Britain’s Royal Opera House is going to take crowdsourcing to a whole new level – the company will be staging scenes from an opera with a libretto written by Twitter users. Fittingly, the first scene, which has already been completed, will be about a man who has been kidnapped by birds. This use of Twitter is is part of the Royal Opera House’s attempt to involve the public in the creative side of opera, which is itself an attempt to counteract a problem that all opera companies have seen: namely that people aren’t all that interested in opera anymore.
Already, we see that the move is working: Techgeist, a technology blog, is covering opera because of this announcement. But whether or not Twitter can be used to create a coherent creative work is yet to be seen. Like the rest of the music world, I’m going to take what is no doubt the popular opinion and say that if this opera is any good, it won’t have anything to do with the people who submitted the tweets. Even if the opera sucks, it probably won’t be the fault of Twitter users.
The actual user involvement with the opera is in reality minimal. The score to the opera is being handled by a single composer in the employ of the Royal Opera House, so the music will have nothing to do with Twitter. The libretto, though, will be a sort of Frankenstein’s Monster assembled from the certainly random messages sent in by the public. Guess what that means? Someone has to sit down and edit that big mess of text into some semblance of a coherent script. So when it comes right down to it, this opera is going to have very little to do with the actual user tweets.
In my book, that’s just fine. This is merely a publicity stunt on the part of the Royal Opera House, and they’re in an industry with such limited appeal that we should just let them have it. If I lived in England, I’d definitely try and go see the ultimate opera that is born out of this, even though I know that at the end of the day, it’ll just be like any modern opera, only this one will involve everyone’s favorite blue bird.
