ABSTRACT
It is almost forty years since Adorno declared that that opera was an eviscerated art form that didn’t know that it had died.1 Some stiffs just won’t take no telling. But for me at least, despite my professional and academic engagement with the form, opera is the encounter that never happens; can never happen, probably, despite its sociocultural visibility and its scandalous consumption of resources. This essay is about European artists working in music theatre today for whom, like me, the aesthetic, institutional and ideological baggage of opera render it essentially moribund; artists who know that the significant developments of twentieth-century music and theatre fundamentally negate the nineteenth-century dramaturgies and metaphysics that continue to underpin most operatic practice, but whose continued engagement with the relation between music and theatre inevitably treads warily around, sometimes through and beyond, opera. Hence: a post-operatic music theatre.
