CREATIVITY AS OPPORTUNITY, Amsterdam conference
Dutch National Opera & Ballet’s Opera Forward Festival was a vibrant host for Opera Europa’s spring conference. The exciting programme put on by Sophie de Lint, Niels Nuyten and their team attracted not only diverse audiences, but also opera professionals passionate about the relevance of creation as opportunity.
Portugese composer Vasco Mendonça addressed our members in his keynote with insights from his relationship with the impulse to create.
To create is, of course, a fundamental human impulse. To make something where there was nothing—in my case, bringing sound where there was only silence—is an end in itself. It needs no other reason. But I’ve come to see the creative act also as a tool for something else: a kind of window into my own instincts, limits, and convictions beyond music. It may sound obvious to say that creation is a form of self-knowledge, but the process can at times be so intense, and so abstract, that it begins to feel almost autonomous—an intellectual, almost scientific process—and it’s easy to lose sight of its psychological and emotional dynamics.
These dynamics are particularly important in collaborative work such as opera. They shape the way you relate to others and can have a strong impact on your artistic output. Opera is, in many ways, an art form built on friction: music versus text, music versus drama, voice versus instruments. At its core, it is always a delicate negotiation between disciplines—and those terms can vary enormously. This is especially true today, as the traditional model—librettist to composer, composer to director—now coexists with many other systems, where roles are fluid and processes unfold in different orders.
This is both exciting and delicate.
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Personally, I deeply admire the operatic tradition, and I am convinced that existing works need to be regularly presented and reinterpreted. But there is a danger in relying too heavily on them. Institutions risk becoming museums—or even worse, temples of consumerism—and we need creation to avoid that.
(…)
My goal was to introduce opera to a general audience—but through contemporary works. Instead of the “masterpieces you must know” approach—which is valid but can be intimidating—I wanted to frame contemporary opera as an urgent and unique reflection of the world we live in.
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Telling stories through music demands a particular kind of attention. The voice unfolds more slowly; it asks us to listen differently.
In many ways, we have not changed that much in 400 years. We still fear death, long for love, and struggle to live together. But we are also facing new questions—about identity, about technology, about empathy in a fragmented world—and, as always in the history of opera, these questions call for new forms and new voices.
We are living through difficult times. It is easy to feel disheartened—to question our role in the face of violence, inequality, and constant noise. But perhaps these are precisely the moments when we are needed most.
As the path toward a more humane and equal society narrows, we must insist on making space—for expression, for compassion, for difference. With every creation, every piece, every story, we expand that space. We create room for thought, for dialogue, for multiple ways of being human. We show that difference is not a threat, but a necessity—that dialogue and compromise are forms of strength, not weakness.
Beloved Australian stage director Barrie Kosky also addressed our members.
We recognize ourselves in that act of singing. That's why we're there, because that person on the stage is expressing and articulating something that we can't. But we know what it is. It's deep, it's primal, it's ancient and it's human. And we listen not just with our ears, but with our nerves and our memories and our imagination. We listen for the silence between the phrases where meaning gathers like breath just before revelation. Opera reminds us that we are Frankenstein creatures sewed together from breath and dreams, flesh and Sehnsucht, sound and silence, tatty, messy and human. For as long as we breathe, we must continually yearn to turn breath into song. It's the essential human act to sing. And in this song we managed to weave past and present.
There's never been a period in the history of opera where opera was easy to put on. It's nonsense that it was all much easier in the old times. It was hard for Monteverdi to get his stuff on. It was hard for Mozart to get his stuff on. It was sometimes easier than other times or in other places. But it's always been hard. It's always been problematic. It's always been not enough money. This is over 400 years of this discussion. And I'm sure it was the same in ancient Greek theatre. I'm sure someone had to say to Aeschylus or Sophocles: I'm sorry. We just don't know about it. I'm sure it was. That's theatre. Theatre's always been like that. That's what gives us this extra thing.
(...)
I was sitting there (in a ‘Siegried’ rehearsal) thinking the difference between the world outside in the real world, and the world that I'm experiencing in this utopian bubble appears to be so different. And I thought, why is this important? When we go outside and we see all of the chaos and the terror and we think about tomorrow. And I think about the audience, because I've always been interested in my audience. I don't do theatre or opera just because I love it. I don't do theatre and opera because I love working with singers, which I do.
I do theatre and opera because I love watching people feel things, and I love the excitement of watching an audience rediscover their childish, imaginative side. Because every production that I see, even the ones I loathe (and there's quite a few of them), I always have a millisecond where I remember what it was like as a four-year-old child going to the theatre for the first time in the darkness. And I always have that little flashback to that moment. And I was sitting there in the ‘Siegfried’ rehearsal thinking: it is important. And it's not important because Wagner was a great composer. It's not important because there's wonderful singers and we're sitting in this great traditional historical opera house. It's not about that, it's about what is affecting the audience and how we affect the audience.
The great thing about theatre and the great thing about opera is that there are hundreds of ways to do it. There is not one way to look at an audience. In my 10 years at the Komische Oper I learned a lot about audiences. There is no longer one audience that go to an opera house. You know this, there are different audiences and it's not up to us to say to the audience: opera is medicine; it's good for you; you'll feel good. That is not our job and neither is it the job of opera. Our job is to say to the audience - particularly as the taxpayers are paying for most of our work - is to say anyone can come here. And we are presenting a buffet of possibilities, a smorgasbord of ideas. The old German dramaturgical idea of the opera house doing one particular style of work in one particular way is dead and it's over.
The audience diversity has to reflect the diversity on the stage. And the diversity on the stage has to reflect the audience diversity. And we have to get rid of this idea that we have to say to people: you must come and see this. Because if people don't want to see it's fine.
I don't think we should be making people come to opera. We should be opening up these possibilities to people. Now that's from the repertoire, the choices of work we're doing. But this trust and loyalty to enable audiences to do this is very important. The other thing I learned about audiences is that we talk about The Audience - but of course we know it's made up of two thousand very different people. The only way to really understand the audience is to eavesdrop in the foyer, which I did regularly. You have to pretend that you're not listening. But I would deliberately go up where people were queuing at interval for coffee or Sekt or whatever, to eavesdrop. Because it's only then that you understand that the dialogue that's happening with the audience couldn't be more different than the dialogue that we have in the rehearsal room and in our discussions here at the Opera Conference. It's not the same dialogue. It's literally sometimes hilarious, sometimes revelatory, because you go ‘Oh, wow, that's interesting. They're talking about that.’ And sometimes so banal that you think, ‘oh, God, I'm gonna give up everything.’
(...)
There's no way you can produce masterpiece after masterpiece. No artist can do that. No opera house can do that. It's just a matter of balancing risk and success. I learned that in Berlin. God, there were some shocking shows we put on. None directed by me, of course, but there were some shockers. It's not the point. Especially if you're protected, as we are in Germany at the moment, by a huge subsidy. We get the subsidy to fail. That's what subsidy actually is about. And by fail, I don't mean fail ‘Oh, my God, it's disastrous.’ I mean fail. Learn something from that. We made a mistake casting-wise, director-wise, conductor-wise. Very, very important. I learned this and I think that it was a time that was fantastic.
And I'm very happy it's over so I can go back to being an artist.
