Opera at Warp Speed : It’s not the nudity, rough sex or a resistance to new ideas that make ‘Rosa’ and similar works controversial--it’s the way music meets the stage, creating a new kind of operatic experience.

Last month Netherlands Opera offered the world premiere in Amsterdam of a new opera, “Rosa,� a collaboration between Holland’s best-known composer--aggressive minimalist Louis Andriessen--and iconoclastic British filmmaker Peter Greenaway. On the surface there seems nothing particularly remarkable about that fact. New operas are presented all the time these days. Also any number of major film directors, including Francis Ford Coppola and Robert Altman, have been drawn to the lyric stage.

The opera, however, proved a sensation, generating a considerable wave of international attention, and even managed to somewhat scandalize the generally sophisticated Dutch audiences. Artistic directors from both the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Lincoln Center went to Amsterdam to hear it, and a question much asked in operatic circles around New York these days is whether “Rosa� could possibly be performed in America, given the current political attitude toward what is and is not appropriate in art.

It’s not just that “Rosa� contains a fair amount of nudity and rough sex. That kind of thing, while perhaps not commonplace, does find its way, now and then, into mainstream opera companies. Angelenos may remember Maria Ewing’s strip in “Salome� at the Music Center, and the same soprano is currently at the Metropolitan Opera titillating audiences with her provocative lustiness in some soft-core Shostakovich, a new production of “Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk.�

Nor is it potential audience resistance to new work. That seems to be something nearly forgotten. Even the major American opera companies, which traditionally had been far less inclined to produce new work than many of their European counterparts, have been enjoying remarkable success with new operas in recent years, albeit conservative in tone and style.

In fact, three seasons ago, when the Met staged John Corigliano’s “The Ghosts of Versailles,� its first premiere in a quarter-century, the company found itself with an instant hit, so much so that the company made a sudden decision to televise it, and now the opera is returning this season. Nearly as popular have been William Bolcom’s “McTeague� in Chicago two years ago and, earlier this season, Conrad Susa’s “Dangerous Liaisons� in San Francisco (which already has been televised). Houston Grand Opera thrives on regular doses of opera that is of our time.

No, what makes “Rosa� shocking is that it really offers something new in opera. Although perfectly accessible, it is altogether different in the way it uses music and the stage, in its very conception of opera, from these other new audience-pleasing operas.

Nor is “Rosa� alone. This season there have been other new operas--Robert Ashley’s four-part “Now Eleanor’s Idea,� the conclusion to a 20-hour mega-opera ultimately intended for television in its final form; Philip Glass’ “La Belle et la Bete,� a curious opera literally performed to the classic Cocteau film; John Moran’s authentically weird TV-age “Mathew in the School of Life,� and Tod Machover’s high-tech extravaganza of opera as magic act for Penn & Teller--each in some way radically reinventing opera for our age and perhaps the future.

In some cases--actually in most cases--they hardly look or sound like opera at all. With the exception of “Rosa,� they are not intended for the traditional opera house, the traditional opera conductor, the traditional opera singer or the traditional opera-goer. (And “Rosa� pretty much wreaks havoc with most of those traditions.)

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Indeed, these new operas are more likely to play to other sensibilities and at other venues, to be suited more for adventurous audiences and alternative spaces. (Machover’s opera had its premiere at the Media Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.)

Whereas an opera like “The Ghosts of Versailles� is opera about opera and its conventions, these new operas are about life and culture as they exist today. They acknowledge the fact that everyone goes to movies and watches television and that, in the age of multimedia, we are beginning to process information, audio and visual, very differently than we did in the past. They are works that contend that opera itself must change, and because of them it surely will.

Media and technology are the key elements that tie all these operas together. But that is nothing new for operatic progress. Opera has always responded to the changes in the other arts and culture in general, as well as to the advancements of technology. One could, for instance, study the evolution of the art form as related to the development of stage lighting--from the way flickering candlelight reflects elaborate Baroque ornamentation to the influence greater lighting possibilities had for Wagner’s concept of opera as total artwork to the effect Robert Wilson’s intense luminosity had on Philip Glass’ early operatic work.

Since film and television are the common denominators of our culture, they are also inescapable in the latest opera aesthetic. In “Rosa,� for instance, Greenaway, who wrote its libretto and directed and designed it, has taken the interaction between film and music theater to a new level, and then from there all the way over the top. Not only does the opera use actual film as an integral part of its narrative, but the opera is also structured like a film, lasting the typical unbroken two-hour length of a film. There is even a staged bit resembling the credits at the end of a movie.

More remarkable, still, Greenaway, who is also a visual artist, employs here the whole range of his obsessions, obsessions that would seem realizable only on the screen. The work is based upon the murder of an obscure Brazilian composer, Juan Manuel de Rosa, who had studied seriously in Paris but wound up in Uruguay writing music for Hollywood Westerns and was found shot in an abandoned abattoir in Fray Bentos. As Greenaway envisions the crime, Rosa, captivated by the Western films he scores, is shot by two cowboys in the film as he projects it.

As anyone familiar with such Greenaway films as “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover� will by now have already suspected, “Rosa� is quite a nasty piece of work. Rosa is infatuated with his horse, which he keeps housed in a treadmill contraption. Rosa’s fiancee, Esmeralda, spends most of the opera nude, paints herself black to look like a horse and does a lot of neighing. In the end, she is stuffed into Rosa’s horse, the composer’s dead body draped over it, and set on fire in what just might be the most malevolent immolation scene in all of opera.

Predictably, Greenaway’s vision gets most of the attention in the theater. But what really makes “Rosa� so shocking (movies, after all, commonly display worse) is that “Rosa� is opera. While the artifice of the stage is always apparent, there is something absolutely devastating about the fact that those are opera singers, singing, while doing--or being the victims of--the unspeakable acts onstage.

“Rosa� is a genuine opera. Andriessen’s score is forceful, intricate and angry, and it doesn’t loosen its grip upon the listener for a second. But the relationship of music to the staging is a radical one. While the strong score drives the drama and has its own integrity, it also inevitably functions, under such extreme circumstances, as a heightened soundtrack, and its ambiguous nature produces an altogether new kind of operatic experience.

Glass’ “La Belle et la Bete�--which recently completed a European tour and will have its American premiere on Wednesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (with an eventual American tour, although no dates or cities have yet been set)--also takes its originality from reinterpreting the relationships between music and film. Here, Glass has simply set an opera to Cocteau’s screenplay, using singers and his ensemble players performing live to a screening of the film, turning the movie into an opera it had never intended to be.

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This too alters our perception of opera in several different ways at the same time. It obviously changes the film dramatically, removing not just Georges Auric’s original score but also the actors’ voices. It adds that special heightened effect that live music, synchronized to film, can have.

But the very nature of the project also profoundly influenced the kind of music Glass wrote, since his vocal lines had to be designed so that they could fit the delivery of the actors on the screen. The final result is supposed to make the original actors now seem like singers. And so the music itself becomes not exactly recitative but not song either. It is a paradoxical kind of singing that is entirely artificial in its relationship to the film (where one expects speaking), yet far less artificial than typical operatic singing since the rhythm and pacing of the vocal lines are so closely tied to the pacing of speech.

That fascinating area between speech and song is the most spectacularly and thoroughly investigated in Robert Ashley’s operas. These operas are, in fact, one great opera, “Ring�-sized in length and as elaborate a narrative. Their subject matter, however, is the utterly mundane. Their characters are bank tellers and lowriders and various other unlikely operatic subjects. But their highly stylized texts, in which the mundane becomes poetry, are presented in an incandescent, trance-inducing manner that transforms all it touches into a sort of futuristic chant.

Ashley’s vocal style is a unique sung speech. Singers are given certain harmonic areas and key pitches, occasionally melodies, but the singer also participates in creating his or her own vocal line and style. The “orchestra� is a richly and subtlety textured background blend. Voices often intertwine, with each other and with melody, with chant and with speech.

The four final operas in the project, the collective “Now Eleanor’s Idea,� conclude a trilogy that began with “Atalanta� and “Perfect Lives�; they may be performed live, as they were in an elegant, static staging at BAM last month, but are ultimately intended as an epic, serial television opera. Only the seven short “Perfect Lives� operas have been made as video thus far, but there is every indication that when the project is completed it will be the Joycean epic of the new video age.

John Moran, a young composer and protege of Philip Glass, also transforms television images into opera but in a far less elegant, more Generation X manner. He has already, before turning 30, produced an opera based on “The Jack Benny Show� and one on the life of Charles Manson that was originally also to include characters from “Hawaii Five-O� (until CBS refused him permission). They are operas that were written not for opera singers but for a theatrical troupe, the Ridge Theater. The musical voices are usually electronic. A favorite effect is the use of spoken voice (often from television) electronically altered and then repeated over and over, as the actors too repeat their motions.

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In “Mathew in the School of Life,� Moran, who plays Mathew, is a robotic creature who it seems is on his way to something messianic. (The first of its three intended parts had its premiere at the alternative space the Kitchen in October.)

So completely strange is the effect of the electronically produced score, with its constant allusions to popular culture, and this virtuoso troupe of faux opera characters, that it gives the impression of watching an entertainment from another planet. And yet, while there is not one aspect about Moran’s work that one could call traditionally operatic, there is the curious sense, in watching it, that it could be nothing but opera.

Compared to such experimentation, Tod Machover’s opera for Penn & Teller is little more than a Las Vegas stage act, and that is where it will surely wind up, when the magicians ultimately incorporate it into their regular repertoire. Penn & Teller do actually sing some lines but nothing you’d actually want to hear. Penn produces a pained kind of rock ‘n’ roll recitative, accompanying himself on his electric bass, while the usually silent Teller is an even more pained mysterious voice of Houdini from beyond the grave.

Yet this opera had its premiere in October as part of a prestigious and influential symposium offered by the Media Laboratory at MIT. Participants ranged from Laurie Anderson to Sony Chief Executive Officer Michael P. Schulhof to National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Jane Alexander. Even Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) dropped by on a campaign stop. The audience seemed to include just about every CD-ROM developer in the country.

Machover, a prominent composer at the Media Lab who organized the symposium, is one of the most interesting and inventive composers using new media--his concerto for hyper-viola (an electronically extended instrument) was performed two seasons ago by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. For this occasion he, with the help of his engineering colleagues, created a sort of throne that made music just by having someone wave an arm in the vicinity, something that inspired great histrionics from Penn.

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The significance of this opera is not just that it was seen, and rapturously enjoyed, by many of the people who will be responsible for the vessels culture comes in in the future but that Machover could actually create an opera--and one that had interesting music produced by the goofy machine that completely upstaged the amusing performers--intended to be part of a pop nightclub act.

For Machover, this was nothing more than a bit of good-natured slumming. He is a serious composer who has written a short, captivating opera based upon Philip K. Dick’s visionary science-fiction novel “Valis� and is now developing a new opera in collaboration with Peter Sellars. He is a highly versatile composer who seems to be able to incorporate Boulezian complexity and rock ‘n’ roll in his work. One of the most sophisticated composers working with technology today, he is part of a research organization with backing from the leaders in the media industry.

Opera, thanks to Machover, has a place in that corporate technological view of the future. He even heads what is called Opera of the Future Group. But while that is only one vision of the future, the implications are clear. Opera is an art form that is rushing into the future maybe faster and more aggressively than any time since Wagner proclaimed his the future. And, although you won’t find it in the big opera houses yet (Houston Grand Opera had originally commissioned the Machover-Sellars project, then backed down), the future is already here with some important and potentially lasting new work.