Present(ing) Opera

When titling my recent monograph, I grappled with the inclusion of the word ‘digital’, which provided important context for the themes and timespan of the book but, I suspected, also might prove to be nonspecific or confusing as technologies evolved. ¹ In examining the subjects of this review – two monographs by Christopher Morris and Caitlin Vincent, and a collection of essays, many of which engage with the digital, edited by Yayoi Uno Everett – I am struck anew by the challenges of writing about the diverse amalgamation of performances that make up twenty-first century opera. As a scholar who, like many of these authors, thinks frequently through refraction, doubling, distancing and repeating – themes that loom large in works dealing with digitality – I find that our critical discourse of mediation and opera, regardless of prefix, adjectival modifier or type (re-, hyper-, cinematic, digital, televisual, through the disposizioni sceniche , Théâtrophone, simulcast) can easily find itself caught within the kind of mise en abyme (to use a recurring image from Morris’s book) that all three texts interrogate. In their remediation of a range of live, screened and cinecast performances, scenographic designs and models of composition, Morris, Vincent and Everett et al. offer a host of disciplinary interventions that exemplify how scholars, audiences and practitioners might observe both obvious and overlooked practices of twenty-first century operatic performance beyond the common theme of their contemporaneity or medial engagement.