The Fredösphere

It's opera and it's science fiction, so you'd think I would be compelled to comment, but I've been avoiding linking to news of The Fly since I figured out the show included nudity.  I'm not exactly one with a finger on the pulse of the opera world, but isn't new opera pulling a Britney/Janet/Jennifer and turning to skank to shore up the sagging popularity?  Anyway, now that we have a review, and it has turned snarky ("The Fly is a dog" is not what he said, but what he meant), I almost feel sorry for poor David Cronenberg et al.  Okay, I don't feel sorry at all.  And the review contains a bit of truly wonderful advice that could have helped more than one recent would-be opera composer:

"The Fly" isn't even an interesting failure. It's just amateurish. It isn't even good enough to be offensive. Shore, noted for composing music for such films as "Ed Wood," "The Lord of the Rings," and, yes, "The Fly," has no business writing an opera. But how could he know until he tried, you ask?

Well, he couldn't, but you don't try it out on an audience at the Chatelet in Paris, where it debuted in July, and then take it to Los Angeles Opera. You write a scene, get a graduate seminar class at some music school to give it a run-through, and then go back to the drawing board, humbled by what you've heard. Opera is hard. A man's got to know his limitations.

(When Matel comes out with its very first composer doll, and you pull the string, that's what you'll hear it say:  opera is hard.)

Well, my very first opera was a huge critical and popular success, in the sense that no critic panned it because there were none present, and the audience, which consisted of the good folk of Bronson, Michigan, pop. 3000, sitting in the gymnasium of the local jr. high school, seemed to like it well enough, or at least acted mightily impressed that a teenager could write 12 minutes of reasonably conherent music and still have enough friends to stage the thing.  But now that I think of it, my experience tends to confirm the wisdom of the above advice.

(I do like idea of the chorus singing the part of the computer, however.)

Labels: Composer, Opera, sci-fi