Hume's "Rigoletto" as an Appology

What I'm about to discuss in this post is a theme to which I will return: opera and ballet companies trying to make older works relevant to contemporary life because they just don't have anything comparable with which to replace them.

Opera companies regularly try new works and subscribers dutifully attend, but most are not particularly successful.  The "hits" are for the most part tried and true operas from the past even if many of the story lines were somewhat problematic when first performed and a lot more so now.

Charlie Parker's Yardbird

I recently attended a performance of the contemporary opera "Charlie Parker's Yardbird," which, among other things, left me thinking about the age-old question of whether an individual's artistic or intellectual accomplishments stand on their own, or whether they are forever linked to the life of the person who created them and should be evaluated in that context.

For example, as a New York Times article of November 2019 asked: "Is it time to stop looking at Gaugin altogether?"  That would be because the French artist apparently repeatedly had sex with young girls during the years he lived in Tahiti and fathered children with one or more of them.

The Appeal of a Twist in Opera and Fiction

One well-known genre is the coming-of-age novel, represented perhaps most famously by J.D. Salinger's classic, Catcher in the Rye. The opposite might be called the fading-away novel, here represented by Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending.

First published in 2011, it won the coveted Man Booker Prize, but I just got around to reading it, and wasn't planning to write anything about it until I took a course from the Seattle Opera in how to write a libretto.