After the Premiere: André de Ridder, New Music, and What Musical Leadership Can Still Change

After the Premiere: “Three Visions of Opera Now” (3/3)

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 opera’s future: how productions change meaning over time, how audiences are cultivated rather than assumed, and how musical leadership intersects with institutional survival. Together, these perspectives form a triptych of how opera is being reimagined from the stage, the rehearsal room, and the podium.

By Justin Vickers

When André de Ridder returns to English National Opera this season to conduct Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, he does so not as a guest revisiting familiar terrain, but as ENO’s Music Director-Designate, preparing to assume one of the most consequential artistic leadership roles in British opera. The production marks both a culmination of his long relationship with the company and a public signal of how he understands opera’s future responsibilities: to balance repertory with risk, institutional stability with artistic experimentation, and audience reach with uncompromising musical ambition.

De Ridder has been associated with ENO for over two decades, having conducted two major premieres there early in his career: Gerald Barry’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant in 2005 and Michel van der Aa’s Sunken Garden in 2013. Those productions positioned him firmly within a tradition of the ENO as a laboratory for new music theatre. Yet de Ridder now approaches the company from a different vantage point, shaped by experience in leadership roles at international opera houses, conducting across standard repertory, and cultivating new work in multiple European contexts.

The selection of the Barry and the van der Aa did not reflect merely “safe” opera titles. They were, as he put it, “pioneering kind of things to do,” and the ENO was “clearly the place to do it.” The point, then, is not only that he has history with the company. It is that his history with the company is rooted in the very identity ENO most consistently asserts: as a space and as an organization that embraces risk, curiosity, and a public-facing sense of what opera can be when it refuses to behave like a museum.

From Guest Conductor to Institutional Steward

When de Ridder first worked at ENO, he described himself as “quite young” and primarily associated with experimental forms of music theatre. At that stage, ENO appeared as a natural home for innovation, a place where unconventional projects could be realized at scale. Returning now as Music Director Designate, he brings not only that experimental impulse, but also a broader sense of what a national opera company must hold in balance.

He emphasizes that ENO’s remit cannot be reduced to only presenting canonical works. As a national institution, it must also maintain it’s function and standing as an international platform for contemporary creativity, emerging artistic teams, and audiences who may never have encountered opera before. Importantly, he does not see these obligations as competing priorities. Instead, they form part of a single ecology in which repertory, commissioning, and education reinforce one another.

That ecology, he suggested, becomes even more vital at moments when companies face financial constraint or public scrutiny. The temptation to retreat into “safe” programming may be understandable, but it risks undermining the very vitality that justifies opera’s continued relevance.

Opera Beyond the Museum: Commissioning as Process, Not Product

One of de Ridder’s chief priorities involves rethinking how new operas are developed, with a clear focus on commissioning culture.

He is plainly skeptical of an older model: a piece is commissioned, the composer and librettist disappear for a year or two, and the company receives a finished object to “deal with.” He wants, however, a developmental environment instead, replete with workshops, libretto labs, and staged works-in-progress that allow ideas to be tested early and revised intelligently. When this agenda is implemented, the principle is clear: new opera should not be a high-stakes single throw. It should be — and must be — iterated.

Such models are not merely efficient. They are pedagogical. Composers learn what theatrical pacing feels like in real time. Directors discover which musical gestures sustain dramatic tension. Administrators gain insight into which projects resonate with performers and perhaps smaller, invited audiences alike. Failure becomes productive rather than fatal, and even abandoned or entirely re-conceived projects contribute to future successes.

This developmental approach is not ancillary to artistic excellence, it is foundational to it. For me, as someone who has sung a number of new operas in first productions — and as someone who is equally conscious that second productions rarely occurred — I can attest that de Ridder’s perspective is as refreshing as it is heartening.

Artistic Teams and the New Operatic Ecology

De Ridder spoke enthusiastically about contemporary composer–librettist partnerships that function almost like repertory companies within new opera. He pointed to several existing librettist/composer partnerships in the current operatic ecosystem. And I am reminded of Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek, whose collaborations (Breaking the Waves, Proving Up, and The Listeners, among several future projects) demonstrate how sustained partnership can yield increasingly sophisticated dramaturgical language and musical soundworlds.

Such teams resemble earlier composer/librettist alliances in opera history, offering continuity of aesthetic vision across projects. (One need only think of Mozart–da Ponte or Verdi–Boito, as a starting point.) Supporting these partnerships allows companies to build artistic identity across several seasons rather than treating each new work as its own discrete experiment.

This perspective re-frames commissioning as cultivation rather than procurement. Opera companies, in this model, do not simply acquire new works, but instead they participate in the expansion of the discipline and its artistic growth over a lengthy time horizon.

Kurt Weill, Crossover, and the Legacy of Disruption

De Ridder’s affinity for Weill is both personal and historical. Growing up in Berlin, he encountered Weill’s music not as academic repertory but as living theatre, performed alongside operetta and popular musical forms. (And even performed by de Ridder’s own father.) That experience shaped his understanding of Mahagonny not as an anomaly but as a deliberate experiment in stylistic hybridity.

Weill’s integration of popular idioms into operatic structures, de Ridder argued in our conversation, represented an early form of crossover — not in the commercial sense often implied today, of course, but as a conscious artistic strategy to bridge cultural cross-currents between popular song (in Weill's day) and the classical operetta (or operatic) genre. In Mahagonny, closed musical numbers still carry narrative momentum, collapsing the traditional separation between aria and action.

For de Ridder, this structural fluidity remains strikingly contemporary. And modern composers continue to wrestle with the same question of how to maintain musical coherence while also following dramatic motion and the continuous unfolding and development of musical ideas.

In this sense, reviving Weill is not nostalgic. It is pedagogical. It has purpose.

Singing Actors and the Ethics of Direct Address

Central to de Ridder’s operatic philosophy is the idea that singers must function as complete theatrical communicators. He repeatedly emphasized his preference for “singing actors” who speak through their respective musical lines, rather than merely executing a vocal passage. One quintessential example of this marriage of both acting and singing must surely be Teresa Stratas, no stranger to Kurt Weill, herself.

In Weill especially, textual clarity and rhetorical intention are inseparable from musical phrasing. The singer must project narrative meaning, not simply radiant sound. Such a requirement aligns closely with ENO’s longstanding commitment to performance in English, where the principal language of the audience becomes an immediate vehicle of engagement rather than a mediated one.

This emphasis on direct address reinforces de Ridder’s broader institutional aims for the ENO. Opera must feel proximate, not remote. An audience must feel its immediacy. Performers must appear to communicate with audiences rather than perform at them. And to his credit, this concern is shared by the ENO’s Music Director-Designate.

Dual Cities and National Responsibility

The ENO’s new dual presence in London and Manchester plays a significant role in de Ridder’s thinking about sustainability and reach. Rather than viewing geographic expansion as dilution, he sees it as an opportunity to build a genuinely national audience while maximizing the artistic life of productions.

Productions developed in one city can circulate to the other, extending their lifespan and increasing access. New work developed in Manchester may reach London audiences, and vice versa. In this way, artistic investment gains broader cultural return.

De Ridder also framed this structure as an implicit acknowledgment that opera cannot remain centralized if it hopes to serve diverse publics. A national company, he argued, must be physically present in more than one metropolitan center if it intends to cultivate long-term relevance.

(One hopes that this ideology results in investment in further touring opportunities throughout the country, which would certainly be a response to recent closures in this once-leading — but very costly — subdiscipline.)

Repertoire as Conversation Across Time

Perhaps most striking in de Ridder’s vision is his resistance to sharp divisions between “old” and “new” opera. He advocates instead for programming that creates conceptual dialogue across centuries. He cited the possibility of pairing canonical works such as Don Giovanni with contemporary operas addressing parallel themes of power, coercion, or social rupture.

Repertoire becomes less a strict chronology — or even a programming teleology — than an intersecting network of ongoing thematic discussions.

This approach also invites reconsideration of (neglected) late twentieth-century operas whose cultural contexts may now feel newly urgent. Revivals, in this framework, become acts of re-evaluation rather than simple repetition.

“Not what we do, but how we do it”

If there is a thesis statement hidden in de Ridder’s account of ENO’s future, it arrives near the end of our discussion. And it raised the hairs on my arms.

When asked what the ENO does uniquely well, he moved away from the language of superiority and comparison and instead moved toward identity. Who the ENO is as an opera company, and what it stands for in the twenty-first century. The obvious element is linguistic: ENO performs in English, which creates “direct storytelling” to its audience. But the deeper revelation returns to the resulting — literal — closeness the language cultivates with an audience. Among its many strengths, the ENO, he said, is at its best when it is “quite close to the audience,” when there is “no distance,” no “gaze in between,” when the performance is “unfolding in the room” with an immediacy that is as clearly felt as it is shared. Shared between the artists and the onlookers alike.

His example was revealing. De Ridder found that in the recent Gilbert and Sullivan production, for example — McCrystal’s production of HMS Pinafore — what struck him was not pristine polish but evident joy: the chorus was “playing with the audience,” laughing and “grinning” together with them, and without self-consciousness. He returned repeatedly to the chorus as a core component of ENO’s conscience and its abiding character, embodying not merely excellence of sound, but excellence of theatrical presence: the visible enjoyment of individuals that an audience can see and zero-in on from the house, which is what makes an ensemble vivid. For a conductor, this is not a sentimental point. It is a statement about what turns a company into a community. (And by extension, that community into a family.)

Our conversation concluded with the most important distinction of all: ENO’s strength has nothing to do with how many commissions or how much repertoire it produces. “The point is how we do things.” What is occurring on the stage, and how it is transmitted to the audience, is the galvanising strength of the ENO: in the living combination of world-class solo artists, stage directors, chorus-masters, choristers, and orchestra.

After the Premiere: Leadership as Cultural Design

Across our conversation, de Ridder returned repeatedly to a simple principle: opera companies do not merely present art, they are responsible for creating — and sustaining — entire artistic universes. Decisions about rehearsal structures, casting practices, commissioning processes, and the geography of venues all shape how opera circulates within public life.

Musical leadership, in this sense, extends far beyond the pit. It involves shaping institutional conditions under which creativity can thrive, audiences can grow, and repertory can evolve without losing continuity.

That conviction brings this opening triptych of After the Premiere full circle.

In this mini-series, Christopher Alden argued that opera’s meanings change as the world changes, and that revivals can become newly resonant without losing their historical strangeness. Cal McCrystal described comedy as a disciplined craft of attention and invitation, a way of making opera feel like a shared theatre rather than a guarded precinct. De Ridder brings those threads into institutional focus. He suggests that the future of a company like ENO depends on commissioning as an ecology, repertoire as something still capable of disruption, and leadership as a commitment to closeness — to an opera house where the room feels alive, and where the public leaves not merely entertained, but altered.

After the Premiere exists precisely to examine these intersections: where art meets institution, where interpretation meets infrastructure, and where opera’s future is shaped not by single productions but by sustained cultural choices. In my next post, I turn from institutions to creators, drawing on my recent work around Missy Mazzoli’s and Royce Vavrek’s opera The Listeners for the Lyric Opera of Chicago to consider how new operas enter public consciousness, and what it means to watch that process unfold in real time.

© Justin Vickers, 2026

This is my third official “After the Premiere” blog post. And it is the last of this opening series with Christopher Alden, Cal McCrystal, and André de Ridder. Future posts will continue to appear on Monday. And I am really excited about the next one, which — as mentioned just above — looks at Missy Mazzoli’s and Royce Vavrek’s phenomenal opera The Listeners, in a production that was mounted at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in spring 2025. After that, one of my next posts centers around children’s opera. If you’ve followed other parts of this website, you will know that my next book project — Childhood and the Operatic Imaginary since 1900 — will be published late this spring with Oxford University Press. And I like to think this forthcoming post will prove timely. Once again, please feel free to share these among your own social networks, and indeed, thank you for joining me along the way!

—JMV