ABSTRACT
At the end of the first half of the twentieth century an axiom began to travel through musical and intellectual circles around the world: the opera is in crisis. The cries ranged from the extreme – such as the contemporary composer and conductor Pierre Boulez’s remark, “We must blow up all opera houses!” – to more moderate positions. The cause resided in two processes. On the one hand, the dramma per musica had lost its ability to function as a place for elites to meet and display themselves. On the other hand, there emerged at this time a pre-eminence of operatic reproduction – CDs, videos, television, movies, even theatrical performances – over production. These factors, plus the tendencies of contemporary music towards structural autonomy – as described by the German philosopher and sociologist Theodor W. Adorno in Quasi una fantasia and Philosophy of Modern Music – along with the growing and omnipresent competition by the cultural industry, which can offer multimedia heirs apparent to the “total work of art,”2 are still among us and leave us trapped within a peculiar effect.
