It was acclaimed as one of the best British operas of recent years-high praise, given the standard set by Thomas Adès and George Benjamin. The opera had its première in London, at the Royal Opera House, in 2016-not at the company’s main stage, in Covent Garden, but at the Lyric Hammersmith. This is an adaptation of the play of the same name by the British dramatist Sarah Kane, who committed suicide in 1999, shortly after completing it. But there was no denying the sledgehammer power of Philip Venables’s “4.48 Psychosis,” which was presented at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, under Prototype’s aegis. Prototype likes shows with hot-button relevance, which can be exhausting: opera doesn’t always have to be dire. In a Prototype event at the lower-Manhattan art space here, the downtown performance artist Joseph Keckler mixed operatic singing and oblique standup comedy in a one-man show called “Train with No Midnight.” At Ferus, which unfolds at National Sawdust, in Brooklyn, the composer Angélica Negrón showed scenes from “Chimera,” a work in progress about drag queens, featuring Alexis Michelle and the eleven-year-old performer Desmond Is Amazing. In early January in New York, two festivals of new opera, music theatre, and multimedia events-the Prototype Festival, which has been running since 2013, and the Ferus Festival, which began in 2010-dismantled preconceptions of what opera is and does. It is, after all, derived from the Latin for “work.”Ĭontemporary composers define opera nearly as loosely as everyone else does. The word is at once suggestively specific and vague to the point of meaninglessness. At the same time, to paraphrase Walter Pater, opera is a condition toward which all pop culture aspires: there are soap operas, rock operas, space operas, horse operas. The electric-car executive Elon Musk has been described as “erratic, unstable, reckless, operatic.” After the 2018 election, President Donald Trump is said to have delivered an “operatic performance of grievances and pugilism.” The most recent World Cup reportedly outclassed all others in producing “operatic drama.” In the popular imagination, opera is an art of histrionics and excess, veering toward insanity.
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