Might anyone in their twenties enjoy a night at the opera if it isn’t the one produced by Queen? Or is the performance form just too dramatic and alien to contemporary audiences?
Against the backdrop of their recent production of The Flying Dutchman, The College Tribune dove into the history of the Irish National Opera (INO) with the founder and artistic director, Fergus Sheil. He spoke about the company’s active efforts to include and connect with audience members, especially students and young people, and how the INO is forging new avenues in the future of opera.
“If you want everyday life, you can stay home,” says Sheil. “[When] you want to go out to the theatre, you want something spectacular that’s going to entertain you.”
While other countries have centuries-old national opera companies, the INO is only eight years old. Sheil explained how they harnessed the power of the company’s Irish identity to catapult themselves to success with the company’s inaugural production, the opera Tristan and Isolde. “It had a really nice selling point that the soprano was Irish–Miriam Murphy–and in the opera, that role is an Irish princess. But it never, ever, in the history of the entire opera, had been sung by an Irish soprano before. So it was kind of this unique moment,” Sheil reflected.
Sheil also plays an important creative role as the conductor. He described the relationship between the pit orchestra and the performers as “like two people walking down the road holding hands…Ideally, you’re going in sync with each other…but that can change from moment to moment.”
The INO’s creative efforts develop performances pulsing with life, energy, and fantastic drama. Still, opera struggles with bad raps in popular opinion. Sheil acknowledges this dynamic. “If you go out in the street and say, ‘What’s your view of opera?’ to some random person you meet, they’ll probably say, ‘Oh, it’s just somebody singing really loud and unnaturally loud,’” he says. “Yet, it’s a form of expression, isn’t it? It’s like if you go to hear Taylor Swift – I mean, that’s not natural either; it’s just a different form of expression.”
Some of these barriers of perception and attitudes are being addressed by the INO’s outreach and accessibility efforts, which occur on many levels, such as through their advertising. “When you go outside and look at a poster, you’ll see the opera is called the Flying Dutchman. It’s not called Der fliegende Holländer,” Sheil points out. In addition to the verbiage used on the poster, Sheil works hard to ensure that the language used by the company is accessible to all audience members. “When we’re writing blurbs about the opera or texts for our website and our programs, we pay particular attention that everything is understandable by somebody who is not an opera aficionado,” he says. “That type of language can be off-putting.”
The INO works to make the experience of opera itself accessible as well. “Obviously, our operas have subtitles. If you haven’t been to the opera before, people don’t realise that it’s actually very easy to follow,” he says, referring to the captions which accompany all performances, allowing the audience to understand the messages being sung in each thrilling moment.
This careful attention to inclusivity dovetails with the INO’s dedication to the involvement and engagement of young people: “Right from the beginning of the company, we’ve had an outreach and education program,” says Sheil. This program includes workshops and educational experiences for both performers and those interested in technical elements. One such opportunity was a recent orchestral workshop for The Flying Dutchman, which allowed student musicians to play in the orchestra pit of the Bord Gaís Theatre under Mr. Sheil’s conducting and with professional musicians. Other workshops consisted of an afternoon choral event wherein amateur and professional singers worked on Wagner together, along with a collaboration with the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in which INO singer Carolyn Dobbin led artists to fuel their creation of visual art with opera music. The INO also supports student engagement with opera with €15 student tickets for all performances.
For Sheil, these efforts for inclusion and outreach are underpinned by a belief in the importance of young people’s positive experiences with opera. “I think it’s vital for us to open the door and encourage people to come in and get the message out that this isn’t some sort of foreign or weird thing,” says Sheil. “We want to get young people engaged.”
As the INO looks to the future with their investments in the artists of tomorrow, the director explained his views on the process of creating new opera and interacting with pieces from the past: “There will be some people who would take an extreme view that there are some operas you should never put on because the material is so problematic. If there is an opera with problematic material, I think we need to find interesting ways of addressing it rather than throwing the opera out. We can’t control what was written in the 19th century, but we can control what we write now…it’s important that we commission new work and that we continue to make opera alive…[so] it reflects the world around us.”
The INO is doing just that with their upcoming work: Sheil speaks excitedly about what’s ahead for the opera company as the INO produces a new opera called Mars. Sheils says that the opera will explore questions surrounding “who owns space, climate change…commercialisation of space and colonisation…so it’s kind of very up to the minute. And I hope it’ll also be kind of quite funny as well.”
The universality of the opera being created and reborn today keeps the work of the INO relevant for all of us. “We’re all looking for adventure and excitement in her life,” Sheil muses, “and I think that can be reflected in historic opera and the new opera.”
It may not feel natural for us to dedicate the time needed to attend the opera. Still, Sheil notes that extra time can be very valuable: “I know people are used to watching a 30-minute episode of Netflix or something, or 60 minutes, so if you are investing three hours…I think you’ll be richly rewarded by it. Where else do you turn your phone off for three hours and go into another world, a much richer world than you find on your phone?” Understanding more about Ireland’s national opera company and their work certainly clarifies why one might make a trip to the opera sooner rather than later.
Edie Weinstein – A&L Editor
