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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
July was New American Opera Month in the purple hills of upstate New York and western Massachusetts. You could hardly drive your Smart car from the lesbian bed-and-breakfast to the organic farm stand without running over an adaptation of a literary property. Stephen Hartke's "The Greater Good" made its debut at the Glimmerglass Opera, in Cooperstown. The Lake George Opera, in Saratoga Springs, presented Ned Rorem's "Our Town," which had its premiere in Indiana earlier this year. Elliott Carter's opera "What Next?" (1999) belatedly had its first American staging, at Tanglewood. Back in New York, Elliot Goldenthal's "Grendel" was the centerpiece of the Lincoln Center Festival, in a Julie Taymor extravaganza. These performances, all well attended, came at the end of a musical season that brought John Adams's "Doctor Atomic" to the San Francisco Opera, Tobias Picker's "An American Tragedy" to the Met, and Lowell Liebermann's "Miss Lonelyhearts" to Juilliard.
Are any of these new operas towering masterworks that will alter the course of music history while winning the hearts of millions? People have been asking that loaded question of American opera for a hundred years, and the way they phrase it almost demands a negative answer....
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