THE IMPOSSIBLE ART

An opera composer shares his love for “this maddening, outlandish, impossible art form.”

Aucoin, a MacArthur fellow and the composer of operas about Walt Whitman and the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, fell in love with the art form while growing up in suburban Boston during the 1990s and early 2000s. In this exceptional book, he describes what he calls opera’s impossibility, “the unattainability of its attempt to gather every artistic medium and every human sense into a single unified experience.” He offers “a practitioner’s view” of opera in essays that “draw extensively on my experience as composer, conductor, pianist, and vocal coach.” His passion is evident in every chapter, starting with an introduction on opera’s basic ingredients, including “the most primal human needs: song and narrative.” From there, he offers learned readings of earlier works about the Orpheus myth; Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress; Verdi’s three Shakespeare operas; and two contemporary operas that give him hope for the genre’s future: Thomas Adès’ The Exterminating Angeland Chaya Czernowin’s Heart Chamber. Also included are chapters on the inspirations for his own operas, including Walt Whitman’s Civil War diaries and the Eurydice play by Sarah Ruhl that “retells the Orpheus and Eurydice myth through the eyes of its heroine.” Aucoin has a gift for accessible writing that mixes technical detail with descriptions that make the material unintimidating, as when he approvingly notes W.H. Auden’s “ready-for-RuPaul’s-Drag-Race affronts to good taste” in his libretto for The Rake’s Progressor when he writes that Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s La descente d’Orphée aux enfershas harmonies that “might have struck a seventeenth-century audience as twangingly dissonant, but to modern ears the whole thing sounds positively groovy…the Beach Boys on the shores of Hell.” The author is often clever, as when he justifies barely mentioning Wagner in this book: “That guy gets enough airtime elsewhere.”

An inspirational trip through highlights of 400 years of opera.