KEYS TO SUCCESS.(Editorial)

Two articles in this month's issue look at the same subject from different perspectives: what makes a successful opera -- besides the obvious prerequisite, memorable music. In "A Novel Idea," which begins on page 20, Joel Honig considers why novels rarely metamorphose into first-rate operas. It might seem surprising that they do not, since both art forms began their development at about the same time -- the early seventeenth century -- and the novel offers readers fully developed characters, each of whom has a distinct way of talking and, usually, a precisely described appearance. One would think that such people would be the easiest for an adroit librettist to turn into memorable opera personalities. More often than not, Honig writes, it just doesn't happen. Joan Peyser, whose article "Future Indefinite" begins on page 14, advances different ideas as to why most twentieth-century American operas failed to win a secure place in the repertory. Some were not very good; many more were injured beyond saving at birth by a critical establishment wedded to the principles of atonalism. Thus, even though an opera received a warm welcome from a first-night audience, the musical establishment would dismiss it as retrograde or worse, because it did not sound like the product of the Second Viennese School. That line of attack has died out, and tonality is welcome at most big opera houses that produce new work. Both Honig and Peyser show that last century's operatic battlefield is littered with corpses. Did those operas die in vain? Is it possible that, at least in this field of human endeavor, today's leading lights learned something from the mishaps that swallowed their predecessors? I think there are grounds for hoping they are building a body of work that a more open-minded public will accept -- and that the best of it will become part of the standard repertory.

Regardless of its musical style or literary derivation, no opera ever succeeded without money being spent on it. Never has this been more true than it is today and OPERA NEWS thought it would be a good idea to ...