Thanks for merging the threads, Ron Dough.  I did have a quick scan of the board to see if there was already a thread, but I must have missed it.

I really enjoyed it, for the most part.  I admire James MacMillan for not being ashamed to use a proven operatic formula, as he did in his earlier Scottish Opera commission Ines de Castro.  The characters are basically stock operatic characters; the plot is a stock operatic plot dealing with stock operatic themes and plot devices.  The music, though through-composed, is recognisably a sequence of arias, duets, recitative sequences and dramatic ensembles, though one of my companions commented on how the scoring often added tension by underlaying quite conventional melody (in the sense of what you'd expect any given character to be singing at any given time) with subversive harmonic writing.
 
MacMillan's also a very good judge of texture when writing for voices; the orchestral music is always heavy enough to underline the drama, but never overwhelms the vocal lines and the words are always clear (the opera was surtitled, but it really didn't need to be).  This will have been due in part to the cast - though sopranos are usually the principal culprits for losing words, Lisa Milne and Sarah Tynan both have impeccable diction - but this is something for which MacMillan has a real gift.

I confess I have not yet read the programme properly, so I have probably missed a lot of background.  I did find myself wondering what "sacrifice" is referred to in the title.  Is it the general concept of sacrifice?  There are at least three major sacrifices as the opera progresses, though I found the middle one - the child's murder (WHY did I have to go and read the synopsis in advance of Act 2? ) - jarred: he was treated as a sacrificial victim (cue an 'Agnus Dei' sequence) even though his murder had more to do with a crazed jilted lover than with the desperate search for peace which is the principal thread that runs through the centre of the drama.

Back to my earlier comment about MacMillan's adherence to conventional operatic formulae.  As a general practice, that works well.  However I did find myself becoming quite annoyed with just how derivative it all was.  Virtually every moment of the plot could be traced back to another piece, and although musically there weren't many blatant quotes, the wide range of precedents were very clear.  That probably says more about me - i.e. I see FAR too much opera - than it says about "The Sacrifice", especially given that the people I was there with, who included another opera nut, a contemporary music nut, and the contemporary music nut's date who had never been to an opera before, ALL had a great evening.  So did I.

Yes, that's why I referenced my first comment from my second.  I wasn't sure whether to love it for being basically a very good, dramatic, coherent opera, or to be irritated by it for not really doing anything that hadn't been done before.  I think - as I said in my previous post - that I have to accept that the former is the more viable view.  People loved it, me included; it stands a reasonable chance of remaining in the repertoire and being able to attract and enthral an audience second time around.  I just had this niggling feeling that although it was good, there was pretty much nothing  original about it.  Because I enjoyed it so much (OK, "enjoy" is the wrong word, given the harrowing subject matter) it really got me wondering whether true originality is a requirement.  Perhaps it isn't.  I even commented to my friend that I suspected it was the music snob in me (for want of a better word) that felt it was lacking in this sense.  In every other sense it was a powerful, persuasive piece of music drama.

Your post articulates exactly what bothered me, even though you haven't seen the opera.

I'm not saying drama or coherence alone add up to "good".  But I did think The Sacrifice was good.  However, if you're looking for evidence that the operatic genre has a hope of survival as a living art form - rather than a historic one that's open to reinterpretion but never real development - then James MacMillan is emphatically NOT the man for the job.

The thing is, if audiences in, say, 200 years' time are still listening to Verdi and Puccini and Janacek and Wagner and Strauss and Britten, they may well still be listening to MacMillan too, no doubt brought up to date for a modern audience by the directors of the 23rd century.  The problem is whether the appetite for development of opera as an art form will have the same longevity.  Contemporary opera (like other contemporary art music) already has a habit of drawing tiny audiences of musical buffs and academics, rather than finding the balance between artistic integrity and wider public appeal.

I am often asked, mainly by colleagues (I work for an electrical engineering company), which opera I would recommend to somebody who has never been to one before.  My answer varies according to who's asking, and I'll generally pick something which is coming up in London (or the asker's locality) at the time.  Often it's Boheme or Carmen or Tosca or Rigoletto or Zauberflote, though I've been known to suggest Jenufa, Peter Grimes and Albert Herring.  That's as modern as it gets.

The only very recent operas which I'd be inclined to place into the "recommend to a newcomer" category (lack of opportunity being the only reason for not having already done so) are The Silver Tassie (Turnage), Ines de Castro (MacMillan), and I think now The Sacrifice.  I'd recommend them to a complete novice, or indeed to somebody who's seen a bit of Puccini and Verdi and Bizet but who "doesn't like modern music".  They are dramatic and melodic and they use a recognisably operatic idiom, while offering a clean slate to the listener: there's no "big well-known tune" to be waited for at the expense of focussing on the opera as a piece of theatre.  And yet those three operas are far from the most original and interesting examples of the operas being produced at the time.

Large-scale new works, commissioned by the major houses, NEED public appeal, not just in order to balance the books, but in order to fulfil their duty to the future of opera and to justify public subsidy (where applicable).  Can anybody think of an opera written in the last ten years that has genuine originality AND appeal/accessibility (I hate that word but can't think of a better one)?

This is all turning into a bit of a depressing stream of consciousness on the future of opera... I'll get my coat.

Tinners: that, I think, brings me back to one of the points that I think I've been trying to make over the last few posts.  From what I've heard of the output from currently active opera composers, I'm not convinced that opera hasn't run its course.

Don't get me wrong, I believe that there's a vast amount of mileage remaining for the performance, enjoyment and appreciation of the existing 400-year "catalogue" (one might say 350 years, based on how few of the last half-century's operas have survived in the standard repertoire) - and a reasonable amount of mileage remaining for the composition of not-terribly-original operas that people will go to see, and which have the potential to be revived and toured and performed around the world.

I also think that there's nothing inherently wrong with bringing the existing repertoire to an ever-increasing audience, developing young people's interest in art music and encouraging young singers and performers.  It would not surprise me if in 200 years from now, there is still a thriving appetite among performers and audiences alike for an art form which hasn't developed much since the 1950s.  Opera performance really has infinite potential still; opera composition, I suspect, does not.

It's not actually the job of James MacMillan (or indeed Turnage, Birtwistle, Ades, Dove, Holt, Maw etc) to reinvent opera.  He is very good at what he does, which is composing opera within existing parameters; if he writes more, I'll be there.  As I've already said, I welcome music in any genre which engages my heart and/or mind and/or soul.  MacMillan is one of the few recent composers to achieve this, and he does so by taking ingredients which are known quantities and reassembling them.

I suppose I really WANT some opera composer to come out of the woodwork and start presenting me with work that challenges and develops the boundaries of the genre while being something which people (outside of the established musically-literate, often musico-intellectual, classical/modern art music fraternity) are inspired to engage with and explore further possibilities.  I WANT to be convinced that there is still room for exploration within the operatic medium, rather than to resign myself to the likely fact that "writing successful opera" is quite a narrow discipline with little left to be done.

I WANT somebody to prove me wrong.