That would be true even if I’d picked a more cerebral favorite moment. Suppose I chose the bit in the second act of Bohème when Marcello and Musetta rush into each other’s arms. There’s a full-throated uproar from the orchestra -- and then all at once nothing, just a pale ghost of the tune nostalgically drifting from the violins, as if the lovers had looked up from their embrace to discover life still running its normal course around them. But, woe! I’ve savored this fleeting peek at love’s psychology (on recordings, of course; in the opera house it’s normally smothered by applause) too many times. I still cherish it -- but now it makes me think, not about love, and not about Marcello and Musetta, but about Puccini’s skill as a musical dramatist. 
Much the same thing happens when I encounter the wiser delights of Mozart, or -- to take a bold step into the 20th century -- Alban Berg. "Dove sono," from Le nozze di figaro, is such an old friend that I feel happy when I hear it, even though it’s an aria about sadness. I can’t quite feel happy at the end of Berg’s searing masterpiece: Lulu, reduced to abject misery, encounters Jack the Ripper, while the orchestra plays the opera’s most pitiless love music. Jack slashes and hacks her, of course, and to make the horrible irony even clearer, Berg wanted Jack sung by the same singer who’d earlier played the only man Lulu ever loved. But now that I’ve known the opera for years, I’ve come to feel comfortable with the scene. What catches my attention is the very fascinating idea of Lulu falling in love with her own destruction, not the carnage being simulated, however bloodily, on stage. 
And there familiarity takes its ultimate toll: Even the most profound creations can start to seem comforting, if you hang around them long enough. A century ago, the violinist Ysaye, it’s said, threw his shoes in the fire after first hearing Tristan und Isolde, because he couldn’t stand to resume the trivial labors of everyday life. But imagine a new season at Bayreuth kicking off with the same opera. Won’t scads of the faithful sit back in their seats and heave grateful sighs at the first notes of the famous prelude? "Ach, Tristan! Wunderbar!" A colleague of mine once reviewed a performance of Figaro, an opera known to carry a profound moral message, and with touching innocence wrote that he’d "basked" in it. Opera may well cast a more seductive web of familiarity than any other art, because the same few works are performed over and over; we learn to adore them. Do we forget how profound they are? Never! But that only gives us deeper levels to cherish. We can worship far more than their grand diva climaxes. We can dote on the subtlest details of their construction; we can even dote on their deepest philosophy.

And that, believe it or not, brings us to contemporary opera. Not many opera houses want to stage it; not many opera lovers want to see it. It’s hard to blame anyone, because, just as not many movies can be the best movies ever made, not many new operas can be the best operas. But when you go to the movies, you’re not likely to care. Go see Batman, and if you don’t like it, next week you’ll pick some other movie you hope you like better. Go to any new opera, though, and in the back of your mind, you’ll probably compare it to Rigoletto and Traviata. Why wouldn’t you? The operas of the past are contemporary opera’s direct competition. The operas of the past are the operas you like; they’re the works you’re thankful that opera companies usually offer you. 
Contemporary opera, though, has one desperate advantage. Suppose you have tickets to see Rigoletto. What are you looking forward to? Gilda in the sack? Or, more likely, the gorgeous arias and the fabulous quartet? But if Rigoletto were a new work -- if you had absolutely no idea what was going to happen when the lights went down and the opera began -- wouldn’t Gilda’s gruesome end, if only for the sheer shock of it, be the part of the opera you’d remember most? Wouldn’t you find yourself telling all your friends about the hunchback who raged and spat at a filthy burlap bag, who even kicked it while his dying daughter lay crumpled and bleeding inside? Contemporary operas aren’t familiar -- so they just might jump out and grab us by the throat. 
And if they did…well, let’s imagine for a moment what a world of thrilling contemporary opera might be like. Suppose we saw a new opera every week, the way some of us might see a new movie; suppose some of those new operas knocked us flat on our backs, as new movies sometimes do. Wouldn’t that be good for all opera? Wouldn’t it be thrilling if, when the lights dimmed and the chandeliers rose, we were eagerly poised in our seats, staring wide-eyed at the stage with no idea of what would happen next? Even our beloved classics might start to take us by surprise. They’d probably have to; how else could they ever compete with all those startling new works? 

Stop me, please, before I dream again. But that brave world of new opera may have taken a step forward out of the mists of unreality last season, when John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles became the first new work in living memory to succeed at the Met. It succeeded, first of all, because of what it’s tempting to call canny musical choices, though I hardly mean to imply that Corigliano (pictured) made those choices with success uppermost in mind. But the opera is melodic, even lush, and full of arias, duets, and ensembles, just like the operas we know. Its music, at least, won’t hit us in the face; we know we won’t have to decipher any sounds more complicated than what we’d hear in an unfamiliar but not terribly modern work like Richard Strauss’s Arabella. 
But at the same time, Corigliano’s music is modern. There’s hardly a moment that doesn’t mark it as music of our own era, partly because it draws on polymorphous harmony that we might figuratively call far more experienced than Strauss’s, and partly because its rhythm tends to hover windlessly, instead of rushing forward in storms and marches like the rhythms in the operas we’re used to. So we get to eat our cake, and respect it, too; we get that ol’ opera feeling, and still we sniff a new scent in the air.
Both sides of the parlay feel exactly right. Corigliano and his librettist, William Hoffman, knew they were fashioning a work for an opera house that’s a shrine to the past, and played an artistic kind of peek-a-boo with the idea of consecrating past eras, as well as with some of the things that get consecrated. Some of their characters -- Beaumarchais, author of the plays that later became The Barber of Seville and Le nozze di Figaro; the guillotined queen Marie Antoinette -- are presented quite literally as ghosts. Others -- Figaro; the Count and Countess Almaviva -- are characters from operas two centuries old (or close to it), which in a work premiered just last year makes them ghosts, too, especially since we meet them as characters in a new opera written and staged by ghost Beaumarchais.
The references to past operas fly thick as bees. Figaro sings a scrambling aria in praise of himself, as he does in the Barber; there’s a reconciliation ensemble for Figaro, Susanna, and the Almavivas whose dramatic meaning recalls the reconciliation at the end of Le nozze, and whose music -- an entwining of rapt voices -- recalls any number of progenitors: the quintet in Meistersinger, the trio in Rosenkavalier, the canon quartet in Fidelio, even the quartet in the last scene of Cosí. But Ghosts also winks at the present, commenting -- with characteristic self-referential postmodernism -- on its own existence. As we sit watching it, we see an audience on stage watching their own new opera, Beaumarchais’ sequel to Figaro. Hoffman and Corigliano even (implicitly, at least) put themselves in the game, showing us Beaumarchais as, among much else, a librettist/composer agonizing over his own premiere. (Do they seduce us into liking their piece, since we see what they’re going through?)
By the end of this self-aware entertainment, the past has not only been quoted: It becomes the unspoken subject of the piece, as the Figaro cast, relocated to Paris (a passing reference in Mozart’s opera tells us the Count was about to become a Spanish ambassador abroad), gets swept up in the French revolution. Now, the French revolution, which smashed the ancien regime, is often thought, with its terror and uncertainty, to mark the start of the modern age. So by asking whether some of our most familiar operatic characters can survive it, The Ghosts of Versailles might metaphorically be asking whether opera itself can survive modernity. And here’s what happens. The Figaro crew mounts a fanciful escape by balloon, and Marie Antoinette -- whom we see the revolution kill -- crosses to a blissful ghost-life in a world beyond death. Which (the Marie Antoinette, part, anyway) is soooo operatic…and seems to suggest that opera, as an art form threatened by the destruction of the culture that created it, can survive only in a protected enclave, a place beyond cultural death where all of us who love it can bask in its familiar, changeless bliss. 

No wonder, then, that Ghosts was such a success, or that it could rouse its audience, without being impolite enough to yell in anyone’s face. It evoked our sheer love of opera, and -- sympathetically, though not without firm touches of irony -- dramatized the reasons why that love could make the very work we were watching hard for us to accept. But in doing so The Ghosts of Versailles raised a challenge to every new piece that comes to the Met after it. If opera survives in the cultural equivalent of a nature preserve, why should anyone tolerate works that breach the barrier, dragging with them all the ugly, clanking noise of modern life? 
That’s a challenge for Philip Glass, who penetrates the house this year with his new opera, The Voyage. He brings spaceships to the party -- his piece is about the ventures of Columbus, but sets up journeys in space as a parallel -- and also black holes, ice ages, beer (craved by someone in a space station), and a musical style formed, as Corigliano’s notably wasn’t, by years spent outside the classical music mainstream. The libretto, by playwright David Henry Hwang, is characteristically abstract, reflecting another influence outside the normal scope of culture at the Met, the world of performance art. Glass once described his operas as animated paintings, and that’s certainly how this one seems. We’ll see Columbus alone in mid-voyage, reenacting in his mind a conversation he once had with Queen Isabella, while his mates call out the dawn watch. Three things happen -- the vision of Isabella comes closer, Columbus evolves new ideas, and, at the very end, the crew sees land. But there aren’t any mid-scene incidents: No tenor gets tortured (a brief diversion in Tosca, act two); no gun gets thrown to the ground and then accidentally goes off, killing the father of an eloping bride (an unexpected crisis in La forza del destino, first scene of act one). Nothing happens to dissolve the tableau. 
The intent of the piece can seem abstract, too; in the best performance-art fashion, conclusions are hinted, not stated outright. So -- though one evident theme, that voyagers find what their deepest souls are looking for, emerges from the libretto -- more than a few Metropolitan habitués may leave the work wondering "What did it mean?" But now prepare for a shock, because there are also ways in which The Voyage might not be all that different from ordinary opera. (And let’s not forget: plenty of fans have come out of Wagner’s Ring not knowing what it means; they just don’t think to ask, because they can hum the leitmotifs and follow the plot.) 

For a start, there’s the sound of Glass’s work, which often echoes the 19th century, his music walks differently (in endless circles, or so people who don’t understand the cumulative force of repetition might say), but talks in the same nostalgic, sometimes melancholy tone. Then there are precedents for Glass’s fluid tableaux, in, of all places, operas of the grandest sort. The auto-da-fé from Verdi's Don Carlo is largely consumed by processions, and the Coronation Scene from Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov has an outline which, framed by choruses, amounts to nothing much more than "Boris comes, then goes." In the end, though, The Voyage really might feel like traditional opera, however mutated, because Columbus, however reinterpreted, is a monumental subject. From its earliest days, opera was larger than life, telling tales of heroes, gods, and kings. Even in its greatest days, when a new opera was as timely as a new Madonna video, works were nearly always set in the past, and in exotic climes. Just think of Bellini's Norma, which introduces us to the Druids, or, for a savory example from the last days of opera composition as we’ve gotten used to it, Puccini's La fanciulla del west, which turned our American frontier (as if we hadn’t made it mythical enough) into a never-neverland as unreal as the Babylon of Rossini’s Semiramide. 
For all its spacemen and quarks (or maybe partly because of them), The Voyager -- by a composer whose earlier operas brought us Gandhi (in Satyagraha), a legendary pharaoh (Akhnaten), and of course Einstein -- takes an unaccustomed place square in that grand and distant operatic tradition. Which provokes just one question. Will there ever be room for operas that show us the jangly world we all live in? Such pieces exist; they include Leonard Bernstein’s A Quiet Place, John Adams’ Nixon in China, John Moran’s The Manson Family, and Anthony Davis’s X. Operas like these can be tricky, because the age of Johnny Carson and MTV doesn’t breathe the same musical air as Die Walküre. We’d have to find room for colloquial American sounds -- read: rock, pop, and jazz -- that haven’t yet found a secure home in the opera house. 
But if we did -- what a stimulating shock! We’d open a door to the rest of America, which, except maybe in romance novels, no longer amuses itself with stories set in the epic past. (Hollywood used to dish out epic spectaculars -- remember Ben-Hur? -- but not any more.) We’d blast ourselves out of our comfortable operatic armchairs, and force ourselves to somehow reencounter the raw drama of classics that slip each year a little closer to routine. 
Most of all, we just might revitalize this historically adventurous but today sheltered art form. I wondered earlier whether Gilda’s ghastly death in the sack deeply shakes many people who see Rigoletto today. What matters more is that, symbolically speaking, there are Gildas dying in sacks everywhere today, from the battlefields of Croatia to our drug-ridden inner cities and the fatal battleground of AIDS. Pop songs, let’s note, now regularly struggle with these themes. If opera can’t do the same, the high claims we make for it will start to ring hollow -- and the art so many of us adore will drift toward a doubtful future as gilded entertainment.

[Written for the Metropolitan Opera's souvenir yearbook, whichever season they premiered The Voyage. They printed my piece with many cuts, because they didn't have enough space -- or, to be fair to them, because I wrote more than they told me to!]