He commissioned a libretto by the African-American author Toni Morrison. While productions of La Boheme and La Traviata paid the bills, he worked hard to expand beyond the white, upper-middle-class audience that typically fills the seats in opera halls. As founder and general director of the Michigan Opera Theatre, his current position, he amassed a record that was anything but conservative. But the irony of it is, after 10 or 20 years of a certain style, it’s not new anymore.”įrustrated that his musical vocabulary was being treated as a relic, he gave up his dream of becoming a composer and devoted himself to artistic administration.
The audience was never important in that approach. If it wasn’t 12-tone, it was atonal, if it wasn’t that, it was electronic.
“But that was a period when most of the classical music composers were part of the university scene, and so there was a very rigid code about what was acceptable. “I always was a romantic in my whole soul and in what I loved about music,” he said. And when DiChiera tried to develop his own style, he found that many of these professors - despite their revolutionary self-image - approached music with as conservative a mindset as that of any small-town kapellmeister. In those days, serious contemporary music was in the grip of academic composers whose dissonant, atonal works turned off many listeners. Nothing could have been further from the minds of the composition professors with whom DiChiera studied at the University of California at Los Angeles in the early 1960s. And I thought, ‘Okay, maybe I’ve succeeded in giving the opera world another romantic tear-jerker.’” “By the time you get to the final scene of Cyrano, a lot of people are in tears, and that really moved me. “So much of my pleasure in opera has been coming to an opera and at the end of it feeling very moved, whether it’s Boheme or whatever,” DiChiera said. “I wanted to give the world another really romantic opera,” said DiChiera, a dapper man with silver hair, a neat moustache and the winning amiability of a man who has coaxed millions of dollars from the cultural gentry of Michigan.
(While noting Cyrano’s unabashedly conservative idiom, Anne Midgette of the Washington Post wrote that “the music is melodious and tonal” and that the opera overall “is utterly sincere, and affecting: a love story that comes from the heart.”). And DiChiera’s opera Cyrano, which opens April 23 at Florida Grand Opera, has turned into a hit, winning standing ovations and praise from some tough critics, impressed with the work’s authentic if traditional style. The contemporary opera scene in the United States is bursting with new works, even in the current lowly economy. Today his Michigan Opera Theatre is one of the leading regional companies in the United States. And finally, in his 60s, he set out to write an opera of his own, flexing compositional muscles that he feared might have atrophied during his years of opera administration. At a time when audiences seemed to want only Carmen, La Traviata and the rest, he set up a national initiative to encourage the creation and staging of new operas.
In a long career in opera, David DiChiera has placed a lot of bets on likely losers.įor the location of his new opera house, he chose one of the least promising settings in urban North America: downtown Detroit. Leah Partridge as Roxane and Marion Pop in the title role of David DiChiera's "Cyrano," which opens April 23 at Florida Grand Opera.