A Process Philosophy of Opera
from The Comet/Poppea - https://www.yuvalsharon.com/
“[Sharon] challenges the status quo and proposes radical new ways to present operas new and old. Expect insight, originality and some contentious views that will stimulate debate.”
―Richard Fairman, Financial Times, "Best Books of 2024"
From “the most imaginative director in the US” (New York Times) comes this generational work with a vision for transforming opera into a powerhouse cultural phenomenon.
"This book builds a compelling roadmap for the future of opera, and how it can truly be accessible for everyone."
―Gustavo Dudamel
Known as opera’s “disrupter-in-residence,” director Yuval Sharon has never adhered to the art form’s conventions. In his many productions in both the United States and Europe, he constantly challenges the perception of opera as aloof by urging, among other things: performing operas in “non-places,” such as parking lots; encouraging the use of amplification; and shuffling the traditional structure of classic works, like performing Puccini’s La bohème in reverse order, ending not with the tubercular heroine Mimi’s death but with her first falling in love.
With A New Philosophy of Opera, Sharon has crafted a radical and refreshing book that can act as an introduction to the art form for the culturally curious, or as a manifesto for his fellow artists. In an engaging style that ranges from the provocative to the personal, Sharon offers a 360-degree view of the art form, from the audience experience to the artist’s process; from its socially conscious potential to its economic reality; and from its practical to its emotional and spiritual dimensions.
Surveying the role of opera in the United States and drawing on his experiences from Berlin to Los Angeles, Sharon lays out his vision for an “anti-elite opera” that celebrates the imagination and challenges the status quo. With an illustrated and unconventional history of the art form (not following a straight line but tracing a fantastical “time-curve”) weaving throughout the book, Sharon resists the notion of the opera as “dying” and instead portrays it as a glorious chaos constantly being reborn and reshaped.
With its advocacy of opera as an “enchanted space” and its revolutionary message, A New Philosophy of Opera is itself a work of art―a living book with profound philosophical implications―that will stand the test of time.
- Publisher
―Richard Fairman, Financial Times, "Best Books of 2024"
From “the most imaginative director in the US” (New York Times) comes this generational work with a vision for transforming opera into a powerhouse cultural phenomenon.
"This book builds a compelling roadmap for the future of opera, and how it can truly be accessible for everyone."
―Gustavo Dudamel
Known as opera’s “disrupter-in-residence,” director Yuval Sharon has never adhered to the art form’s conventions. In his many productions in both the United States and Europe, he constantly challenges the perception of opera as aloof by urging, among other things: performing operas in “non-places,” such as parking lots; encouraging the use of amplification; and shuffling the traditional structure of classic works, like performing Puccini’s La bohème in reverse order, ending not with the tubercular heroine Mimi’s death but with her first falling in love.
With A New Philosophy of Opera, Sharon has crafted a radical and refreshing book that can act as an introduction to the art form for the culturally curious, or as a manifesto for his fellow artists. In an engaging style that ranges from the provocative to the personal, Sharon offers a 360-degree view of the art form, from the audience experience to the artist’s process; from its socially conscious potential to its economic reality; and from its practical to its emotional and spiritual dimensions.
Surveying the role of opera in the United States and drawing on his experiences from Berlin to Los Angeles, Sharon lays out his vision for an “anti-elite opera” that celebrates the imagination and challenges the status quo. With an illustrated and unconventional history of the art form (not following a straight line but tracing a fantastical “time-curve”) weaving throughout the book, Sharon resists the notion of the opera as “dying” and instead portrays it as a glorious chaos constantly being reborn and reshaped.
With its advocacy of opera as an “enchanted space” and its revolutionary message, A New Philosophy of Opera is itself a work of art―a living book with profound philosophical implications―that will stand the test of time.
- Publisher
A Process Philosophy of Opera
based on Yuval Sharon's ideas
in A New Philosophy of Opera
For its devotees, opera is intellectually invigoration and emotionally incandescent: a form in which music, poetry, stories, design, and costumes converge with such force that feeling spills beyond containment. As Yuval Sharon explains, its power is perpetually rejuvenating, whatever its form: "Rebirth is opera’s true power, manifested through the act of performance. Every time an opera appears on the stage, it’s not simply replayed but resuscitated, renewed, reshaped."
For those indifferent to opera, if not also critical, opera is elitist, irrelevant, musically inaccessible, embalmed in the past, governed by rigid conventions, sealed off from contemporary life, and obsessed with the careful repetition of inherited masterpieces rather than to the risks of the present.
Sharon's aim is to offer a philosophy of opera that can help overcome these criticisms. His own remarkable work in experimental and avant-garde opera, as well as his creative re-creations of classic operas in remarkable ways, goes a long way toward showing how this is possible. Learn more about him at his website: click here. Process philosophy is a supportive ally in his quest. Below I offer general principles of a process philosophy of opera, indebted to Sharon's ideas.
For those indifferent to opera, if not also critical, opera is elitist, irrelevant, musically inaccessible, embalmed in the past, governed by rigid conventions, sealed off from contemporary life, and obsessed with the careful repetition of inherited masterpieces rather than to the risks of the present.
Sharon's aim is to offer a philosophy of opera that can help overcome these criticisms. His own remarkable work in experimental and avant-garde opera, as well as his creative re-creations of classic operas in remarkable ways, goes a long way toward showing how this is possible. Learn more about him at his website: click here. Process philosophy is a supportive ally in his quest. Below I offer general principles of a process philosophy of opera, indebted to Sharon's ideas.
- Opera is not a substance; it is an event
In process philosophy, reality is composed not of enduring substances but of momentary acts of becoming. Opera, accordingly, is not an object that persists unchanged through time. It exists only when it happens—when it is performed. Each performance is a new event, not a copy of a prior one. - Each performance is a concrescence
Process philosophy names the many becoming one in experience concrescence. An operatic performance gathers a multiplicity of factors—musical score, voices, bodies, space, acoustics, technologies, audience presence, cultural context—into a temporary unity of experience. This unity is concrete, lived, and never exactly repeatable. - The score as lure, not command
Within process philosophy, propositions function as lures for feeling rather than deterministic instructions. The operatic score operates in this way: it offers possibilities for realization but does not dictate outcomes. What the opera becomes depends on how those possibilities are taken up under specific conditions. - Multiplicity without collapse
Process philosophy insists that the many do not vanish into the one; they are felt together while remaining distinct. Opera exemplifies this principle. Music, narrative, staging, movement, costume, and light each follow their own logic. Operatic intensity arises not from fusion into sameness, but from multiplicity sustained in experience. - Contrast as the source of intensity
In process philosophy, intensity is generated through contrast—the felt togetherness of differences that do not cancel one another out. Opera depends on this: loud and soft, beauty and violence, intimacy and spectacle, stillness and excess. These contrasts are not problems to be resolved but energies to be sustained, giving opera its distinctive power. - Emotion as subjective form
Process philosophy understands emotion not as an added reaction, but as the subjective form of experience—the way an event feels from within. Opera is fundamentally an art of subjective form. Its meaning lies not only in narrative or music, but in the tonal qualities of feeling it generates: anguish, longing, exaltation, dread, tenderness. These emotions are not contained in the score; they arise in performance, as lived experience. - Ambiguity as an aesthetic good
Process philosophy resists final closure in favor of openness to novelty. Opera likewise need not resolve its tensions or clarify its meanings. Ambiguity—emotional, narrative, sonic—is not a failure but a value, allowing experience to remain layered, provisional, and alive. - Distributed agency and relational power
In a process-relational universe, no act of becoming occurs in isolation. Opera embodies this relationality: composers, performers, designers, spaces, audiences, and chance all participate in shaping what occurs. Power is not centralized; it is exercised through responsiveness and mutual influence. - Time as internal to the event
For process philosophy, time does not happen to events; it is internal to their becoming. Opera exists temporally not only because it unfolds in duration, but because each performance arises within a specific historical moment. The past is inherited, the present is decided, and the future is opened. - Novelty through inheritance
Process philosophy understands creativity as the emergence of novelty from what is given. Opera advances in the same way. New operas and renewed performances of older operas are not opposites, but expressions of the same process: taking up inherited materials and transforming them into something new. - Care replaces control
In process philosophy, power is persuasive rather than coercive. A process-oriented approach to opera replaces mastery with care: attentiveness to conditions, openness to variation, and trust in emergence. Opera is not engineered to arrive at a predetermined result; it is tended so that something worthwhile may occur. - Opera as prehensive experience
In process philosophy, every event prehends—that is, takes account of—the world that precedes it, both consciously and unconsciously. Opera is an art of intensified prehension. A performance absorbs past performances, musical traditions, cultural memories, bodily habits, and audience expectations, but it also prehends the immediate environment: acoustics, attention, fatigue, excitement, resistance. Opera is thick with inherited feeling. - Opera as bodily knowing (“withness of the body”)
Process philosophy insists that experience is never disembodied. Feeling is bodily through and through. Opera exemplifies this principle: breath, strain, resonance, posture, and physical risk are not secondary to meaning but constitutive of it. What is known in opera is known with the body, not merely through interpretation. - Subjective aim and operatic directionality
Every process event has a subjective aim: a tendency toward some form of satisfaction. An opera performance likewise moves toward felt coherence, intensity, or completion, even though this aim is never fully explicit or guaranteed. Different productions, performers, and audiences embody different subjective aims, which is why the “same” opera can feel radically different. - Tragic beauty as operatic achievement
Process philosophy affirms the possibility of tragic beauty: beauty that includes loss, conflict, and suffering rather than eliminating them. Opera is perhaps the art form most committed to this idea. It does not resolve pain into harmony but allows incompatible feelings—love and destruction, desire and despair—to coexist in heightened form. - Opera as proposition rather than representation
In process thought, propositions do not merely describe reality; they invite ways of feeling and responding. Opera functions propositionally in this sense. It does not simply tell stories or depict emotions; it proposes emotional and existential possibilities that audiences may take up—or resist. - Opera as a field of lures
Rather than a single message, opera offers a dense field of lures: melodic gestures, visual images, dramatic tensions, silences, excesses. Each listener responds selectively. No two experiences are the same because no two sets of prehensions are the same. - Opera as socially shared concrescence
Unlike solitary experiences, opera is a collective occasion of experience. The audience does not merely witness the event; it participates in it. Attention, restlessness, delight, boredom, and shock circulate through the space and subtly shape what occurs. Opera is socially co-constituted in real time. - Opera as resistance to premature closure
Process philosophy resists final explanations and absolute resolutions. Opera enacts this resistance aesthetically. Even when narratives end decisively, the emotional experience often remains unsettled. Something continues to resonate, unresolved, after the final note. - Opera as rehearsal for pluralistic living
By holding together multiple voices, perspectives, temporalities, and emotional registers, opera trains audiences to live with complexity. It becomes a practice in tolerating—and even enjoying—difference without demanding reduction to a single truth. - Opera as imagining the world from multiple perspectives
Because opera gathers many voices, emotional tones, temporal layers, and sensory registers without collapsing them into a single viewpoint, it invites audiences to imagine the world from multiple perspectives at once. Opera trains the capacity to feel with others, to inhabit tensions without resolution, and to recognize that reality itself is plural, relational, and shared.
Ideal Spectators
These spectators come to the theater in search of imagination. They realize that each performance is a new opportunity for venturing somewhere new and for expanding their minds. They relish the opportunity to view the world from a different perspective and to hear new voices that bring out something unique even from the oldest scores. Confronted by the unexpected, they don’t fall into confusion or fight against it furiously; they lean in, curious, eager to know what will transpire over the course of the performance. They may eventually decide that they disagreed with what they saw. But the consideration of another perspective and the opportunity to think differently are ultimately the primary reason they bought a ticket in the first place. The risk is its own reward.
Sharon, Yuval. A New Philosophy of Opera (p. 11). Liveright. Kindle Edition.