Page 25 - BBC Music (January 2020)

Opinion
Richard Morrison
We should be grateful that rapper
Kanye West has written an opera
odest chap, Kanye West.
Over the course of his
M eventful 42-year life the
rapper, producer, fashion designer
and husband to Kim Kardashian has
compared himself to Leonardo da
Vinci, Thomas Edison, Walt Disney,
Michelangelo, Picasso, Shakespeare and
Socrates. Now he declares that his recent
embrace of evangelical religion is at least
as helpful to Jesus Christ as to himself.
‘Jesus has won the victory because the
greatest artist that God ever created is
now working for him,’ he told a church
congregation last month.
Oddly, however, the list of geniuses
whom West considers his forerunners
doesn’t include Giuseppe Verdi. Why is
that a surprise? Because Verdi wrote a
rather good opera called Nabucco, while
West has just premiered, in a blaze of
pomp and publicity in the Hollywood
Bowl, his own opera about the same
Babylonian king.
And by all accounts West’s
Nebuchadnezzar matched Verdi’s
Nabucco – at least for grandeur. As the
composer himself declaimed passages
from the Old Testament’s Book of
Daniel, a vast gospel choir hurled out
disembodied Latin phrases on a smoke-
filled stage. Meanwhile, in the centre,
another rapper, Sheck Wes, depicted
the mad king in a stream of ‘screams
and moans’ interpreted by The New
York Times’s reviewer as ‘a vision of
masculinity rendered unintelligible
by its own toxicity’. How much of this
was West identifying himself with the
tormented Biblical monarch – after a
torrid few years that have included a
battle with drug addiction and a spell in
hospital to deal with mental illness – is
anyone’s guess.
Unsurprisingly the spectacle of the
most phenomenally successful rapper
of our age (with 21 Grammy Awards and
140 million record sales to his name)
crossing over into the ‘highbrow’ world
of opera has triggered a fierce reaction,
particularly in America. Quite a
few cynics have dismissed it as just
another publicity stunt, akin to all
those astutely timed ‘controversies’ that
have kept West’s name in the headlines
for two decades.
Other commentators have pointed out
that West is hardly breaking new ground
History is sprinkled
with pop-music
composers testing
their cra! in opera
in writing an opera. That’s true, of
course. From Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha,
written 109 years ago, to much more
recent divertissements such as Rufus
Wainwright’s Prima Donna and Damon
Albarn’s Monkey (both of which I rather
enjoyed at their premieres), 20th- and
21st-century music history is sprinkled
with pop-music composers testing their
craft in the longer artform of opera.
But other critics have been much
more categorically dismissive. They
have deemed West’s Nebuchadnezzar
(in the words of The New York Times) as
‘not really an opera’ – perhaps because it
doesn’t have a conventionally developed
drama, or because it’s under an hour
long. Or simply because it’s written by
Kanye West, not the classical composers
John Adams or Thomas Adès.
That sort of blinkered criticism makes
me quite angry. The lines dividing
opera, music theatre and musicals have
never been, and should never be, fixed.
Are Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd,
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita, Claude-
Michel Schonberg’s Les Misérables or
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s superb hip-hop-
infused Hamilton – all sung-through
pieces with proper plots and ‘big’
passions – musicals or operas? Who
knows? Who cares? Why get hung up on
pigeon-holes?
In the original Latin the word opera
simply means ‘works’. When adopted
in the 17th century as a useful term
to describe a new artform combining
music, poetry, drama and dance, there
were no restrictive stipulations laid
down as to what sort of people could
write it, perform it or listen to it. I very
much hope we can get back to that
open-ended approach, and dump all the
overtones of elitism, intellectualism and
snobbery that the word has acquired.
If a rapper wants to describe his latest
creation as an opera, those of us who
call ourselves opera-lovers should feel
elated, not threatened. We should say:
‘Thanks, Kanye, for expanding notions
of what opera means, double-thanks
for pointing your tens of million of fans
in our direction, and triple-thanks if
just one per cent of them are curious
enough to try out other things that are
called opera – because that will probably
double the number of people buying
opera tickets next year.’
Indeed, those whose jobs are to
promote opera should be delighted.
After all, the ‘greatest artist that God
ever created’ is working for them now.
Richard Morrison is chief music critic
and a columnist of The Times
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 27