A Metropolitan Opera Playlist

If you’d like to drive an ice-pick through your eye but are short on equipment, the New York Times comments section is often a good virtual substitute. Case in point: The 700-plus responses to the paper’s coverage of the Metropolitan Opera’s decision to focus future seasons on more new works and living composers, citing sold-out performances for recent runs of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and Kevin Puts’s “The Hours” against lackluster sales for war horses like “Don Carlo.” While Peter Gelb told the Times that this represents “a big shift in terms of opera singers themselves, embracing new work and understanding that this is the future,” some fans offered counterpoints. “I’m pretty sure the singers, if not the audience, will at some point rebel against having to spend their limited career time singing contemporary junk,” wrote one commenter. 

What’s missed by those who object to this new direction for the Met—as well as by many who support it—is the fact that this isn’t strictly new for the company or its singers. Contemporary works and living composers were integral to the company’s first few decades, when its singers sang as many new works as they did old (even more, in some cases). In the first 20 years of its history, it presented as many American premieres of contemporary works. In the 1910s alone, it gave 13 world premieres. 

Many of these new works weren’t destined for long shelf lives. In a way, this makes them more interesting as microcosms of their era. It also suggests the need to do more than one new work a season: Treating each commission like it’s going to be the next repertory warhorse misses the point of creating an opera that speaks to the present moment. (Since 2000, the Met has performed an increasing number of contemporary works, but it’s only given four world premieres—and one of them was a pastiche cobbled together from a handful of Baroque operas and a libretto that rhymed “treetops” with “treetops.”)

Each of these nine works were brought to the United States and/or the opera stage at large for the first time by the Met, often by composers who were in the audience for those first nights, and provide a window into the strange and wonderful world of the company’s first 50-ish years of new works. Some would go on to become repertoire staples. Others would be written off as “contemporary junk.” The first entry did both.