RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - Opera Is Dead!
Aired: 2026-03-13
Duration: 09:42


=== Opera As A Museum (08:59) ===

[00:00:00]  There was actually a quote by Timothy Chalomé that I think sort of resurfaced and got controversial, but he said something to the effect of, well, they're opera singers and ballet dancers, but they don't matter.
[00:00:13]  So no one really cares about them.
[00:00:16]  And on one level, he's being a jerk.
[00:00:21]  On one level, he's right and so on.
[00:00:25]  But on one level, he's wrong in the sense that there's more classical music being performed at a higher level than there ever has been in world history.
[00:00:39]  Because keep in mind, what we call classical music now, which may be a misnomer, has never been the popular music of the day.
[00:00:50]  Now, Bach made a living selling sheet music and you could buy a Verity opera, reduced to a piano score, and I'm sure he made money off that and all that kind of stuff.
[00:01:04]  But it was never the popular music.
[00:01:08]  It might have been more mainstream than it is today, but it was not Cardi B because Cardi B or the Beatles or whoever, they exist in a world of infinite reproducibility in Benjamin's term.
[00:01:23]  They exist in a world where you can listen to music on a smartphone or buy a record or turn on the radio and hear pop music.
[00:01:34]  So there's no real comparison.
[00:01:37]  There is a juncture due to technology itself.
[00:01:41]  But the other thing is that classical music is a museum and museums are doing fine.
[00:01:51]  People go to the Met.
[00:01:53]  The last time I was in New York was May of 2025.
[00:01:58]  Getting a ticket to the Met meant standing in line in the rain and it was impossible.
[00:02:03]  I mean, museums are doing great and they benefit from technology and people hearing about it or wanting to meet friends there and have fun and so on.
[00:02:13]  But it is a museum.
[00:02:15]  It's not producing something new that's directly speaking to people.
[00:02:19]  Opera houses around the world are, in effect, producing the same 10 operas over and over again.
[00:02:28]  From, you know, Carmen La Traviata, I think is the most popular opera, Rigoletto, The Magic Flute, and yeah, Tosca from Puccini, but they're all producing the same 10 works.
[00:02:42]  And maybe there's actually a bigger canon of 50 to 100 works, but it is actually quite limited.
[00:02:48]  And it is a museum when you go to the Metropolitan Opera, the Chicago Lyric Opera, La Scala, wherever.
[00:02:56]  It's a museum that you are entering.
[00:02:59]  And it is maybe arguably more popular than ever.
[00:03:05]  And the quality has never been higher, arguably.
[00:03:09]  But it is not a living art form at all.
[00:03:13]  You're listening to old music as a kind of elitist in a way that it's not in the slightest bit relevant to the world.
[00:03:23]  Now, there could be cool avant-garde productions of an opera.
[00:03:29]  Can't really do that with a symphony.
[00:03:30]  They can kind of speak to you, but nothing really creates the kind of cultural impact or scandal even that a film was able to create in the 20th century.
[00:03:44]  So classical music is dead and it did push what music could be to the limit and then just fell off a cliff.
[00:03:54]  Strabinsky's Rites of Spring, or certainly like Schoenberg and 12-tone, Strabinsky's Rites of Spring is listenable, but at some point you reach this point of it not being listenable.
[00:04:05]  Wagner was pushing tonality to the outermost limit, but the prelude to Tristan Isolda is still hummable, for God's sake.
[00:04:16]  It still is communicating to the people in the audience and even communicating to the masses.
[00:04:23]  I would imagine that if someone listened at mall, like even if you're working at a factory or McDonald's, it still speaks to you on some level.
[00:04:37]  Not so much Schoenberg at all.
[00:04:40]  So the 20th century music committed suicide in this acknowledgement that music had reached its limit and had pushed tonality to beyond where it was even understandable.
[00:04:57]  And they just committed suicide in this effort of modernist alienation and even snobbery, to be honest, of we're writing for fellow artists and we're not going to speak to the public in the slightest bit.
[00:05:13]  And music ended.
[00:05:14]  And so what you are listening to, even if you're listening to a new opera that's produced, you're still in a museum because new operas, you know, John Adams, Nixon in China, or some of these operas that have sort of lasted like they did the Dead Man Walking opera and there's new operas coming out of the Met.
[00:05:35]  It's played by a symphony orchestra that hasn't fundamentally changed in 200 years in terms of its sonic vision.
[00:05:43]  Or that's a weird way of putting it, in terms of its sonic quality.
[00:05:47]  It's a museum piece.
[00:05:48]  You were just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
[00:05:52]  Art music only exists in the way that like Renaissance painting exists in the Louvre.
[00:05:59]  So it's over.
[00:06:00]  It's been over for 100 years.
[00:06:03]  If you took a program of the upcoming season at La Scala or the Paris Opera or the Met, and you took one from like 1940 and 2025, there would be no difference.
[00:06:19]  There's no discernible difference.
[00:06:20]  They're playing the same music, but they're playing on instruments that have not changed in well over 100 years.
[00:06:27]  Yeah, it's over.
[00:06:29]  The canon is there.
[00:06:30]  I think if Western civilization survives into their 100 years, there's going to be an opera house at a capital city that is playing La Traviata, Parsifal, and Carmen, which is great in a way from my perspective because I love those works.
[00:06:47]  But it just gets to the fact that the genre of Western European art music is totally exhausted.
[00:06:57]  There's one more thing I wanted to point out with regard to Timothy Chalamé is that he is correct in dissing opera and ballet.
[00:07:09]  They are dead and they don't matter.
[00:07:13]  Sadly, they exist in a museum, a beautiful museum where they're performed at the highest level.
[00:07:21]  And this is something, a quick aside, like a lot of people want to look back and think that like these like violinists were better 100 years ago.
[00:07:32]  They weren't.
[00:07:32]  Like one thing about the internet is that it has increased the skill level of piano playing, string playing, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:07:42]  I mean, the one possible exception is like the opera singer who's an actor or actress as much as he or she is a singer.
[00:07:53]  So, like, are you going to have anyone quite like Maria Callas or Franco Corelli or one of these just total showmen and dramatists?
[00:08:04]  You know, maybe not.
[00:08:05]  Maybe in a way singers today are like too good that they are able to capture just the magic and the passion and so on of singers like that that I just mentioned.
[00:08:20]  But the one thing about Timothy Chalome, which you should remember, is that cinema too is dead.
[00:08:27]  The exact same process that opera went through in the 19th century, cinema has gone through.
[00:08:35]  So like opera went, opera was never a total mass medium in the way that film was, or certainly television.
[00:08:49]  But it was more middle class, more popular, directly relevant, caused scandals and controversies and so on in a way that it doesn't now.

=== Cinema In The Next Century (00:41) ===

[00:09:00]  But the same story can be told about cinema.
[00:09:03]  Like, I think that what is going to happen with cinema in the next hundred years is that rarely will they produce new films.
[00:09:14]  And what cinema is going to be is going to be its own museum, much like an opera house, where you will go in and like they'll have a this season, what are we playing?
[00:09:22]  Oh, a 2001 by Stanley Kubrick.
[00:09:25]  Oh, an amazing film.
[00:09:27]  Gone with the wind.
[00:09:28]  Have you ever seen it?
[00:09:29]  Or, you know, Birth of a Nation.
[00:09:31]  Oh, that's controversial.
[00:09:33]  Yeah, pulp fiction.
[00:09:34]  It's going to be that the 20th century time capsule, basically.
[00:09:38]  But anyway, this is a good conversation.