Scala was a pulpit of climate science. Giorgio Battistelli, Ian Burton, and Robert Carsen's CO₂—based on Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (2006)—places fictional climatologist David Adamson at center stage, where Adamson warns that greenhouse gas emissions are making the planet uninhabitable. In interviews about CO₂, Battistelli explained that the theme of climate change was "not ideological, not religious, and not the usual [opera] plot. I was interested in finding a subject away from our cultures and that would address a global issue." ¹ Climate activist Lucy Wood has suggested that projects like Battistelli's are important because "if [climate change] remains mere data people are literally blinded by it. So, people are able to file it away as something we don't have to deal with because it's not an immediate concern, because they don't feel the emotional, moral connection to it." ²

Contrary to Battistelli's and Wood's claims, though climate change is, as E. O. Wilson has ominously proclaimed, a "planetary killer" and therefore an issue of "species" concern, its conditions of possibility and presentation in oral and written media are nonetheless deeply bound to social and racial ideologies, and to the histories of culture and aesthetics. ³ Anthropogenic environmental change is not even a truly new topic for operatic treatment: its introduction to the opera house—and to opera criticism—might be traced to Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876). George Bernard Shaw first alluded to such a reading in 1898 when, in Thomas Grey's words, Shaw characterized Wagner's Ring as a Marxist tale of capitalist economics, "the basis of a potential environmental parable," however inconsistent. ⁴ In the many years since, several directors have offered ecocritical readings of the tetralogy and its industrial-capitalist tropes, most recent among them Stephen Wadsworth and his "green" Ring , premiered at the Seattle Opera in 2009 and revived in 2013. ⁵ Wagner's works bear a timely eco-politics that transcends the composer's musical and plot devices; they are instead firmly lodged in the Romantic aesthetic axioms that authorized them, as well as climate-themed successors such as CO₂.

In this review essay, I use CO₂ and Stuart MacRae, Louise Welsh, and Matthew Richardson's Anthropocene (Scottish Opera, January-February 2019)—its title a reference to our current geological era, marked by significant human impact on the environment—as case studies for exploring the critical challenges that lie in presenting climate change lessons on the operatic stage. I argue that this mission of operatic activism bears an uneasy relationship to its own undertaking. Despite persistent claims that opera cannot reliably render historical truths, opera has often been experienced as a purveyor of truths of various kinds; voices, stagings, scores, and plots have positioned opera as a seemingly appropriate medium for dispensing climate truths. But operatic portrayals of human-made climate disaster hold an especially fraught relationship with the category of "truth." Wagner's aesthetic doctrine holds that music drama renders not just "deep truths" accessible to listeners, but "deep truths" of Nature and the ideal human relationship to it. Climate-themed operas could, therefore, be understood as reifying a particular Wagnerian—or, at least, Romantic—brand of truth, one endowed with the composer's and his contemporaries' discriminatory politics of Nature, creative agency, and racial ascendancy. And, finally, these operas' marriage with climate science is a particularly complicated one, for what may appear to be technoscientific fact cannot be regarded as inherently truthful either.

When viewed in this interpretive context, CO₂ and Anthropocene might be understood as diagnostic: they reveal the myriad of critical quandaries intrinsic to attempting to offer lessons of the climate crisis in an artistic medium that bears its own complex relationship to the very idea of truth and fact. In the first section of this review, I unravel the imbricated hermeneutic registers that underlie these works' claims to Anthropocenic truth-telling, and query the interpretive challenges and opportunities...