Cross-Over Singers Can Attract New Audiences to Opera

I think cross-over artists are good for opera - providing that they are identified as crossovers and not as opera singers, at least until they have sung unamplified (no microphone) on-stage in a proper opera performance - and not suck at it. Would you call a lay person who knows a few medical terms from watching hospital-theme TV shows a doctor? Would you call a lay person whose biggest brush with physics consists of having read a lay book about black holes or the string theory a physicist? Would you call a person who can't tell a status quo from a positive or a negative stance a philosopher? Of course not ! The same goes for opera singers.

Sarah Brightman isn't an opera singer, nor is Charlotte Church or Leslie Garrett or Josh Groban. Andrea Bocelli is, but not a great one (though his courage and determination to overcome his physical handicap is inspiring), and so is Anna Netrebko (who is quite a good opera singer in the Russian repertoire).

To be an opera singer, one spends years training and cultivating the voice while learning to sing the most difficult and beautiful vocal music ever written loud enough to be audible to the entire operatic auditorium without the aid of artificial amplification, and over a 70 plus instrument orchestra that plays between the singer and the audience... without shredding their vocal cords to pieces in the process. And often in a language that one doesn't even speak. Opera singers generally don't start training until they are at least 14 yrs or older, after one has reached puberty (singing opera arias with supported voice before one is trained enough to know how to protect the vocal cords is exceedingly dangerous.... Charlotte Church isn't singing opera songs anymore now, does she?). Pop-singers who cross over to sing individual opera songs out of context with the aid of microphone to a modified orchestral rearrangement designed to enhance the voice rather than preserving what the composer had written down are no more opera-singers than the folks who have read The Complete Idiot's Guide to Einstein but don't understand mathematics and can't explain or put in context any of the physics lingo they try to impress you with are physicists.

That is not to say that there is no place for the crossovers or the lay-friendly medium for the difficult subjects like opera or physics in this world. The crossovers can reach and possibly attract interest in the folks who would never be interested in these fields otherwise. As soul-bearing as an opera can be and as intellectually stimulating and fun as physics is, these subjects aren't really easy to dig into at first. Indeed, in 21st Century America, they are quite counter-intuitive, and require gradual acclimatization. Gone are the days when almost everyone knew who Einstein, Heisenberg, von Braun, Pauling, or Bohr were. Gone are the days when the news media couldn't get enough of operatic divas like Callas, Sutherland, Melchior, Horne, or Nilsson. So, too, must go the usual snobbish excuse of "I won't dumb down my arts so that others can understand it" retort.

It doesn't take a genius to predict the destiny of an art form that fails to attract new audience or the destiny of the field of knowledge that fails to ignite the interest of the younger generation. A lonely death awaits them, unless their practitioners are willing to embrace the competition and use it to draw in potential new opera-lovers or physics students by offering them encouragements to check out the finer renditions (by real opera singers) of the same opera tunes sung by the crossovers, or to make fun and understandable the mathematics that would allow the budding young students to really understand physics and other scientific concepts for themselves. There is room for the crossovers of this world. We just have to take care to not mislabel them for what they are not, that's all.