“After the Premiere”: Why Does Justin Vickers Have a Blog, Anyway?

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 what gives music its cultural power happens after those moments have passed.

Works are revised, reinterpreted, abridged, mistranslated, canonized, neglected, rediscovered, and sometimes quietly forgotten. Performers inherit traditions they did not create. Scholars encounter repertories through layers of editorial decision-making and institutional mediation. Audiences learn how to listen through recordings, pedagogical narratives, and marketing frames that shape expectation long before anyone enters the theatre. Archives preserve, but they also curate, organize, and in some cases distort what later generations are able to know.

This blog begins from that premise: that the most consequential life of musical works unfolds not at their point of origin, but in their long, complicated afterlives.

That is what I mean by “after the premiere.”

A view of Snape Maltings — the home of the Aldeburgh Festival — across the reed beds, and looking from the location of Barbara Hepworth's stunning triptych The Family of Man. Image by the author.

Sometimes this will mean thinking about reception histories and performance traditions. Sometimes it will mean unfinished projects that never reached the stage but nonetheless continue to exert imaginative and scholarly pull. Sometimes it will mean institutional histories: how opera companies, conservatories, publishers, and funding structures shape what repertories survive and which aesthetic values are rewarded. And sometimes it will mean the everyday labour of musicians, teachers, and students who sustain these traditions long after the headlines fade.

Several recurring concerns will structure what appears here.

Opera and Childhood

One is opera and childhood. Modern opera returns obsessively to children, whether as protagonists, symbols, witnesses, or pedagogical participants. Yet children in opera are rarely uncomplicated figures of innocence. (Innocence is, in fact, a weighty, loaded term.) They are entangled in questions of authority, vulnerability, discipline, and social imagination. Works written for children raise equally complex problems about access, agency, professionalism, community participation, and artistic seriousness. I am interested in childhood not as a sentimental category, but as a critical lens through which modern operatic culture reveals its deepest assumptions.

Listening

Another is listening as a historically conditioned practice. We do not simply hear music; we learn how to listen, and those habits are shaped by technology, trauma, ideology, and training. Twentieth-century vocal music, in particular, is saturated with anxieties about communication, surveillance, and the fragility of public speech, especially in the aftermath of the Second World War. Questions of timbre, text, audibility, and vocal identity are never merely technical. They are ethical and political as well. Listening in 2026 is every bit as complex as in previous generations.

Archives

A third concern is archives and musical memory. Manuscripts, letters, rehearsal materials, production photographs, and institutional records all promise access to musical pasts, but they also reflect structures of power: what was preserved, what was discarded, or what was never collected in the first place. (In the early years of the Britten–Pears Archive, this was patently manifest in folders that lay researchers might never have seen, which bore the clear all caps imprint: UNAVAILABLE. Even if an invigilator went to the strong room in an attempt to bring a called-up item to a researcher, this would have instructed them that it was in no way possible to share the contents of that folder. In later years, these very folders have been brought directly into the Rosamund Strode Reading Room, finally available for the waiting researcher, yet carrying a reminder of the not-so-distant past.)

Archives do not simply transmit history; they help manufacture it. They generate myths of “lost works” (I've found one of those, the "Epilogue" to Britten's The Holy Sonnets of John Donne), they hold the incomplete fragments of unfinished works (which I'll discuss in the months to come), they stabilize certain narratives, and render others almost impossible to reconstruct. Sometimes the creations of these narratives is intentional. Other times it is a consequence of some outmoded practise or limited research. And still other instances are entirely unintentional. Thinking critically about archives is therefore not ancillary to musicology. It is central to it.

Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears

Benjamin Britten (and Peter Pears) will appear frequently in these blog discussions, not because his music (or their collaboration, for that matter) exhausts these issues, but because it exposes them — occasionally — with particular clarity. Britten's operas for and about children, his fascination with the night and interiority, his sensitivity to specific vocal qualities, and his complicated relationship to institutions and public culture make him an unusually revealing figure for thinking about modern musical afterlives. But this will not be a Britten-only space. Quite the contrary. Other composers, repertories, and performance contexts will enter into this blog whenever they illuminate the broader questions at stake.

“The Industry”

This blog is also shaped by professional experience beyond the archive and the seminar room: work with opera companies and festivals, time in rehearsal rooms, teaching singers and scholars, and participation in the often precarious economies of contemporary musical life. The subtitle of this blog includes “the industry” advisedly. Opera is not only an art form; it is also a labor system, a funding ecology, and a network of institutions whose structures profoundly affect artistic possibility. Moreover, as in the case of my own ongoing work writing a history of the first four decades of the Aldeburgh Festival, “the industry” capaciously includes all things Aldeburgh, as well as the English Opera Group, Britten's other great entrepreneurial endeavor.

Thus, most of what appears here will grow out of projects already in progress: books, chapters, journal articles, lectures, program essays, editorial work, and teaching. Writing in this format allows ideas — I hope — to circulate more quickly and more openly, and it allows questions to remain provisional rather than prematurely resolved. In that sense, these posts are not digressions from other scholarly work. They are part of the same inquiry, pursued in a different register or key, if we want to belabor the metaphor, and at a different tempo.

Opera has always trafficked in spectacle and intensity, but what interests me most are the quieter pressures beneath those surfaces: the assumptions about age, authority, memory, voice, and value that shape how musical stories are told and how they continue to be heard. If this blog proves useful, I hope it will be because it helps make some of those pressures more audible, long after the curtain has fallen.

Indeed, long after the premiere.

© Justin Vickers, 2026

My “After the Premiere” blog posts will appear weekly and will address opera, vocal music, archives, pedagogy, and the contemporary musical economy, with particular attention to how works and institutions continue to shape meaning long after their first performances. —JMV