Rock has become so good at grand, anthemic statements - the kind that can fill a stadium with 60,000 screaming fans - that it already operates on a grand opera-like stage. So you might well ask, why would anyone bother to make a "rock opera." But rockers have been trying for over 40 years to do just that. Now, The Who's Tommy is marking its 40th anniversary as still the best-known "Rock Opera"; and Green Day is getting raves for the new 21st Century Breakdown, also billed as a rock opera.
Is this one of those cases where it's opera because the band says it's opera? Ever since composer Philip Glass and dramatist Robert Wilson collaborated on the trippy, abstract piece Einstein On The Beach in 1976, the word "opera" has been applied to lots of music/theater works that do not have arias, orchestras, or even a plot. Robert Ashley's "video operas" like Perfect Lives/Private Parts are a good example, or Steve Reich and Beryl Korot's The Cave from 1994. Laurie Anderson's United States from 1982 was referred to as an opera (of sorts), but it was really more like a song cycle, much of it veering pretty close to rock in fact.
It seems to me that many of the so-called "rock operas," including the new Green Day album, are actually song-cycles. As perfected by Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann in the first half of the 19th century, a song-cycle was a collection of pieces linked together by a tale, or a thematic thread that bound them together. Tommy began life as a song-cycle, a long one that ran to 2 LPs and really didn't require anything else to tell its story. It became a rock opera only later, when people began staging it. Since I've seen neither the staged nor the filmed versions, to me, Tommy will always be a song-cycle, not an opera.
So for me, David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon are song-cycles, not operas, rock or otherwise. But Pink Floyd's The Wall is another, murkier matter. Yes, it was released first as a 2-LP set, and it seemed to tell its own story just fine, but bassist/songwriter Roger Waters clearly intended it to be a lavish spectacle as well, and seeing the staged performance, which was so complex and so expensive that the American "tour" consisted only of the Nassau Coliseum and the LA Coliseum, was a grand, operatic experience.
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice called Jesus Christ Superstar a "rock opera," and it too was lavishly staged, and like The Wall, eventually made into a film. Problem there is that most rock fans would never admit Lloyd Webber into the canon of Rock songwriters, and there's also the vexing opera/musical question, which Leonard Bernstein had to deal with when West Side Story came out. Jesus Christ Superstar may have been called a rock opera, but it was presented as a rock musical. As was Hair...
So, is there such a thing as a rock opera? Possibly, but it's much rarer than you'd think. Damon Albarn, former leader of Blur and now of Gorillaz, debuted his opera (no "rock" in the descriptor) Monkey last year. Yes, there's a CD, but that does not give the full story - for that you need Jamie Hewlett's animation and the sprawling, multicultural choreography on stage. The music rocks - in spots, it sound quite Gorillaz-esque - but this work seems to be a genuinely operatic effort.
Tell us: do you have a favorite rock opera? Do you believe rock operas are even a good idea?
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John Schaefer has hosted Soundcheck since the show’s inception in 2002. He has also hosted and produced WNYC’s radio series New Sounds since 1982 (“The No. 1 radio show for the Global Village” – Billboard) and the New Sounds Live concert series since 1986.
Comments [3]
I love Hair but I'm not sure it was a "rock opera" The Wall IMO was the best.
I remember very clearly when "Tommy" was released in 1969 - I was in the 7th grade, when my music teacher, Mr. Cohen, brought his own copy into class, again the curriculum rules to play for us (He also taught "The White Album" to us!). He called it "the first rock opera" that day, so I never believed that the filming or staging of it was a fluke, but a natural extension of its life as an opera. When "Jesus Christ Superstar" came along, it was thought of as a refining of that genre. We had never heard of ANY musicals Webber and Rice had done before - our first introduction to them was rock songs on the radio. and "Superstar" was not staged or filmed until much later in its life - at that time, fully sung, with no spoken dialogue, so what would make it a musical? So, I can't agree with you on those points. Thanks!
These "smakdown" themes are trivial and boring. I would more appreciate your show if you focused on current opportunities to listen to music in NYC. Jazz, rock, classica, world music, etc. There is so much going on in the City. It would be valuable to hear interview and sample the music of those currently performing in town. Thanks for your attention to the above, Bill Weiss
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