On its 400th birthday, opera is gloriously alive and active. Unlike other forms of high art, including symphonic music, its popularity is steadily growing over a wide audience base, high ticket prices notwithstanding. Opera adds a dimension to drama that is larger than life. One way in which opera stays healthy is by reinventing itself every generation or so.
Audiences are more demanding of opera now.
And they want to understand what is being sung. That's why projected English translations have been such a success. Opera was born in Italy toward the end of the 16th Century, a new form of musical drama invented by aristocrats who wished to re-create the theater of ancient Greece. Of the 42,000 operas that are said to have been written since then, only a few hundred survive in the affections of opera goers. If this has turned today's leading opera houses essentially into museums for the canonized classics, there is plenty of creative enterprise at work in smaller theaters, with scores of living composers embracing a genre that remains viable, exciting and fraught with possibility for the future.