2008-11-16

Bring the Children to the Opera

The search for a concept that will draw the public of tomorrow is releasing unforeseen energies in the opera. Since 1996 Cologne has possessed a children's opera as part of its rich cultural offering, and now Dortmund too has one.

Operas for adults are mainly long and hard; those for children must be more digestible. Apart from this, what is to be understood under the concept of a children's opera is much disputed. That became clear at a conference of the European Academy of Music Theatre in Vienna, which addressed the subject in 2000. According to the results of the conference, there are now three main strands of "children's and music theatre" with a tradition. First, there is opera composed for children and performed by professional musicians. A second strand is made up of operas in which children perform, in which they stand on the stage and not only sit before it. A third variant takes a middle course: works from the classical opera repertoire are adapted for children; here Mozart's The Magic Flute for Children broke the ground a quarter century ago. Obviously, the only thing that the three variants have in common is that each is somehow to do with children.

The accent on the perception of children is still rather new. It is a product of the Enlightenment; in the eighteenth and nineteenth century childhood, along with its distinctive, non-adult laws, was more or less invented as an educational idea and swiftly disseminated. Before then there had been operas that quite naturally addressed themselves to both children and adults; for example, Mozart's Magic Flute (in its original version) or numerous musical comedies of Goethe's time.

Goethe Institute, Germany