About philipoftheopera
Hi! đź‘‹ I'm Philip, and I write about opera the way it deserves to be written about: as a living, breathing art form that has something urgent to say about the world we're actually living in.
For me, opera isn't a museum piece preserved under glass. It's one of the few remaining cultural spaces where complexity isn't just tolerated—it's essential. Where else can you find four hours of uninterrupted storytelling that tackles power, identity, love, betrayal, and revolution through music that literally moves your body while staging that challenges your assumptions?
In an era of algorithmic feeds and corporate-controlled narratives, opera remains stubbornly analog, beautifully unoptimized, and radically human. It's messy. It's political. And when done right, it cuts deeper than any TikTok comment section or Netflix show ever could.
What I'm interested in: How productions mirror our social dynamics. How directors choose to reimagine—or refuse to reimagine—works that are centuries old. How casting decisions become political statements. How a single staging choice can reframe an entire story about who gets agency, who gets punished, and who gets to belong.
What I'm less interested in (please don't stone me): Vocal perfection divorced from meaning. Orchestral precision that serves no interpretive purpose. Productions that reproduce historical works without asking why we're still telling these stories, or what they mean to audiences now.
Because here's the thing: we live in a moment of competing narratives about power, identity, and the future we're building together. Opera—with its unique combination of emotional force and intellectual complexity—has an artistic advantage in processing these tensions. It can hold contradictions. It can make you feel and think simultaneously. It can take you somewhere you've never been and show you something you've never seen.
The best opera productions I encounter don't just preserve tradition—they interrogate it. They ask hard questions: What does it mean to stage a work about empire in a post-colonial world? How do you handle historical misogyny without reproducing it? What happens when you cast a Romani performer as Carmen, or stage Don Carlo like a sci-fi dystopia, or transform Mahagonny into an immersive capitalist critique?
That's what I explore here: not just how opera sounds, but how it speaks—to us, about us, right now. Because when opera is done right, it doesn't just entertain. It confronts. And in a world that desperately needs confrontation with its own assumptions, that feels like exactly the kind of art we need more of.
philipoftheopera is an independent publication launched in March 2025 by Philip Zuschke. If you subscribe today, you'll receive email newsletters about new content when it's available. Your subscription makes this site possible, and allows philipoftheopera to continue to exist. Thank you!
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