Weep, Shudder, Die: Can Opera Talk? (Dana Gioia, December 16, 2025, Church Life Journal)
The term “folk opera” refers to the European genre of sung theater that borrows musical material of a specific region or people—melodies, modal scales, or dance rhythms—to create operas of popular appeal that reflect national identity. Bedřich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride (1866), for example, used Czech dance rhythms and melodic patterns that his regional audience recognized as their own. Gustav Holst’s opera, The Wandering Scholar (1934), likewise based its style on English folk music, though it never quotes any actual folk tunes. Gershwin used the term both to claim operatic status for Porgy and Bess and to acknowledge the work’s debt to African American music. A musicologist might debate how accurate the term “folk opera” is in this case. The pointed Gershwin/Heyward lyrics have a Tin Pan Alley polish that hardly feels folkloric. But it helps to know where the composer stood. The question matters because Porgy has inspired many subsequent works of American musical theater whose popular sources have complicated their identity.
The problem is older than Porgy. When Joplin published the score of Treemonisha, he subtitled it an “Opera in Three Acts,” although the work resembled operetta far more than traditional opera. Joplin understood that opera had greater prestige. The genre of a musical work establishes specific expectations for the audience, performers, and critics. Joplin wanted Treemonisha regarded as a serious work of art, not as a musical entertainment.
The concept of genre is important because it suggests what formal elements a composer and librettist might bring to new works. In American opera that question becomes complicated when creators want to incorporate elements from popular music and theater. It confuses the frame of reference. Porgy has spoken dialogue; it also has self-contained songs. Both of those features associate it with the Broadway musical. Traditional opera generally sets the entire libretto to music. How far can a composer depart from the conventional model of opera before the audience changes its perspective on the work? Must every word be sung for the work to be serious?
Critics tend to deny any work with substantial dialogue the title of opera. Real operas should have continuous music to guide the drama without relying on dialogue to move the plot. Depending on the context, a piece with spoken dialogue is labelled an operetta, musical, Singspiel, or zarzuela—all less exalted categories than opera. The criteria seem clear, but, in practice, they are applied inconsistently. Many classic musical works escape the downgrade.
No one refers to The Magic Flute as a Singspiel, even though it has a great deal of dialogue. Three factors elevate The Magic Flute to the status of opera. First, the score shows Mozart in the full maturity of his genius. Second, in addition to its low comedy, the work has a Masonic subplot with music of undeniable nobility. Third, The Magic Flute was Mozart’s last opera, and no one wants the divino maestro to have checked out writing an operetta. Likewise, Carl Orff’s Die Kluge (The Clever Girl) and Der Mond (The Moon), both of which have dialogue, earned the honorific by the brilliance of their music and the parable-like quality of their libretti. Based on two folk tales from the Brothers Grimm, the operas have a tough edge and dark vision that no one would associate with operetta or children’s theater.
There is a theoretical bias among critics that opera should be entirely sung