Opera has a long history of evoking the natural environment either to provide an atmospheric setting or to enhance the effect of a dramatic situation. Examples of what Clive McClelland has identified as the ‘tempesta’ topic abound, from the storm music conjured in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas to the thunder that opens Wagner’s Die Walküre. Footnote 1 As McClelland has highlighted, the natural environment is often used simultaneously to convey the emotions of the characters or as a window into their interior states of mind: the sea interludes in Britten’s Peter Grimes are a good example of this. Indeed, Emanuele Senici has demonstrated the importance and prevalence of exotic locales and symbolic landscapes in eighteenth and nineteenth century opera, arguing that ‘when nature makes itself heard, its sounds are filtered through the emotional states of the characters on stage’.Footnote 2 But what if the environment itself became the subject of an opera, rather than a backdrop or symbolic conduit for realising human emotions and predicaments? This is a distinctive trope that has emerged in the context of community operas in the UK over the last sixty years or so. This article will survey this field and demonstrate how issues dramatised in these community operas have responded to evolving debates about the environment. It begins by examining what was arguably the first community opera with an environmental message, Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde (1958), which has had a substantial influence on subsequent works. It then proceeds to consider a series of community operas conceived explicitly to convey an environmental message, with a focus on two community operas by Christopher Brown and Timothy Kraemer. Some more far-reaching questions about environmental concerns and contemporary opera opened up by these works are then discussed, and the influence they have had on the operatic profession in recent years is considered. The article concludes with some reflections on how community opera might help to address issues surrounding sustainability and the operatic profession.
The notion of ‘community opera’ opens up complex sociological and philosophical questions.Footnote 3 For the purposes of this article, the term is used to capture the interaction or collaboration between opera professionals and community participants in the process of staging an opera. Such works include operas from the repertoire organised specifically to include community participants,Footnote 4 new works written especially by composers for community resources,Footnote 5 and, more common in recent years, new operas ‘co-created’ with the community where the creative process itself becomes part of the professional–community collaboration.Footnote 6 It has been increasingly common over the past forty years for opera houses in the UK to include community operas as a component of their outreach, education or learning and participation programmes, with dedicated staff and departments.Footnote 7
The narrative content or meaning of the opera generally realises something of importance to the community in question. This could be a story about the local history or area, the pride taken in their way of life, or a pressing issue of relevance to the community. Unsurprisingly, many community operas exhibit plots and stories inspired or motivated by ecological matters, and as Arron Allen has noted, ‘contemporary eco-musicology [i.e. the study of such works] is in many ways a response to our current environmental crisis’.Footnote 8 However, as Allen has also observed, such environmental awareness has a long history, with roots in the nineteenth century and responding to the impact of the industrial revolution. For example, Roger Scruton has argued that one of the most important political messages conveyed by Wagner’s Ring cycle is that power divorced from love is an ‘ecological catastrophe’.Footnote 9 Nevertheless, eco-musicology distinguishes itself from such historical–musicological arguments with reference to ‘environmental justice’ and social responsibility,Footnote 10 which have come to the fore since the Second World War, and particularly following the social changes and countercultural movements that gained momentum during the 1960s.Footnote 11 This article documents ways in which matters of environmental justice began to emerge and develop through artistic debate during this time.
Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde: a proto-environmental community opera
Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde (1958) has had a substantial influence on both environmental and community operas, reflecting a preoccupation with the threat of flooding to the coastal communities of Suffolk. Although a setting of a medieval Chester Miracle Play in Middle English, it was chosen partly because of the continuing relevance of flooding to the community for which it was written.Footnote 12 In contrast to Britten’s previous opera, Peter Grimes (1845), Noye’s Fludde is based on a biblical story in which the flood is not only a dangerous natural force to be managed, but also a phenomenon caused by the greed of the community. It begins with a setting of ‘Lord Jesus think on me and purge away my sin’, followed by an admonishment from God to his people outlining their greedy behaviour and the catastrophic flood that will be brought down upon them as punishment for their debauchery. The libretto opens with the words:
I, God, that all this worlde hath wrought, Heaven and eairth, and all of naughte, I see my people in deede and thoughte Are set full fowle in synne. Man that I made I will destroye, Beaste, warme and fowle to fly; For on eairth they me deny.
The story of Noah is then told: in order to survive the flood, he builds an ark to hold his family and creatures from the animal kingdom; the righteous man, unlike the gossips in Noye’s Fludde, has not wasted his energies on drinking and feasting.
Britten realises this story ingeniously by using a plethora of local community resources that were available to him in Suffolk: trained choristers to sing the roles of Noah’s children, large groups of (untrained) children to play the roles of the various animals, teenagers to play the gossips, offstage buglers from the local youth cadet corps, recorder-playing school children (a British tradition) and a battery of easy-to-play percussion including handbells and the famous ‘slung mugs’ that together evoke the flood.Footnote 13 Hymn tunes are integrated into the score and performed by the community (i.e. the audience) and the church organ underpins the score. All of these resources are used to take expressive advantage of the performance limitations. For example, the chaotic tuning and timing that is generated by the tutti sections of large groups of children singing and playing recorders, and amateurs playing the instrumental parts, help to evoke the chaos of the flood: a perfect realisation would ruin the effect. Although Britten also drew on a small band of professional musicians and included two solo roles for trained opera singers, he forged a piece that made maximum use of community resources to depict a story about the morality of preserving nature against the greed of humanity – about the environment and our responsibility towards it. It is obvious from the spoken role of the Old Testament God that humankind (with the exception of Noah and his family) is in some way responsible for the environmental disaster (the flood) that is about to befall them, and it continues to resonate with contemporary environmental debates. Noye’s Fludde was the first community opera to convey environmental justice in such a way, as an integral component of the work.
This understanding of Noye’s Fludde has gained new relevance and urgency, offering possibilities for opera companies seeking to engage their communities and use operas as tool for exploring modern concerns. For example, in their 2018 production directed by James Hurley, Blackheath Halls Community Opera in London reinterpreted the process of moving animals into the ark as Noah’s family collecting plastic waste for recycling. In this way they drew out the environmental trope and brought it up to date, transfiguring the greed of the gossips as the greed of modern consumer culture and its pollutive effects. The gossips become those responsible for the plastic pollution and Noah’s collectors of plastic waste for recycling represent those who consider the consequences of their waste and its future effect on the environment.Footnote 14
Although Britten did not write Noye’s Fludde as an explicitly environmental piece, this production is a good example of how it has often been understood and interpreted in this fashion. Britten’s primary concern, building on previous works that similarly incorporated amateurs (e.g. Saint Nicolas, 1948, and The Little Sweep, 1949), was to realise his belief that the composer has a social responsibility to be of ‘value to the community’.Footnote 15 In Noye’s Fludde this is realised by maximising community involvement and audience participation, which, as Stephen Allen has observed, ‘ensures a remarkably democratic aesthetic’.Footnote 16
Britten’s strong belief in community, democracy and society was in some ways shaped by his upbringing and by his encounters with intellectuals, writers and composers such as W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill and Aaron Copland, who all shared a socially motivated, politically idealistic left-wing worldview, which in turn informed their work.Footnote 17 In America during the Second World War, Britten lodged at a house in Brooklyn, New York, that was a kind of bohemian retreat for European exiles and a literary salon, managed by Auden.Footnote 18 Here Britten met Copland and Weill and almost certainly discussed with the latter his collaboration with Brecht on works such as Der Jasager (1930), as well as the Jugendmusikbewegung and Gebrauchsmusik movements in 1930s Weimar that provided the intellectual and political context for such ‘lehrstück’ or ‘schuloper’ collaborations.Footnote 19 Another example of this genre (also with a libretto by Brecht) was Hans Eisler’s Die Massnahme (1930): it has an explicitly agitprop political purpose.Footnote 20 Writing of Gebrauchsmusik, Eisler claimed that ‘Music has always and explicitly been a community art. It arose from physical work undertaken together (work songs, which ensured a regular rhythm of work), from festivals, religious and cultic behaviour.’Footnote 21 Even before moving to America, Britten had formed a friendship with Copland, who visited Britten in 1938 and played through his ‘school opera’ The Second Hurricane (1937).Footnote 22 There are some striking similarities between Copland’s school opera and Noye’s Fludde in the use of storm- and flood-related subject matter, the chamber instrumentation, the hour-long structure and the inclusion of school children. Additionally, the story for The Second Hurricane (like both Der Jasager and Die Massnahme) has a didactic moral component for its young performers, but one in which the environment plays a role: the characters in the story (a group of school children) must learn to work together in order to be rescued from a hurricane.
In other words, concerns about the environment evolved out of a broader collection of socialist or countercultural ideas that were in the air at the time. Their influence on Britten during his formative years may well have fed into his conception of Noye’s Fludde. His first opera, Paul Bunyan (1941), with a libretto by Auden and conceived in the intellectual surroundings I have outlined, was also originally intended for school halls, although it was first staged at Columbia University. It concerns the mythic pioneering logger Paul Bunyan and his taming of the natural world; although it does not embody an explicitly environmental message to the degree found in Noye’s Fludde, there are nevertheless hints of this trope in the opera. It opens with a chorus of old trees who are told they will have to leave once Man arrives, and later in the narrative Bunyan leaves his fellow lumberjacks on the eve of the ‘Machine Age’.Footnote 23 Noye’s Fludde is, however, more explicit in presenting the human relationship with the environment as a moral imperative, with an attached social obligation.
Environmental concerns in community opera projects in the UK
Although Noye’s Fludde has received some attention from scholars, its subsequent influence on the wider amateur culture of community-based projects and organisations has been less well explored.Footnote 24 Nevertheless, its influence has been widely acknowledged by practitioners. For example, the composer Jonathan Dove describes Noye’s Fludde as the ‘ur-community opera’ and observes that most of his own community opera work has been anticipated by that of Britten.Footnote 25 In the UK, Noye’s Fludde became the inspiration for what was in essence a new genre of music-making. Examples by well-known figures include The Happy Prince (Malcolm Williamson, 1965), All the King’s Men (Richard Rodney Bennett, 1968), The Two Fiddlers (Peter Maxwell Davies, 1978), Where the Wild Things Are (Oliver Knussen, 1984), Monster in the Maze (Jonathan Dove, 2015) and Dalia (Roxanna Panufnik, 2021). Prominent educationalists such as Richard Addison were also prolific children’s opera composers writing in the Britten mould.Footnote 26 Part of the reason for the growth of this new genre of operas was the prestige that Britten’s reputation brought to music for amateurs and community groups. Music teachers and young, unestablished composers could access community resources and, following Britten’s example, work in schools and churches around Suffolk, engaging in compositional activity that was now considered high-calibre work. Equally, these communities had the opportunity to perform new works written especially for them.
One good example of this trend was Christopher Brown’s The Split Goose Feather (1979) with a libretto by Olive Cook, written for St Peter’s School, Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire – not far from Suffolk. The opera is set during the reign of Oliver Cromwell (who was born in Huntingdon), and the title refers to a pledge he made to the local people (known as the Fen Tigers) not to drain the local Fenlands for agricultural purposes – this he did by ‘swearing on a split goose feather’. According to the programme for the premiere (Figure 1), when Cromwell saw there was profit to be gained from the drainage, he disregarded his oath, provoking the anger of the Fen Tigers.
Figure 1. Extracts from The Split Goose Feather first production programme (1979). Copyright © Christopher Brown.
The opera follows the conflict between the Fen Tigers (played by a chorus of children with occasional soloists, as in Noye’s Fludde) and the Dutchman Vermuyden (clearly modelled vocally on Noah), who was employed by Cromwell to oversee the drainage work. The following extract from the libretto pits the locals lamenting the loss of the natural Fen habitat against Vermuyden, triumphant at having achieved his ambition for Cromwell.
Vermuyden: Thus did I achieve my great victory! Brutish Tigers, Greedy Adventurers, Rebellious Workmen, Hostile Elements failed to hinder my grand design.
Fen Tigers: Before they came we lived in plenty, dined like kings on fish and fowl.
Vermuyden: This ordered landscape is the fruit of my imagination;
Fen Tigers: Before they came our hearth was warmed by blazing fires of Fenland Peat.
Vermuyden: Where mist once hung over pestilent morasses and putrid waters; where fish and fowl once held undisputed sway.
Fen Tigers: Before they came a thatch of reed protected us from Rain and Sleet.
The scoring demonstrates the influence of Britten in its combination of a string quintet, a piano duet (identical to Noye’s Fludde) and idiomatic vocal writing for children’s chorus (Example 1). Additionally, the harmonic colouring of the music here contains many characteristic Britten features, such as the rolled piano chords from no. 121 onwards (doubled in the strings) consisting of stacked major seconds (B♭ and C, D♭ and E♭, F and G), which are reminiscent of the closing bars of Noye’s Fludde. When combined with the E♭ Lydian melodic inflections present in the upper piano and chorus parts (including oscillations between A♭ and A♮), the rolled chord implies a coloured quasi-dominant seventh in E♭, which is another stylistic trait of Britten’s output.Footnote 27 Furthermore, assigning the list of the various animals lost due to the drainage to parts for the children betrays the influence of Britten in the libretto (it is similar to the list of animals taken into the ark in Noye’s Fludde) – as does the spoken vocal part superimposed above the music, which exclaims (with regard to the lost animals), ‘They are all gone … forever.’
Example 1. Extract from the original score of Christopher Brown’s The Split Goose Feather (1979), 133–4.
The environmental theme in The Split Goose Feather has thus come closer to the surface of the narrative than in Noye’s Fludde, with the Fen Tigers giving direct expression to the destruction of their environment at the hands of Vermuyden and Cromwell. Brown explained the importance of the environmental theme in an interview as follows:
That was very conscious in both our [composer and librettist] minds. We spent quite a lot of time actually out on the Fens, we talked about this quite a lot about the importance of the environment, but partly that was her [Olive Cook’s] reason for wanting to do it because she was very conscious in her historical awareness generally of the mixed blessings which things like the draining of the Fens provided. Environmentally, in some ways, of course it was a huge benefit; it enabled the fens to become agricultural in a way which they never were in the past. But of course, you’ve destroyed things at the same time. You lost all those wonderful marshland areas.Footnote 28
The Split Goose Feather exemplifies the influence Britten had on local music-making in England from the 1960s onwards and represents an important piece of social history. It demonstrates not only Britten’s stylistic influence and adeptness for writing for young voices and amateurs, but also his interest in taking issues of concern to the local community and using local history (in this case with an environmental theme) as the basis for an opera in order to raise awareness and educate. Britten’s influence, however, extends further than individual composers and librettists to new organisations. Productions of Noye’s Fludde have frequently led to the permanent foundation of a company, which then goes on to commission new work from contemporary composers. Blackheath Halls Community Opera has already been mentioned. Other examples include W11 Opera and Leeds Youth Opera, which have each staged new community operas with environmental subjects.
W11 Opera ‘for young people’, based in West London, was founded in 1971 and grew out of a production of Noye’s Fludde. It has subsequently commissioned more than thirty new community operas. It started out as W11 Children’s Opera, producing biblical operas modelled closely on Noye’s Fludde, but grew to incorporate older participants, with open auditions attracting a cast drawn from more than thirty-five schools in London. From 1971 to 2020, over two thousand children and teenagers have been involved in its productions. In 2001 W11 Opera was invited to perform at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio.Footnote 29
During the 1990s environmentalism gained new momentum with the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, which was extended in 1997 with the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, and a range of influential campaigns such as Al Gore’s 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth. Footnote 30 This new impetus was primarily concerned with the interconnected issues of global warming, the production of greenhouse gases such as CFCs and rising CO2 levels, together with wider concerns such as the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest (thought to be a contributing factor to global warming), rising sea temperatures and the effects these changes had on ecological systems and plant and animal life.Footnote 31
Continuing the trend exemplified by The Split Goose Feather, W11 Opera staged three newly commissioned operas inspired by topical environmental issues. In 1992 Listen to the Earth was premiered with music by Steve Gray and a libretto by Sarah Shuckburgh. The synopsis from the programme of this community opera reads:
The opera’s theme is the disintegration of the natural world seen through the eyes of two inquisitive children. They watch as a series of false gods, greed, ambition, envy, impatience, wastefulness cruelty and apathy, tempt the inhabitants of the earth away from Gaia, guardian of the earth. There seems to be no hope for mankind until Gaia appears just in time, warning of the dangers we face if we neglect our environment but ending on a note of hope if we learn it is not too late to reverse the destruction.
Although not explicitly stated in the production materials, the inclusion of Gaia in this community opera is likely to have been influenced by the ‘Gaia hypothesis’ proposed in the 1970s by James Lovelock (an influential scientist within the environmental movement), which postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system.Footnote 32 Lovelock argued that the lack of respect humans have had for the planet, evident in the damage done to rainforests and the reduction in planetary biodiversity, had placed a strain on the Earth’s capacity to minimise the effects of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.Footnote 33 The Earth goddess Gaia in the opera issues a stark warning to humanity that echoed contemporary concerns. Like Noye’s Fludde, the programme notes for Listen to the Earth frame the morality of the opera in Christian terms, revealing more recent overlaps between topical ecological issues and the Christian conception of human greed and sin. Audiences and participants who were familiar with Noye’s Fludde were further engaged and educated by reference to more recent environmental debates.Footnote 34 This connection is made explicit in the programme notes, which argue:
With the growing ecological movement, this is clearly a topical and important message which can also clearly be seen in a Christian context. Jesus’ message to us all was to resist greed, envy and selfishness, and to care for one another and for the world which God created for us.
Listen to the Earth was followed by two more operas that focused on the potential extinction of the natural world, but with a distinct maritime flavour – perhaps again betraying the influence of Britten. They address environmental concerns during the 1990s and 2000s related to overfishing and the warming of the oceans.Footnote 35 Deep Waters (2000) by Cecilia McDowall, with a libretto by Christie Dickason, concerns overfishing; its revival in 2014 highlighted the continuing appeal of this topic to school children of all ages.Footnote 36 Whale Savers (2009) by Martin Ward with a libretto by Phil Porter is about disturbances to oceanic food chains, to which whales were thought to be especially vulnerable. However, an additional tension is also explored, as explained in the programme:
the village gain a new sense of purpose from the mission to save the whale, but their elders are tempted by greed to take a deadlier path. Unless Farnaway can heal its generational divide, the whale will die…
As in Noye’s Fludde, and all of the other examples examined so far, human greed is here portrayed as the enemy, but in this case it also creates a generational rift. This brings the environmental issues closer to aspects of contemporary political discourse, anticipating the campaigns of young political activists such as Greta Thunberg (just six years old when the opera premiered), who have accused older generations – in positions of power – of failing to consider the sustainability of the environment for future generations like her own.Footnote 37
Timothy Kraemer has composed several community operas for W11 Opera: Like This, Like That (1976), The Adventures of Jonah (1977) and Ulysses and the Wooden Horse (1987). In 1990, he joined with the prominent environmental group Friends of the Earth to stage his new work, Timber!, which was first performed at the Barbican Centre in London, by the Mozart Players, to raise awareness and educate children about the ecological damage wrought by deforestation.Footnote 38 Like Listen to the Earth, Timber! explores prominent environmental concerns of the 1990s, such as the depletion of the ozone layer, melting polar icecaps, and its central theme: the destruction of the Amazon rainforest (Figure 2).Footnote 39
Figure 2. Extracts from Timber! first production programme (1990). Illustrations by Abby Wall. Copyright © Timothy Kraemer.
Kraemer’s approach was to dramatise an Amazonian legend concerning twin brothers Ariconte and Tamendonare, whose sibling rivalry and ensuing arguments about stewardship of the forests result in the destruction of the natural world. This legend is framed by a narrator who addresses the audience in a contemporary vein, warning that ‘the rain forest logging equals CO2 increasing equals global warming equals icecaps melting’, and concluding that Western governments should ‘take away third-world debt and the green-house effect’ – among other issues – to save the planet. An extract from the vocal score (Example 2) demonstrates how the aesthetic of the music reveals the continuing influence of Britten, together with other musical influences that simultaneously emphasise and expose the countercultural and political rationale of the piece.
Example 2. Extracts from the vocal score for Timber! (1990), bb. 9–14 and 121–6.
Aspects of Britten’s influence are immediately clear in the music: its suitability for children or amateur performers, the monotone and monosyllabic nature of the word setting at bars 9–14, and the diatonic harmonies derived from stacked major seconds or fourths (which act as pseudo-dominants), including the opening chord, which functions as a dominant seventh over a tonic pedal in C major. Here, however, the influence is more diluted than in previous examples, and it is fused with references to 1960s pop music. In particular, Kraemer acknowledges the influence of the Beatles, many of whose songs he had arranged for string quartet prior to composing his community operas.Footnote 40 This can be observed in the jaunty, syncopated word-setting of ‘take away third-world debt and the green-house effect’ (bars 121–3) and the chord-driven parallel harmonic shifts from I to IV (F to B♭) in F major in the accompaniment, which are scored here for guitar and bass. Britten-esque harmonies have not completely vanished (for example the pair of major seconds in bar 126) but here they act more like suspensions a second or fourth from the bass, but conceived as chordal sonorities rather than contrapuntal decorations (i.e. ‘sus’ chords in pop music nomenclature), which illustrate the fusion of the Britten–Beatles styles. From a hermeneutical perspective, this fusion effectively mirrors the overlap between the political influences that impressed themselves upon Britten in his youth on the one hand, and the countercultural revolutions in which such ideas came to fruition during the 1960s (racial, sexual and gender equality) on the other.Footnote 41 It is easy to forget that much of Britten’s output and the advent of pop culture appeared at roughly the same time and were therefore subject to the same cultural pressures, such as the peace movements of the 1960s. For example, Britten’s War Requiem (1961), expressive of Britten’s lifelong pacifism, and the Beatles peace anthem ‘All You Need is Love’ (1967) might both be understood in this context. In other words, Britten and the Beatles were operating in the same counterculture, and aspects of their ideas arguably fused in works such as Timber! Moreover, ideas about environmental justice, which were also evolving during the 1960s, were articulated artistically in such musical fusions.
Leeds Youth Opera (LYO) was founded in the same year as W11 Opera: 1971. It has produced Noye’s Fludde three times and staged a production of The Split Goose Feather in 1980. In contrast to W11 Opera, LYO expanded by producing existing repertoire operas with community participants. For their fiftieth anniversary production in 2023, however, they commissioned a new opera for their younger members (eight to twelve years old) from composer Lewis Murphy with a libretto by Laura Attridge. Once again, the narrative explores children’s preoccupation with the environment in the guise of a science-fiction parable – entitled ARC23. The story follows the crew of ARC23, one of a small fleet of ships sent from an earth dying from the effects of climate change, to establish a habitable colony for humans on a new planet. The characters are all officers or scientists transporting greenery to populate their new planet. Attridge has explained that the story focuses on the unhealthy impact of human isolation (with echoes of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns) and the fear it generates, and on the instinct to survive in an environment of ever-depleting resources. The opera therefore both explores human ecology and issues a warning about the effects of climate change from a point in the future when the consequences of environmental destruction have become irreversible. Like other community operas, its didactic message is crafted to educate participants and audiences about the dangers of climate change. The influence of Noye’s Fludde is once again apparent in the conception of an ark (Noah’s ship is reimagined as a spaceship) built to save humankind from an environmental cataclysm by transporting plant and animal life to a new place in which to start again. ARC23 can therefore be understood as a reimagining of Britten’s plot but transported to a different time and place to make its message more relevant to younger participants and audiences in 2023.Footnote 42
These examples together demonstrate a history of community operas influenced in a variety of ways by Britten’s Noye’s Fludde and bringing concerns for environmental issues into the present. What accounts for this trend? Britten’s compositions for community resources, which bring together professionals and amateurs or children, have influenced many composers in terms of performance techniques and innovative instrumental combinations, but this does not account fully for the enduring performance tradition and the creative legacy of Noye’s Fludde. Its story connects traditional Christian ethics with the modern environmental movement in light of our still increasing awareness that the environment is vulnerable to human greed – and that the young therefore need to be educated in its preservation.Footnote 43 It also provides an archetypal or mythical frame within which to dramatise this conflict between humanity and the natural world, one that can be explored with a warning for those who do not appreciate or act upon it – as recognised by Jonathan Dove. Yayoi Everett has argued that in contemporary operas the ‘mythic narrative is also about transporting the viewer from the diegetic time and place of the story to a universality of expression that transcends time’, and that through this process ‘viewers are made to grapple with fundamental truths and moral imperatives by reflecting on the allegorical significance of these tales to the global age in which we live’.Footnote 44 Noye’s Fludde, as I have highlighted above, continues to function in this allegorical and mythical fashion, and this perhaps accounts for its enduring success, in contrast to works such as The Split Goose Feather or Timber!, whose narrative content is too specific to the communities or times in which they were written to act in this way.
Community opera projects have now become a common feature of outreach, education, and learning and participation programmes run by opera companies in the UK and funded by bodies such as Arts Council England (Table 1). There is an expectation that opera companies should commission and undertake such community-based projects in order to justify and maintain their broader funding.Footnote 45 In this way, opera companies rather than composers or community organisations such as LYO or W11 Opera have in recent years become the main initiators of community opera projects. Environmental themes have proved a popular, topical means of drawing communities into such projects. For example, Glyndebourne Education’s mainstage presentation Till the Summer Comes Again (2012) by Russell Hepplewhite was written to celebrate the installation of Glyndebourne’s wind turbine.Footnote 46 The programme states: ‘Inspired by the wind turbine, Glyndebourne Youth Opera (GYO) and Youth Company presents an evening of music, performance and visual art about our environment and our young people’s place within it.’Footnote 47 In this case, the opera company not only took active steps to improve its relationship with the environment in its production, but it also involved collaboration between composer Russell Hepplewhite and the school-aged participants, who contributed to devising the libretto in a process of co-creation.
Table 1. A selective list of community operas on environmental themes that have been produced by organisations based in the UK
In sum, dramatising concerns about the environment has been a rising trend in community opera projects since the 1950s. Such projects tend to involve young to early teenage children and therefore realise the social issues that concern them directly, such as environmental justice. As we have seen, in addition to topics of flooding and other sea-related environmental events, and Christian-influenced backdrops concerning man’s disposition towards greed and consumption – familiar from Noye’s Fludde – newly pertinent environmental concerns have also been explored. These have included ozone layer depletion and Amazonian deforestation in the 1990s, new environmental technologies such as wind turbines developed in the 2000s, the effects of rising CO2 emissions and a more apocalyptic sense of climate crisis and the end of humanity in the 2020s. The fundamental idea of an approaching environmental cataclysm that can be avoided only by those who address wasteful human activity – a central idea of Noye’s Fludde – has remained present. This is a trope that is likely to continue as the environmental debate itself continues.Footnote 48
Sustainability and contemporary opera
Two questions arise from these community operas and the broader issues they invoke: what impact can environmentally themed operas have on the ongoing debate concerning the climate crisis, and how can the international operatic community respond to the environmental challenges that confront human society? In answer to the first, it is difficult to determine whether works of art are simply reflective of debates present in a society, or contribute to changes in attitude, policy and the dissemination of ideas surrounding such debates. Certainly, community opera projects are educational for those who participate and witness them in performance, but does this amount to influencing the debate on the environment? Is community opera an effective way of changing the minds of doubters and sceptics, and do the issues need artistic amplification if members of society are already aware of them from the mass and social media that constitute modern public debate? Mark Pedelty and Andrew Mark have discussed the effectiveness of ‘musical activism’ and its promotion via social media to champion environmental causes.Footnote 49 Both have sought through case studies – and through what Pedelty has called ‘ethnographic focus’ – to ‘attempt to objectively measure the influence musicians can have on environmental outcomes, awareness and campaigns’.Footnote 50 Their conclusions are disappointingly indeterminate, however: ‘Is it music for place or place for music?’, asks Pedelty.Footnote 51 Such circular arguments are unhelpful – though useful reminders of the difficulty in disentangling cause from effect. That said, the details of the stories on which community operas are based can highlight instances and examples of environmental issues previously unknown to audiences. For example, few participants and audiences were likely aware of the ecological damage caused by drainage of the Fenlands, dramatised in The Split Goose Feather.
The second question is arguably more pressing. Do the benefits of communicating an environmental message offset the considerable costs and resources required to stage an opera – even a community opera? It might be wishful thinking to believe that opera in any form is capable of influencing the economics of climate change, energy policy and so forth. Nevertheless, opera professionals have recently started to broach such issues in broader terms. For instance, Annilese Miskimmon, the artistic director of English National Opera (ENO) since 2020, has expressed concern about the amount of air travel undertaken by international soloists and opera professionals.Footnote 52 Additionally, ENO’s 2021 staging of The Valkyrie used a new translation by John Deathridge that reimagined Wotan’s longing for ‘das Ende’ in the second act monologue as ‘extinction’, and thus channelled environmental protests that were taking place in the UK at this time and attracting considerable media attention.Footnote 53
Glyndebourne, following on from their installation of a wind turbine, have recently started collaborating with ‘sustainability advisors’ in the development of a ‘Theatre Green Book’ with the aim of reducing direct carbon emissions and ‘reaching net zero by 2050’.Footnote 54 This has involved an array of energy saving (and generating) technologies that are beginning to reduce the opera house’s energy consumption. Their 2022 staging of Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers experimented with initiatives to recycle production materials and reported that 28% of timber used in construction came from recycled sources; 50% of the steel used went back into Glyndebourne’s stock, including the stage revolve; only 4% of the costumes were new – the remainder came from Glyndebourne’s existing stock or from local charity shops; all fabric dyeing used natural dye from plants grown at Glyndebourne in a new, dedicated dye garden; 92% of the props had a previous life; and only 3% of props were disposed of at the end of the production.
Smaller opera organisations have begun to act along similar lines. For example, Green Opera (founded in 2020) – with its tag line ‘Opera today for the world of tomorrow’ – is ‘a charity with a vision for making music and drama in a way that is environmentally sustainable’:
Producing music and drama sustainably isn’t as complicated as it might seem. All of our resources are sustainably sourced: we upcycle props, costumes or scenery and recycle anything we no longer have a use for. We also use a paperless ticketing system and where printing is unavoidable, we do so on recycled paper. We are also interested in repurposing buildings: many of our productions take place in spaces that are not designed for theatrical use, such as churches.Footnote 55
The influence of Noye’s Fludde can again be felt in the use of community centres, such as churches, to stage resource-saving productions and in the use of facilities provided by local community structures. These examples suggest, therefore, that an important way in which the international operatic community can respond to the climate emergency may be through community opera itself.
Production materials and energy saving technologies are not the only issues to consider, however. The sustainability of the art form itself warrants further thought.Footnote 56 The influence of Britten’s Noye’s Fludde on community opera arguably points the way forward.Footnote 57 As discussed earlier, its mythic qualities have been reinterpreted to represent a myriad of human issues, including environmental destruction, and this in turn has supported initiatives to keep opera – particularly new opera – relevant.Footnote 58 Climate change and ‘net zero’ are topical issues, widely debated in the media in the early 2020s, and they provide obvious subject matter for this purpose, though a balance needs to be struck between topicality and timelessness, to ensure their longevity in newly relevant musical-dramatic conceptions.
Since its inception in 1986, Glyndebourne Education has commissioned and staged hundreds of new community works in various guises, many of which have been produced on their mainstage. These include Misper (1997), Zoë (2000), Elemental (2002), Imago (2013), Tycho’s Dream (2014), Nothing (2016), Belongings (2017) and Agreed (2019). Very few of these productions have had a life beyond their first performances, but some of the youth operas have been staged by other companies. For example, Scottish Opera’s Connect Company performed Misper in 2014. Nothing (2016) was revived by Den Jyske Opera in a Danish translation with their youth opera company as part of Aarhus European Capital of Culture 2017; three years later it was performed by Danish National Opera in a new production. Minnesota Opera’s youth company performed their own production of Belongings (2017) in January 2020. But beyond these occasional second performances (which in any case one might expect from an established and internationally renowned opera company such as Glyndebourne), there is little evidence of these newly commissioned works entering the repertoire.Footnote 59 Jonathan Dove has voiced similar concerns, contrasting his earlier community operas for Glyndebourne Education – such as Dreamdragons (1993) and In Search of Angels (1997) – with his later operas written for professional companies, such as Flight (1998), which have enjoyed many repeat performances. As Dove has observed ‘a drawback to co-devising operas with their community performers is that you can end up with pieces so precisely tailored to their communities, in the stories they tell and the forces they use, that no-one else will perform them’.Footnote 60 Echoing Yayoi Everett, Dove recommends as an alternative finding mythical or quasi-mythical subject matter with a more ‘universal’ underpinning. Moreover, given the investment involved in the creation of new opera, it is crucial to plan for repeat performances and new productions that do not require similar levels of funding and resources. Dove’s The Monster in the Maze (2015) is a good example of this more sustainable approach, commissioned by Simon Rattle for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Written for ‘Actor, Soli, Adult, Youth and Children’s Choruses and Orchestra’, it is modelled on Noye’s Fludde in a number of ways: its style of writing for a variety of young amateur voice types, the inclusion of amateur instrumental parts (in this case a profusion of parts for brass instruments), the short, hour-long structure and story chosen for its universal appeal. Based on the Greek myth of the Minotaur, it has been extraordinarily successful, and has been staged in sixteen productions by separate opera companies to date, and in translations into Catalan, Taiwanese, Dutch, French, German, Portuguese and Swedish.Footnote 61 Successes such as this, however, are exceptional, and greater consideration about what makes an opera ‘recyclable’ – like Noye’s Fludde or The Monster in the Maze – would contribute to the practical, artistic and social sustainability of opera in the future.
In an attempt to broach this issue, Glyndebourne recently commissioned and staged Uprising (2025), a new community opera with an environmental theme written by Dove with a libretto by April De Angelis. The opera in many ways echoes the themes that have been covered in this article. The story revolves around a school-aged environmental activist called Lola Green who refuses to attend school, as she is overwhelmed by the loss of the world’s rainforests. Talking to fellow youth activists online (including Greta Thunberg) she is emboldened to organise a protest. As well as encountering initial resistance from her classmates she also comes into conflict with her family, particularly her mother – a building contractor who has recently secured a lucrative deal to bulldoze a local forest to construct a superhighway. Her family attempt to coerce Lola into dropping her protests, but to no avail as she leads a rowdy school strike. This is brilliantly scored for soloists, a large youth chorus and full orchestral accompaniment, and imaginatively reinforced by onstage percussion to conclude the first act. In the second act, Lola’s mother proceeds with the deforestation – despite further pleas from Lola, her supporters and the forest itself in the form of a dream-like sequence. However, the deforestation process accidentally causes a river to flood, from where her family rescue her. Having expressed regret at the damage done to the natural world, Lola’s mother is offered a choice at the end by Lola and the other family members (who have come over to Lola’s way of thinking) to join them in restoring the forest. The opera ends before we can learn of her decision, leaving a question hanging in the air for both the drama and the audience.Footnote 62
There is a concerted attempt in Uprising to dramatise an environmental protest, rather than create an opera that is itself an environmental protest with a didactic message. Although the school strike and protests form a key narrative element and backdrop for the opera, the main thrust of the drama comes from the familial relationships (principally between Lola and her mother) and the environmental issues are the context for these relationships. As Dove suggests, Uprising is both a community opera with an environmental theme and an exploration of universal human relationships. In a sense, it has brought the matters discussed in this article full circle by returning the issues to the background and bringing human emotions back to the fore. Nevertheless, the opera retains a very distinctive topical and political flavour, which at the premiere had already begun to feel somewhat dated; school strikes and the prominence of Greta Thunberg have already passed out of the public eye. Operas that rely too heavily upon contemporary topical or political themes of any hue may automatically suffer this fate, which helps explain the problems associated with repeat performances and sustainability discussed above. Whether Uprising can successfully overcome this hurdle – as an opera with a clear topical, political dimension that can inspire repeat performances organised by other institutions – remains to be seen.
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