I can’t remember exactly when I got bit by the opera bug, but it might have been during Act II of Puccini’s Tosca. It was the moment after the titular soprano witnesses the villain, Scarpia, torture her lover Cavaradossi. We hear his screams offstage. Tosca agrees to give herself to Scarpia to spare her lover’s life. But there’s a twist: rather than be raped by Scarpia, she declares, “this is Tosca’s kiss!” and stabs him. I was so shocked by this staged murder that I gasped. I knew the plot of Tosca perfectly well before going into the show, yet somehow I was still surprised. It was the feeling that one is supposed to have during well performed Shakespearean tragedies—when the audience is so locked into the drama that the familiar plot twists appear fresh and spontaneous. But this had never happened to me before. Gasping in shock at theater is pretty uncharacteristic of me. The characters in Tosca are not especially relatable. They are emotional extremists in high 19th century Romantic style. Cavaradossi is ultimately killed, and Tosca, devastated by his death, cries “Scarpia, we meet before God!” before throwing herself off a rooftop. There is no question of social realism. Nothing about what I was seeing reflected my lived reality. I generally don’t gasp in shock unless I see a minivan narrowly avoid collision with a three-year-old. Surely my irony-pilled, ferociously critical modern mind couldn’t have such an outsized response to such grand, over-the-top artifice. This is a work that is not merely acted but sung and ornamented in the 1001 affectations of an ancient tradition. And yet, I did. Reader, I gasped.

Perhaps it was a matter of all that came before Act II of Tosca. The composer Wagner described his ideal opera as a “total work of art” (gesamtkunstwerk in German), meaning an artwork that brings together all the arts into a single masterwork: music, dance, drama, literature, and visual art, all combined and synthesized. This is true of much musical drama globally, such as Chinese Xiqu, Indian Kathakali, or Japanese Noh theater. Western opera, however, unique in most western classical arts, takes each art form to sensuous extremes. An artwork that uses all the arts, especially in lush Romantic operas like Puccini’s, can be like a circus of sensation. In the production of Tosca I saw, the rapturous music was accompanied by a religious processional, with dozens of elaborately costumed performers, including an entire children’s chorus. The processional has no practical purpose in the plot except to create a vibe. It takes place outside a gilded baroque basilica which had been built on stage merely for Act I and then taken apart during intermission by a team of carpenters to create the palatial room in which Tosca will murder Scarpia.

Illustration by Tiffany Pai

I could also pinpoint Act I Scene III of Philip Glass’s Akhnaten as the moment when opera wormed itself inside me and stayed there. Akhnaten was an Egyptian pharaoh who temporarily transformed the state religion from polytheism to monotheism during the 14th century B.C. I was hooked in Glass’s 1983 opera when Akhnaten, clothed in robes decorated in gilded baby skulls, praises the divine creator in ancient Egyptian and in a high clarion voice. Akhnaten contains two of my favorite operatic voice parts: countertenor and contralto. A countertenor is the highest male voice and a contralto the lowest female voice. At their extreme ends, the male countertenor can sing high as a soprano and the contralto as low as a bass. These composite voices, countertenor and contralto, which sound neither male nor female but both simultaneously, are so otherworldly in Akhnaten as to sound supernatural. As they sang, to the accompaniment of tubular bells and pulsing violas, I fell into a wakeful trance.

Between the glitter, the ancient languages, the gender mixing, and the hauntingly good music, the glam goth girl who lives in my heart squealed in pleasure. Akhnaten also left me with a feeling of wholeness and spiritual fulfillment. As I watched, something inside me shifted, a membrane disintegrated, and I became immersed, however temporarily, in a new world of sensation. There is an immersive and psychotropic quality to great opera. During Akhtaten’s intermissions, the colors of the world seemed brighter, and the sound of my friends’ voices was like music. All that which had seemed alien was now intimate. We couldn’t stop laughing. I felt tingly all over and ecstatic, like the pleasure centers of my brain were being engaged by foreign chemicals. The opera produced sensations similar to those from MDMA or LSD. I was high on Philip Glass.

My interest in opera as a writer began not with any particular production, however, but with a conversation with a friend about health insurance. The friend happened to be an operatic baritone. I was writing about labor unions in the performing arts at the time and my friend mentioned that opera singers, even when they perform as soloists at prestigious opera houses, sometimes don’t have health insurance. Unlike workers in unions like Actors’ Equity or the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), a singer employed in a unionized opera house may not actually have health insurance. Through an unusual and circuitous path this conversation brought me towards writing first about labor and social change in opera and ultimately to writing about operas themselves.

It was by seeing operas not just as works of art but predominantly as work that I truly began to enjoy and understand them. When you see grand opera, you’re seeing a group of people who can do something only a scarce handful of people in the world can do. Operatic voices can take over a decade to blossom and sometimes don’t mature until a singer is middle aged. Opera singers traditionally do not use microphones, and the sound of their voices filling a 3,800-seat theater like The Metropolitan Opera is literally one of the loudest sounds a human voice can make without screaming. Through the shape of the mouth, the muscles in the diaphragm, and the way singers move air through their chest and lungs and mouth, they transform oxygen into some of the most beautiful and most difficult to perform music. There is an unbelievable amount of skill, to say nothing of physical strength, required to transform a frail human body into a finely configured wind instrument. Attention is paid in practice to single phrases of music (that is the equivalent of a phrase or a sentence in writing), which are to be shaped differently depending on the language you are singing in, the specific tradition and era of the opera, the character’s emotional state in that moment of the performance, the singer’s own voice, the director’s instructions, the composer’s intentions, and the expectations of an audience who has heard this particular phrase pronounced in an arbitrarily specific way at that opera house for the last generation.

Adding intense pressure to the performers is the fact that opera runs tend to be short. Performers rehearse for a few weeks, perform at most maybe 10 times, and then are off to another gig. All of the performers generally need to know their roles before rehearsals even start. A long run of a single production at the Met is under 20 shows. Compared to a popular Broadway show that runs hundreds of times in a year, seeing an opera can feel like catching a rainbow in a jar. Traditional grand opera can be wildly complex. The cast of performers can consist of principal roles, a forty-person chorus, a 100-piece orchestra, supernumeraries (non-singing actors in small parts), and sometimes dancers and occasionally live animals. As a result, many performances come with their surprises. The famous arias—the renowned songs that the operas are known for—are also famously hard to sing. Singers sometimes nail the iconic phrase and sometimes they don’t, and it depends entirely on which night you attend one of a handful of performances with that cast member. It’s what makes opera such damnably hard work for performers and such a thrilling experience for the audience.

Since these thrills are also not easily transferable to a screen, live broadcasts do not remotely approach the real thing. The sheer physicality of opera is incredibly important to its understanding and enjoyment. You want to physically be in the room with the singer as they fill the enormous space with their naked voice. You want to feel the sound reverberating on your skin, feel the way it travels across your body after it’s left the singer’s body, raising the hairs on your arms. When you are physically in the room when the performance takes place, you also become a part of its history and traditions. As you share the same air as the singers on stage and become part of an opera audience, you have your part and costume, too, and some opera fans take their roles very seriously.  

It is not only permissible to dress fancifully at a grand opera house, it is especially encouraged. Given the splendor of your surroundings—lush carpets and sculpted chandeliers, ushers in opera cloaks carrying handbells to call the audience to their seats—you may feel inclined to fit in. The Metropolitan Opera can be a high fashion carnival: I’ve seen opera gloves, opera capes, crushed velvet ball gowns, fuchsia tuxedo jackets brocaded in black feathers, every kind of Victorian men’s facial hair, and the inevitable couture gowns that cost twice what I make in a month. At intermission you can watch this fashionable set waiting in line at the concession stand with opera bros (yes, they exist—I’m pretty sure they’re singers themselves) in football jerseys.

Like sports fans, opera aficionados tend to know a lot about their subject. They are constantly doing comparisons to past productions and past performances by this dramatic soprano or that Wagnerian baritone. Like sports fans, they watch a career unfold over years and chart their rise from rookie young artist to headlining star. When a singer snags that famous high note, the audience cheers like they’ve just watched a slam dunk. Opera buffs, like serious sports fans, are also famously merciless. Commentary is suffused with vicious takedowns. Some critics eviscerate a performer, drilling down into errors perceived in single phrases of a song, sometimes single words or even vowels. (And we wonder why opera singers are known to be such prickly divas.)

In my experience of going to the opera and speaking with opera lovers, I’ve found that most people who go to the opera do so because they enjoy opera and not because they are high society operators mingling among Astors and Rockefellers. But opera nevertheless has a reputation as an antiquated pastime for rich people, and for good reason. A major hurdle to becoming an opera aficionado is money. While anyone can look up operatic performances on YouTube, opera houses are not so accessible. Everything from living in a city with enough wealth to have a grand opera house, to buying $200 tickets, to having that outfit snazzy enough to fit in with the Met set, presents a barrier to entry. We also think of opera as a corny pastime for old rich white people because they’re the ones donating money to opera houses. In the U.S., government arts funding is a minuscule fraction of what it is in similarly wealthy developed nations. Since millions of dollars are often required to put on grand opera, places like the Met turn to a donor base of overwhelmingly wealthy people. This donor base partially accounts for why many grand opera houses are so stuck in the past, putting on few new works, if any, and generally performing the same 20-40 operas over and over again.

Granted, those 20-40 operas are mostly pretty great, and being stuck in the past can sometimes be a delightful experience. We glory in the traditional skill of the musicians, the handcrafted sets and costumes, the conductors in their tailcoats, and the roses flung at the feet of the grand diva as she takes her final bow. At other times operatic nostalgia is utterly repugnant. On the Met’s bottommost level, generations of singers are memorialized in a wall of black-and-white photos: on close inspection, a portion of these turn out to be a rogue’s gallery of grinning white people in appropriative and racist costumes. Nineteenth-century Romantic opera in particular is fraught with Orientalism and Western fantasies of the exotic east. Opera’s racist leanings are hardly buried in the infamous past, either. Blackface was used continuously at the Met until 2015, when a public outcry over a production of Verdi’s Otello finally put an end to the practice.

Racism in opera isn’t limited to backwards costuming choices, either. Wagner’s German nationalist opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, was performed at the Met last in 2021. It includes the humiliation of a Jewish caricature as well as a concluding number that defends the purity of German art against toxic foreign influence. The Met’s decades-old production, which includes a set of Disnified medieval Nuremberg and beautiful Mädchen in dirndls and braids, has all the historic awareness of a Bing Crosby musical. 

The Metropolitan Opera was founded in 1883, and its first donors were Rockefellers, Morgans, Vanderbilts, and other robber baron families that had grown monstrously wealthy from oil, railroads, and banking in the Gilded Age. To this day, the decadent dazzle of that era seeps through at the Met, despite a change in location and the passing of over a century. When the Met opens its season in September, the orchestra plays the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and the entire audience stands up and sings along. It’s just like at a ball game, except the audience is in evening wear and they’re accompanied by one of the best orchestras in the world. In this seat of American wealth and power, the imperialist gleam shines through clearly. When I witnessed the anthem sung in 2022, my opera buddy and I didn’t stand for the anthem (reader, I admit it, we giggled). The ballgowned lady beside us shouted at us to show some respect. To my horror (and delight), my friend told her to shut up (and she did). The opera was Cherubini’s Medea. After our encounter, we sat uncomfortably beside our heckler for the next several hours, watching the lead soprano plot the slaughter of her family in song. I felt like a poor relation in an Edith Wharton novel: I was in another country whose traditions and taboos I didn’t know. This encounter felt not just out of place in New York City, where people turn minding their own business into an art form, but also out of time. It felt like a clash not merely of cultures but of eras.

This ingrained conservatism is at odds with the steps opera houses have taken in recent years to maintain their relevance. Grand opera houses like the Met try to at least appear progressive these days, from performing new operas by Black and Latin American composers to placing more diverse singers in leading roles. While diversity and inclusion in repertoire is an improvement over the recent past, given that opera’s funding model will not change anytime soon, the likelihood of the industry getting a serious ethical makeover is small. Tales of sexual predation, grooming, and manipulation are to be found throughout the operatic world. (Things don’t look much better behind the scenes, either.) As in theater and publishing and Hollywood and academia and any field where only a handful of players can make it big or even make a living, the road to success is narrow and plagued with predation. While this dynamic is present across the arts, it is especially palpable in opera, where the stars are sometimes literally costumed in gold cloth and perform as kings and knights and gods.

At this moment, the opera world appears to be inching towards a precipice: its donor base is shrinking and dying. According to Peter Gelb, the Met’s General Manager, today’s super wealthy are less interested in funding the arts. As a result, the Met, the wealthiest performing arts institution in the country, had to reach into its endowment in 2022 and 2024 to make payroll. The Washington Opera and Los Angeles Opera have experienced similar shortfalls and responded by cutting back programming. Smaller opera houses without huge endowments to fall back on in crises have closed completely. You might not be bothered by the closure of places like the Syracuse Opera House, but for singers, especially young ones, the collapse of the already small and faltering regional opera houses means that they have nowhere to learn roles and become seasoned artists. Such opportunities were few enough to begin with, and now they’ve almost disappeared. Without the ability to make money, artists drop out of the field and find other work. As a result, more and more singers must be independently wealthy enough to afford to learn their craft through competitions and predatory pay-to-sing young artist programs. This means that the pool of singers will continue to shrink and, much like opera’s donor base, remain overwhelmingly white and well-to-do. 

But it doesn’t have to be that way. In Austria and Germany, classical music is well-funded and more accessible. On a trip to Vienna in my early 20s—occurring while I fought with a musician friend who had declared that “opera combines bad theater with worse music”—I went to the opera every night, sometimes twice a day. This is possible in Vienna, where there are multiple government supported opera houses and, back in 2004, you could get standing room tickets at the Vienna State Opera for two euros (today they’re a whopping 13 Euros, less than the price of a movie ticket). The singers at these houses also have more stable employment and better pay than their equivalents in the United States. I’ve heard American singers lament that the U.S. loses some of its greatest singers to “fest” contracts in which a singer is fixed to a single ensemble in Germany, Austria, or Switzerland for a period of years.

As we await a government arts funding windfall, there are some good tidings on the horizon for opera. Opera Philadelphia is setting tickets at a mere $11 for any seat for its entire 2024-2025 season. With opera audiences shrinking, just getting people in the door is an accomplishment. While you’d probably hesitate to throw down $200 on a ticket to some antique artform you’re not sure you even like, for $11 you might give it a shot. In the meantime, the Met is attempting in fits and starts to bring opera into the 21st century with more new works, alongside their traditional offerings. After getting arrested together at a Gaza ceasefire rally last year, friends of mine in New York City Democratic Socialists of America memorialized the occasion by going as a cohort to see Anthony Davis’s 1986 opera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, which was then being performed for the first time at the Met.

While some ultrarich people may now be abandoning arts institutions, that doesn’t mean that all is lost for opera. I believe that opera is not merely pleasurable but necessary, and keeping it alive means transforming institutions like the Met into palaces of the people: places where the productions are accessible to anyone in need of the succor and catharsis that great opera can provide. This doesn’t mean we should all throw money at already wealthy institutions with incoherent and outdated industrial nonprofit funding models. But just as we have progressive think tanks coming up with methods of costing out Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, we can simultaneously be thinking about how we will structure our arts institutions of the future. While we labor in a political doldrums between center right neoliberalism and outright fascism and wait for the tides of history to present the left with an opening, it’s time we start thinking about making an impact through culture. This might begin by drawing back the curtain on high culture and discovering how we can bring it down to earth, not as an extravagant luxury but as a birthright for every living human.