ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses trends of ‘de-internationalization’ in twenty-first-century opera by means of a comparative analysis between the United States and the German-speaking countries. Although opera has been a uniquely international art form for large stretches of its history, opera today displays a critical lack of global exchange, as is reflected both in the rhetoric of opera institutions as well as in the aesthetics of new operas themselves. Nowhere are these differences – and their ideological underpinnings – more visible than in the operas’ dramaturgical operations. In the United States, opera houses have committed to developing an American opera canon that relies on and reproduces an essentialist understanding of identity, as exhibited in both their artistic practices and their hiring practices. In contrast, the less-nationalistic mission of the German-speaking countries is coupled with more ambivalent modes of aesthetic representation. These observations are drawn from close readings of two new operas from the United States (As One by Laura Kaminsky, Mark Campbell, and Kimberley Reed) and Austria (Orlando by Olga Neuwirth and Catherine Filloux) that focus on each opera’s approach to questions of representation and identification.
