Steven Schwartz writes appreciatively of the operas of Carl Orff.  Hear,
hear!

The Theban Operas, especially "Antigone", are certainly amongst the
greatest stage works of the century, whilst "Die Bernauerin" is perhaps the
greatest of all in extending our understanding of what opera is - or might
be - about.

I won't bore anyone with a personal love-list, but the truth is that the
20th century can boast an incomparable richness of operatic quality and
diversity - even leaving aside that other potent lyric- theatre form, the
zarzuela!

The fact that there are no recent quantitative titans alla Donizetti,
Handel, Verdi or Wagner (except perhaps Britten) is down to our very
different - and decadent - director/designer driven theatrical priorities.
Composers simply aren't given the opportunity to write more than a very
few operas these days, and Verdi's "years in the galleys" might now seem
a luxury to be pined for, rather than a necessity to regret.

Composers such as Bartok, Nielsen, Bretan, Berg, Poulenc and Ligeti may
not have written great swathes of operas, but the quality of what they
did write more than makes up for the lack of quantity.

In England, at least, opera is flourishing in a way that "straight" theatre
patently is not.  Tippett's operas seem to grow in stature and popular
appeal every year - perhaps "The Know Garden" is the greatest.  Britten can
at least be credited with one significant innovation, on artistic grounds
if not in fact - that of "chamber opera".  His "Turn of the Screw" and
church parables do represent a radical reformulation of what opera can do,
just as valid and quite different from the evolution Carl Orff pursued in
Germany.

Andriessen and, especially, Glass have proved themselves engaging men
of the theatre, whatever the diehards might think about their lack of
traditional musical virtues, and the potency of their work is another sign
and token that opera is very much alive and well as it enters its sixth
century.

Christopher Webber,  Blackheath, London,  UK.
http://www.nashwan.demon.co.uk/zarzuela.htm
"ZARZUELA!"