All “After the Premiere” Blog Posts

After the Premiere: “ Three Visions of Opera Now ”   (1/3)   In this short series — “ Three Visions of Opera Now ”  — I draw on recent conversations with three major figures working across very different corners of today’s operatic landscape: stage director Christopher Alden, theatre director Cal McCrystal, and conductor André de Ridder. Rather than presenting these as conventional interviews, each post reflects on how their artistic choices reveal broader questions about op

Welcome to “After the Premiere” Opera, Vocal Music, Archives, the Industry, and Musical Afterlives By Justin Vickers Opera culture invests enormous symbolic weight in premieres. We mark first performances as moments of arrival, consecration, and especially — given the economics of the genre — great financial risk. New works are greeted with excitement or suspicion; revivals are framed as rediscoveries; reputations seem to pivot on opening nights and first reviews. Yet most of