The best-foot-forward moments in the opera world — season open­ings — are Americanizing opera well beyond the nostalgic idealism of generations past.

PTSD opened the Metropolitan Opera’s 2024–2025 season in Grounded (Jeanine Tesori, composer; George Brant, libret­tist) about the inner life of a military drone operator, while tales of a toxic cult rang in Opera Philadelphia’s season with The Listeners (Missy Mazzoli, composer; Royce Vavrek, librettist). Little Women (Mark Adamo, composer and librettist) at Fort Worth Opera tapped into the cur­rent longing for a more stable past.

None of these operas existed before 1998. Some have barely dry ink.

Is there any semblance of a cohe­sive identity yet? Yes, but it’s more in the kinds of stories that composers and librettists are telling than any sort of throughline of compositional style. Don’t look for the American Dream, as seen in echt-Americana operas such as the 1954 The Tender Land (Aaron Copland, composer; Horace Everett, librettist). Cult psychology in the modern southwestern U.S. setting of The Listeners explores the inner void “that’s real for all of us,” says Missy Mazzoli. “The agony of having to exist in a system you didn’t design ... the loneliness ... the lack of mental health services ... more than in any other coun­try, we’re looking to fill this void.”

Opera once rode the waves of his­tory like a majestic, European-imported ocean liner. Now, American-made cruis­ers, ghost ships, and vehicles that don’t yet have names are piloted by individuals who share 21st-century urgency and are part of the larger non-operatic conver­sation. New media allows stories old and new to be told in more immediate ways — with an energizing impact on singers and audiences.

Opera can still be its unrealistic, otherworldly self, but it's much less foreign.

“The shift toward subject matter that challenges the status quo is part of an overall trend in social thinking in what it means to tell stories responsibly,” says Yuval Sharon, Detroit Opera’s artistic director and the founder of Los Angeles’ The Industry.

And not just operas that he has directed. The depicted-in-real-time child sexual abuse in the 2019 Fire Shut Up in My Bones (Terence Blanchard, composer; Kasi Lemmons, librettist) and the end-of-life sorrow of gay boxer Emile Griffith in the 2013 opera Cham­pion (Blanchard, composer; Michael Cristofer, librettist) — both pre­miered by Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and later performed at the Metropolitan Opera — made Blanchard, best known in jazz, one of the opera world’s most-discussed composers. Before the 2020 murder of George Floyd, the opera Blue (Jeanine Tesori, composer; Tazewell Thompson, librettist) examined racial police violence at its 2019 Glimmerglass Festival premiere.

Form Follows Function

The singular toolbox that American operas draw on is an ever-increasing range of musical and dramatic sources, say several leading artists including Mazzoli; Sharon, also the author of A New Philosophy of Opera, W.W. Norton & Co.; composer Gabriela Lena Frank; playwright/librettist Nilo Cruz; Anthony Roth Costanzo, counter­tenor and Opera Philadelphia general director; mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves; conductor Gil Rose (Boston Modern Orchestra and Odyssey Opera founder); and Francesca Zambello, Washington National Opera artistic director.

Broadway, minimalism, neotonalism, flamenco, a strong literary tradition, and advanced stage technology are all there, creating more operatic options than in Europe, where neotonality remains dismissible. American opera also tends to be tighter: Multiple work­shops are customary. As on Broadway, operas aren’t etched in stone (Zambello got Philip Glass to rewrite nearly half of his Civil War opera Appomattox). Perfor­mance schedules are concentrated into a much shorter time span than in Europe, prompting American composers to seize audiences more immediately, knowing that their operas don’t have the luxury of building public support over months.

But at its foundation, the American identity comes down to what stories are told, how they’re told, and where they’re told. Checking those boxes is no guaran­tee of success, but it’s a map, a compass, a backbone.

Having collaborated on a number of concert-hall works, composer Frank (who is of Peruvian heritage) and the much-awarded Cuba-born playwright Cruz took on the cultural icons Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, but portrayed the two artists in an imaginary meet­ing on the Mexican holiday Day of the Dead. What could be more at home on the opera stage? Titled El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego, the opera enjoyed a quick succession of performances up the West Coast in San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, sung in Spanish with casts drawn from a ready community of Latino singers. “Audiences took the journey of the opera with us,” said Cruz. A second operatic collaboration is in the works.

Grounded is a very different case history. Composer Tesori, whose his­tory includes Broadway, tells the story of a drone-warfare operator with an orchestra full of otherworldly extended techniques, harmonically liberated arias describing the great blue sky but also down-to-earth American song in more intimate moments. The dazzlingly com­puter-generated visual elements created by Broadway-based director Michael Mayer brought the opera as techni­cally up to date as the drone warfare it depicted. Actual performances have been in traditional theaters (the Kennedy Cen­ter last season, the Met this season), but community engagement appearances with the composer and librettist were in far-flung hipster Brooklyn.

Alternative venues, says Costanzo, who performed The Marriage of Figaro this fall on Manhattan’s outdoor Little Island, send an important message to potential audiences: This is not an elitist art form. In fact, the annual PROTOTYPE Festival in New York, produced by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE, uses almost noth­ing but non-typical venues for works that have gone on to win Pulitzer Prizes — Angel’s Bone (Du Yun and Royce Vavrek) and p r i s m (Ellen Reid and Roxie Per­kins), for example — the downside being that limited seating capacity can mean limited exposure.

Taken together, all elements point to what is widely acknowledged as an operatic golden age in America. “There’s is so much beautiful creation of new works and spectacular, relevant storytell­ing,” says Graves, who sang in the Met premieres of The Hours (Kevin Puts, com­poser; Greg Pierce, librettist) and Marnie (Nico Muhly, composer; Nicholas Wright, librettist). “It’s making a big difference drawing people into the theater as never before.”

It’s a world of many voices, but modern opera today must sound inviting: “We’ve so given up on the school of music that audiences don’t want to hear,” says Zam­bello. John Corigliano is long established as the master of musical collage. Mason Bates’ gleaming sound world hails from the electronic club music. In the opera Cold Mountain, Jennifer Higdon knew when to halt her Britten-esque harmo­nies and let her characters exclaim for themselves. From Philip Glass to John Adams to Jake Heggie to Mazzoli, they’re all writing the music that’s dramatically necessary in each scene, even if they all have their own ideas as to what that might be. Idea dictates content, with tinges of Ravel in Kevin Puts, frank Puc­cinian emotions in Gregory Spears, or an all-around radiant glow in Ricky Ian Gor­don. On the technological front, David T. Little employed a long electronic cre­scendo as the mind-blowing finale of his acclaimed opera Dog Days.

American History

Few agree on which foundational operas had the most impact. Sharon points to three wildly dissimilar works: Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s plotless Einstein on the Beach (1976), John Adams and Alice Goodman’s refraction of history in Nixon in China (1987), and Meredith Monk’s wordless, beyond-language jour­ney Atlas (1991). For Gil Rose, the current sense of realism finds its source in the theatrical tempo of Robert Ward and Bernard Stambler’s The Crucible (1961), based on the Arthur Miller play about the Salem witch hunts. A more dizzy­ing cross-section can be found in Rose’s 35-title opera discography.

Whatever bedrock these works cre­ated was waiting to be built upon when history turned a corner with some seis­mic event. Mazzoli pinpoints the 2008 financial crisis as the start of the cur­rent operatic generation. “There’s a desire to respond to what’s happening around us,” says Mazzoli, whose students at Bard College, Aspen Music Festival, and Luna Composition Lab are all keen to write opera. “Opera has the power to get at the truth and in a more accurate way than in any other art form — with the enveloping scale of the work, the ability to explore complicated feelings. It con­nects in a more immediate way than an abstract piece of music.”

Lack of abstraction, says Costanzo, is a key American distinction: “As Americans, we want to make sure that things are legible.” And legible does not equal mundane. Mazzoli admits to being par­ticularly attracted to the “witchy” elements of any given plot, as befits a fundamentally surreal art form where the spoken word is replaced by pur­poseful singing. Dramatic credibility is a priority, but as much as Zambello encourages the creation of American characters, she urges caution: “If you don’t create characters that we can connect to, no story will work.”

How that’s achieved has no set for­mula. Terrence McNally simply wrote a libretto on the subject at hand — Dead Man Walking, for one — and told Jake Heggie to do what he wanted with it. The Ghosts of Versailles librettist Wil­liam M. Hoffman declared that he didn’t much like music getting in the way of his words. In contrast, when Frank first began working with Cruz, she identified unintentional arias and duets in his writing (he attributes that to his sense of rhythm), resulting in a collab­oration with such give and take — more words here, more music there — that the end goal was to make words and music disappear into the story. Yet, in keeping with Costanzo’s observation, their brand of magic realism never dips into fantasy. Cruz has a firm sense of purpose with the characters (and cuts them when he doesn’t). “And I try to reflect the magic with a magical orchestra,” Frank says.

Navigating the zeitgeist is still not an easy way to live. Major companies are forced to plan seasons ahead, count­ing on operas that aren’t fully finished. Even a clear-cut hit can’t be revived too often, or this season’s triumph lays an egg next season. Among many myster­ies, who knows why Moby-Dick did so much better in Washington than the better-established Dead Man Walking? Every year for the past decade, Zambello has tried to secure the operatic rights for To Kill a Mockingbird, but to no avail. “When you think about all of these films that get made, there’s so much content out there, but we hit walls getting the rights,” she says.

Graves has seen it all. She has steadfastly refused to sing cer­tain curse words. But during Marnie, she was able to say, “C’mon Nico, you can give me more music here.” And while teach­ing at the Peabody Conservatory, she says she wanted to kiss the office door of fel­low faculty Kevin Puts for the music he wrote for her in The Hours. But an opera she treasures in special ways is Richard Danielpour and Toni Morrison’s Margaret Garner (2005), about an 1850s runaway enslaved person: “This was a story that I know, that’s relevant to who I am. It hit me like a ton of bricks, that I didn’t have to have language and acting coaching to portray that role. It was a story of slavery that I grew up knowing about.”

Such rewards — not just for singers, but audiences — aren’t to be experienced elsewhere in opera. But one might think Graves would be intimidated by having no previous point of reference in singing new-opera roles. Maybe it’s just a little nerve-wracking?

“No,” she says. “It’s liberating.”