Community opera: A short introduction and a case study in Italy

Abstract

Around the beginning of the 2000s, among various responses to the crisis in traditional opera, a few Western theatres and festivals started to propose community operas based on the involvement of professional and amateur performers as co-creators. This article traces the idea back to the pre-Second World War United States and its more general use from the 1950s onwards, although it carried with it the negative connotation of being the naive output of amateur singers and musicians. The term reappeared in the United Kingdom in a series of works put on between 1990 and 2005, especially by the composer Jonathan Dove at Glyndebourne and in other British regions. All of these were presented as ‘community opera’. Among other ventures similar to the ‘new’ community opera in the British style, La Monnaie theatre in Brussels became the first European important opera house to start a program of community operas as a staple part of its season. The first one, Orfeo and Majnun (2018), defined as ‘a participative opera’, assembled myths from both Western and Persian cultures and whose music combined Western and Middle-Eastern elements. Immediately after, the first Italian community opera, Silent City, was produced in 2019 in the then European Capital of Culture Matera, establishing a new model of opera centred on social inclusion and involving people with disabilities. This article is aimed at defining the origins of community opera and at exploring similar phenomena around the globe.