There is no shortage of operas and other stage works with music, of many different genres and from more than five centuries, which deserve to be dug up and get an outing with an audience now and then. So it is quite remarkable that two of Sweden's summer operas has chosen to stage newly concocted pasticcios. The YstadOperan has arranged an opera that never was about the love story between composer Hugo Alfvén and artist Marie Kröyer with music by the former - who never wrote an opera.http://www.ystadoperan.se/ The Vadstena Academy has made a new opera out of various compositions by "the Gustavian Mozart", prolific opera composer Joseph Martin Kraus. http://www.vadstena-akademien.org/silverskeppet/
Now it happens that no institution in Northern Europe has in the past revived so many forgotten works from the by-ways of opera history as Vadstena. And the same people who now try to revive operatic production in Ystad's beautiful 19th century theatre some decades ago revived then seldom given works by composers from Verdi to contemporary composers. So they are not to blame for the less and less adventurous repertory choices in bigger, more lavishly funded houses.
There the "classical" - that is from late 18th to early 20th century - repertoire has been rapidly shrinking. Many well-known works which were considered reasonably popular and safe box-office only twenty, thirty years ago - by other composers than Mozart, Wagner, Verdi and Puccini - today would be seen as high-risk projects by the marketing departments of the bigger theatres, although these to a high degree are funded to do exactly that kind of thing. The odd new and "difficult" works can possibly be marketed as sensational products for an audience today used to popular culture while painstaking work to (re-)create a broader interest in classical music takes far longer than the average 4-6 years' time of service of any general manager.
So we should not be too harsh if two smaller institutions have chosen to re-cycle good music with librettos never contemplated by their composers. It might even be fun to see and listen to. And we are grateful that they do fully staged productions, not semi-staged concerts or potpourries in costume. Yet this comeback of the pasticcio is worth to reflect on. While possibly more opera performances than ever are given world-wide, generally of a more and more restricted, less and less controversial repertory.
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