AFTER a visit to Ireland in September 2003, a space alien with a taste for contemporary opera would return to his distant planet with a highly favourable impression of the Irish new opera scene. September includes not one but two premieres of new operas by Irish composers. Following its world premiere in Schleswig-Holstein in March, Hamelin by Ian Wilson (b. 1964) is given in Sligo, Dublin and Belfast. Then Thwaite by Jürgen Simpson (b. 1975), a winner of the prestigious UK-based Genesis Prize for Opera, will receive two performances at Dublin’s Project arts centre as part of the ESB Dublin Fringe Festival.

‘Ireland is the place to be,’ the alien would report -- bless him -- to his opera-loving friends back home. But the reality is entirely different. Without the commitment of Dublin-based touring company Opera Theatre Company (OTC), who are presenting both Hamelin and Thwaite, there would be very little contemporary Irish opera performed in Ireland. At that, OTC’s complete list of operas by Irish composers is small enough to list in its entirety here. They are the 20-minute chamber operas The Poet and his Double (Raymond Deane, 1991); Hot Food with Strangers (Marian Ingoldsby, 1991); The words upon the window-pane (John Buckley, 1991); Bitter Fruit (Fergus Johnston, 1992) and Sensational (Kevin O’Connell, 1992). My Love, My Umbrella (Kevin O’Connell, 1997) and The Wall of Cloud (Raymond Deane, 1999) are both 80-minute works, also for chamber forces; and Alexandra’s House by Stephen Deazley (2000) is a children’s opera.

With Hamelin and Thwaite, that’s a total of ten operas in twelve years. [see panel below for a summary of other, earlier operas]. It’s no wonder, then, that observers maintain a gloomy view. ‘There isn’t really a state of new Irish opera [in Ireland], except for what OTC has done,’ says Pamela Smith, author of the Arts Council’s 2002 report, Towards a Policy and Action Plan for Opera. ‘That’s putting it bluntly and bleakly. And even OTC have varied according to their own resources and their strength at different times. So while their ethos has been consistent, what they’ve been able to do has varied. You couldn’t say that Irish opera is any stronger than it was ten years ago.’

OTC general manager Andrew McLellan can only agree. Of the new Irish opera scene he says, ‘There hasn’t really been much, has there?’ It’s his job to work with the financial realities of running an opera company. In the case of contemporary opera, those realities can be particularly ugly. ‘New opera almost never pays for itself,’ he says, pointing out that, following Hamelin and Thwaite, 2004 is likely to be a ‘lean year’. ‘New opera really needs an enlightened donor, on top of Arts Council funding. For example, only the huge injections of cash to the Genesis Project [Stg£1m over the past two years from a single donor] could have made Thwaite possible.

‘We can’t often make the kind of significant investment in new work that we have this year. Audiences and venues around the country want something more saleable and popular, a sure bet. You have to balance it for the promoters and for the venues as to the risk they’re taking. If you’ve got Cinderella coming up to Christmas, you can ask them to pay for it. With Hamelin we’ve had to rent the venues in every case, and so it’s us who are taking the risk on the box office. So it’s not something that promoters are yet ready to pay for.’

Over at Opera Ireland, chief executive David Collopy knows exactly what McLellan is talking about. His company would like to support new Irish opera, but the practicalities are forbidding. ‘Our difficulty is this,’ says Collopy, ‘will a new Irish opera, in the context of our standard season, attract sufficient numbers of people to pay upwards of 70 a ticket to hear it? At the moment the answer is no.’

Opera Ireland, which is hoping to return to full productions next spring after its financial problems reduced them to concert performances in 2003, finds it difficult enough to sell works by Janácek and Strauss, never mind operas by living Irish composers. The closest they’ve come was in 2001 with The Silver Tassie by England’s Mark-Anthony Turnage. ‘We took a huge box office hit,’ admits Collopy, ‘but the mistake wasn’t doing it, but doing it the way we did it: in the spring season and as the lead opera. It would have been better to do it for just four performances at Christmas with La Traviata.’ (Coincidentally, this was the work that nearly everyone interviewed for this article used as a metaphor for opera’s most popular and bankable titles).

Collopy is interested in radically altering Opera Ireland’s normal schedule involving pairs of operas presented in short seasons. He feels people would find it easier to buy tickets for one opera at a time -- say once every six weeks -- rather than for two within one season and out of the same month’s salary. But as it stands at present, he says, if you were to programme a new Irish opera alongside a traditional favourite, the audience will go for the traditional. ‘In our environment, the contemporary piece doesn’t actually stand a chance.’

Why not? Why is it virtually impossible for Opera Ireland and so difficult even for OTC with its good, if slight, track record? Why does no one else try? What makes Irish audiences shy away from new work, thereby terrifying the opera companies that want to put them on?

One of the reasons, suggests OTC’s artistic director James Conway, is context. ‘Part of the problem of finding the audience for new opera is that there is so little performance of modern opera. So something that’s new is almost seen without context. I don’t think we’ve yet had a performance of Wozzeck or Lulu in Ireland. So it’s a little tricky to contextualise, say, a performance of a Gerald Barry opera. Or indeed of Thwaite, because there’s quite a strong influence of Berg there.’

‘What are we asking audiences to do?’ asks David Brophy who conducts Hamelin and who points out that music education has a lot to answer for. ‘Going to hear new music or opera can be like being sent to live and work in Moscow without any previous exposure to the Russian language. The musicians and others involved expect audiences to interact as much as we do, who have been exposed to it so much.

‘To people I know who wouldn’t have a lot of time for contemporary music -- like people in my family, for example! -- I always make the point that from the first day of primary school -- and I recall this myself in junior infants -- we’re asked to be visually creative. Because we’re given paper and pens and crayons. And we’re also asked to be spatially creative and we’re given construction straws and Duplo bricks. And to be aware of colour from the beginning. Then through literature and poetry, and through general day-to-day interaction, we are asked to be creative in our language. But we are rarely asked, throughout the whole education system in this country, from the age of four to seventeen, to be aurally creative in any sense or form. We’re only asked to be aurally re-creative. It’s a problem.’

But Brophy believes that, if anything, new opera has an advantage over the rest of contemporary music: text. And from text springs other components for an audience to latch on to. ‘They will recognise the visual language, the language of gesture, the direction, the lighting, the set design, the movement on stage, the story-line. They’re going to be able to interact with all those things, even if it’s without necessarily appreciating the way it sounds.’ He cites The Silver Tassie being reviewed on RTÉ TV’s arts programme, The View. ‘They liked it as a theatrical event but couldn’t understand the way it sounded. This can also be negative as well. Certain composers use very strong language; Ian’s [Wilson’s] language is very strong. The colours and sound of each of the three characters are very carefully thought through.’ He expresses the strong hope that people will hear all this and not just experience the theatrical side.

So, given the difficulties, why don’t opera companies in Ireland just programme endless Traviatas? ‘Because,’ affirms OTC’s McLellan, ‘we have almost an evangelical belief that opera is a living art form and it would be awful if that were lost. OTC was in some ways an Arts Council invention to meet a need. And I think that people shouldn’t forget that, and that we’re still meeting that need, in part by contributing to the art form and kicking it into the twenty-first century and saying, “This deserves to be taken seriously, alongside other cutting-edge contemporary arts. That’s what it is.” ‘

David Collopy is no less fervent, pointing out that with The Silver Tassie, financial disappointment notwithstanding, Opera Ireland got 2,500 people through the door for a contemporary piece. The company is currently in discussions with RTÉ and The Helix concert hall in Dublin City University towards possibly mounting the world premiere of Gerald Barry’s latest opera, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Collopy will have to seek extra funding, hopefully enough for a full production, but he talks about going ahead even without and the possibility of trying to pay for it with seven Rigolettos the following Christmas. ‘That’s how much desire is there,’ he says, ‘which will hopefully lead to a situation where Opera Ireland can commission work, perhaps annually or every two years: fully staged, major productions. Not to take at all from OTC, without whom there would have been no opportunity for new Irish operas to be performed, but just on a different scale.’

James Conway speaks of new opera as a desirable outlet for creative energy in opera. ‘If you’re not in that context where you have both new and old stuff being done, then you end up with all the creative performing artists in the country turning their energies to doing La Traviata set in concentration camps or a toilet: not always bad, but sometimes a bit desperate. For God’s sake, if you want something to be all about today, do something new.’

The ideal which Conway has often described is for opera, including new opera, to be ‘normal’. ‘Opera is just another art form. I think seeing new work is not extraordinary, it’s normal. And if it’s not normal, then you should give up on the whole business, because there’s no point in doing an art form where there are no new examples.’

But before new Irish opera can become normal, the conventional definitions of what an opera is and who its audience should be will have to be modified or perhaps even abandoned. A case in point is yet another new Irish opera for 2003, XXX Live Nude Girls by Jennifer Walshe (b. 1974), with first performances to take place in Dresden in October and in Vienna and Oxford in November. It’s about as alien to La Traviata as an opera can be. The set is a large Barbie doll-house, with puppeteers manipulating a cast of Barbies. The singers are off-stage and the action is projected onto giant video screens. ‘Although it’s like a marionette opera,’ says Walshe, adding with a laugh that she therefore sees herself as standing in this tradition with Mozart and Haydn, ‘it’s pretty violent.

‘It’s not an opera in the sense that, I don’t think anybody’s granny would like to watch it. It’s not The Magic Flute. I don’t actually think that nowadays the sort of stuff that I do can be promoted within the context of standard opera. I don’t even think it’s relevant to standard opera in many ways.’

She would likely find an ally in James Conway who actually recoils from notions like ‘standard operas’. ‘What’s really mentally deficient,’ he says, ‘is the idea that there is something called a “repertoire”, which is a handful of operas from the nineteenth century which call for specific orchestral or choral forces and specific kinds of theatres and which were written originally for specific kinds of audiences, and which we’ve somehow removed from all those contexts and decided, they are ‘‘the classics’’. That’s a load of rubbish, and laziness.’

Walshe refers to the composer Robert Ashley, an American experimentalist in the tradition of Ives, Cowell and Cage. ‘I think he’s amazing but I don’t consider what he does to be within the standard opera tradition. And the problem is, I don’t think you can write in that standard opera tradition any more, because the social situation that composers like that wrote for doesn’t exist any more.’

She talks about new operas and composers who try to hang on to too much tradition. ‘Like Nicholas Maw who did Sophie’s Choice last year. The reviews always say that they’re trying to write opera with a contemporary musical language but within the style and conventions which have been going on for hundreds of years. I just don’t think there’s much point in that. I think you have to find your own new way of expressing.’

Andrew McLellan is similarly committed to escaping narrowly defined, and in many cases outdated, ways of thinking about opera. He cites a recent international promoters’ meeting he attended in London as providing glimpses of how far some of the escape routes can take you. ‘Some of the mainland European promoters were saying how it’s incredibly conservative for an opera to start with a librettist and a composer. Why not have a composer and an architect? Or a painter? Why do you have to have singers? This is so conservative… Some of them were proposing radical re-thinkings of what opera may be, as music drama, and there may be no singers at all! The fact is, I suppose you have to draw the line somewhere. But I think it’s an interesting question.’

Part of re-defining opera involves re-drawing the target audience. OTC’s web site describes the company as providing four main types of opera -- popular, period, family and contemporary -- which research has indicated attract ‘a broad audience of opera lovers, first time attenders, music specialists, theatre goers, contemporary music groups, youth theatre, children, special interest groups and families.’ McLellan talks about ‘multi-segmented marketing’ and the realisation that ‘theatre people’ are less resistant to new opera. He refers to OTC’s 2002 production of Viktor Ullmann’s The Emperor of Atlantis, for which the target audience broke down into three groups: ‘1) people who are looking for a different cultural experience; 2) theatre people who want a dramatic experience, an event; and 3) the more curious music audience.’

And no mention, even, of the traditional opera or National Concert Hall audience? ‘I would hate to say that there is a conservatism in the traditional NCH or opera audience. But the evidence suggests that there may be. You see it in the programming of music venues.’

Pamela Smith, from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and author of the Opera report, also recognises the audience issue. ‘While there is a very adventurous public for certain other kinds of art form, you quite often find -- certainly in new music circles -- that the interested and enthusiastic audiences are those people who are also appreciative of modern art and they’re interested in art cinema; a different type of audience from your typical music audience that would go to your more traditional opera fare. And I think to change that profile takes a very, very long time.’

She, too, talks about new concepts of what Irish opera means and new Irish opera particularly. ‘Dieter Kaegi [artistic director of Opera Ireland] had various ideas about experiments he wanted to do with Opera Ireland. They were smaller scale projects and I think that’s where opera will develop over a period of time.’

Likewise, Jennifer Walshe describes her Live Nude Girls as a ‘pocket opera’: two puppeteers, two singers, four musicians and two suitcases full of toys. The video projection equipment is provided by the venues. Andrew McLellan similarly believes that Hamelin and Thwaite are examples of the way forward. ‘Hamelin, for example, is lightly scored, with all portable percussion. So there are no headaches for the producer and not a huge bill for an overseas promoter or foreign festival: the piece can travel. Even though it doesn’t break even, or make money, it is feasible.’

Pamela Smith’s ideas about breaking with convention go beyond scale, beyond changing the target audience. ‘It doesn’t have to follow, I think, that a new work has to reach some kind of production stage and then have to tour. I don’t see any problem with -- and this is entirely hypothetical -- whatever company it is establishing patterns of presentation such as informal presentations of work in progress, or public workshopping of composers’ ideas. Because it’s not just about bringing a thing to final production stage, it’s about developing the composer’s aptitudes and skills in writing for the theatre.’

What it’s about, ultimately, is creating opportunities. In this, education has a role to play. More immediately, opera companies have to widen their concepts of what opera is, and they have to communicate these new, wider concepts to a new, wider public. This could lead to higher attendances and therefore to greater financial returns on investments, and in turn to a mutually beneficial marriage of artistic and financial confidence.

But such change will take time. Meanwhile, new Irish opera shouldn’t have to wait: it needs to be done anyway. ‘Because if you don’t do it,’ says Opera Ireland’s David Collopy, ‘people are never going to be attracted to it. It’s a vicious circle.’