Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Steve Jobs Opera Premieres in Santa Fe This Saturday
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I positively endorse this negative comment about all this negativity!
When Bill Gates dies there will be days of mourning and articles praising his life and achievements. And then it will all go away. Because Steve Jobs died prematurely and at the height of his innovative powers he has become some sort of mythical character in the lexicon of tech.
Well Mason Bates wanted to do this and someone gave him a chance. You can't be a 70-year old (John Adams) or 80-year old (Philip Glass) opera composer with a long track record of successes without starting somewhere. I'm sure someone else said the same thing about them when they got started, that someone else should have been hired.
For what it's worth, Mason Bates has enjoyed some critical acclaim for his recent orchestral work with the San Francisco Symphony. Whether or not he can successfully make the jump to opera remains to be seen, but you can't write your second opera until you've written your first.
Only time will tell if this Steve Jobs opera will be part of the regular repertoire for major opera houses across the globe a hundred years from now.
The initial run of Georges Bizet's Carmen was not popular and drew lackluster interest from the opera audience. It would take generations of performances before it became one of the most popular operas in the world.
Best of luck to Bates and everyone involved in this production.
[doublepost=1500567981][/doublepost]
It depends, mostly on when and where they were written, and by whom. Also, an opera can be translated into a different language, usually in the language of the local audience, sort of like dubbing movie dialogue.
In fact, in major opera houses today, there are supertitles or a small seatback-mounted screen that offers dialog translation.
Opera over the centuries has had its time as a very popular form of entertainment, particularly in Italy and German speaking countries. Today, opera is more popular in Germany than anywhere else (including Italy). At least at the major opera houses, operas are typically performed in the original language they were written in.
Most operas were written in the primary language of the composer. Puccini and Verdi were Italians, they wrote in Italian, even if the subject matter/setting was elsewhere. Wagner was German, that is the language of his works. The very popular Carmen was written in French by a French composer Bizet, even though the story takes place in Spain.
There are many exceptions though. Mozart wrote operas both in German (The Magic Flute) and Italian (Le Nozze di Figaro). Rossini wrote most of his in Italian, but his last one Guillaume Tell was written in French based on a German story about a Swiss folk hero.
Here in the USA, some popular operas are often translated and performed in English, particularly around the winter holiday season to appeal to a wider audience.
Italian language operas are overrepresented because the opera world has three very prolific Italian composers: Rossini, Puccini, and Verdi. Many of their operas are beloved by today's opera audiences, so their works are performed frequently, thus giving the impression that most opera was written in Italian.
Last edited:
Why are we still mourning for this dead guy? He's dead. No one will replace him. Let's move on already.
You can be a lover of arts and a private person at the same time. Loving the arts does not require you to attend red carpet galas and balls overrun by paparazzi.
[doublepost=1500569362][/doublepost]
It's opera. Opera is about dead people.
An opera is a story set to music. Most of these stories have the same popular themes that are almost universal: success and failure, love and anger, loyalty and betrayal.
Sometimes the protagonist's antagonist is himself. This is very common in Western literature.
It's not about replacing Steve. Obviously, the people who write about him and discuss him after his death believe that there is something that people can learn from his story, his successes and failures.
In fact, dying of illness is a well-established way to end an opera, like Mimi dying of tuberculosis in Puccini's La Bohème, one of the most popular operas of all time.
If you are squeamish about dead people, don't read history or novels, don't go to an art gallery or museum, don't go into a church, temple, shrine.
Last edited:
Wait. So operas don't have happy endings like in the Broadway musicals? Well that's depressing of them!
Here's a basic opera: boy meets girl, they fall in love, everything is great. Then one of them suspects the other of infidelity, so they break up. There are two possible endings: 1.) it's just a misunderstanding, they get back together and throw a big party, or 2.) that unfaithful d--k/b--ch cannot go unpunished, so people die.Wait. So operas don't have happy endings like in the Broadway musicals? Well that's depressing of them!
That story basically covers maybe 80% of currently performed operas.
Sure, there are other side stories, different characters, different ways to get from the start to finish, but that's a typical opera.
More than anything else about opera, it's about the music. It's less about the staging/acting and not so much about the specific words.
That's why opera is not performed as a play (without the musical score). It also explains why people have been listening to opera recordings without the visuals for about a century, and why one can appreciate an opera without understanding the language it is being sung in. Much of the music of the best operas are used as instrumental pieces and often repurposed for everything from movies, cartoons, and television commercials.
An opera can't be good if the music is bad. The music makes the opera.
Opera is not a very popular art form for today's youth. A shame really, but I get that media consumption tastes change. Plus, I agree that most operas would be better with tighter editing and shorter performance times.
Last edited:
this summary makes me think of the play/movie "Rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead" in which Shakespeare's two minor Hamlet characters discuss their roles in life as if it were a major operatic show. Even so much as running into the "playrights". who describe all shows the following:
“We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.”
Not sure if serious or you don't realize the opera is about Steve Jobs' personal life.
Diversity in thought. Some might even say "Think Different."
Something Apple's upper management unfortunately severely lacks/doesn't support nowadays.
I realize that, but it's hard to say how a dead Steve Jobs would look back at his existence.
It is likely he would have disapproved of the libretto during his life, but who can say that he would hate it as a dead person?
That said, I'm not sure how factual opera really needs to be. Steve ran Pixar and I'm sure he understood that there's some dramatization in story telling, whether it be a animated short or a full-length opera. As I mentioned in another post, the most important thing about opera is the music.
We do know from his own words while he was alive that he liked music. Of course, we don't know if he would like this music or how much this libretto would detract from that appreciation, but it is a possibility that he would enjoy this.
Last edited:
And in one year we will have the updated The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs S+ Edition.
Which has a longer run time, a smaller stage and will leave you wondering about the future of Opera all together.
[doublepost=1500577897][/doublepost]The PT Barnum Megalomaniac of Tech, Mr. Jobs deserves an Opera about as much as WC Fields deserves Sainthood. Marketing genius...for sure. Hero? Not.
An opera based on the life of late Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs is set to open in Santa Fe, New Mexico this Saturday. Called The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, the opera will have its world premiere showing on July 22 at 8:30 p.m on the Santa Fe Opera's open-air summer stage.
The opera has been in development since 2015, created by electronica DJ Mason Bates and librettist Mark Campbell. It tells the story of the Jobs and his struggle to balance life, family, and work, and is set to a live orchestra accompaniment, guitar, natural sounds, and expressive electronics, including Apple's own devices.
Bates described one of the scenes to ABC News in an interview last week, highlighting the moment where Steve Jobs introduces the first iPhone before being exhausted by illness.The opera, which is approximately 90 minutes long, kicks off with a prologue in the garage of the Jobs family home in Los Altos, California, with Jobs father, Paul Jobs, gifting him a workbench.
From there, it jumps to 2007, where Jobs unveils the first iPhone, and then shifts back and forth between 2007 and Jobs' early years developing Apple. Campbell and Bates, who say the opera does not vilify or glorify Jobs, aimed for a non-chronological timeline dictated by emotion and memory. It will feature Jobs and several supporting characters like Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Chrisann Brennan, with each character highlighted through a unique series of sounds.
The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs has been financially backed by opera companies in San Francisco and Seattle, with guaranteed performances coming to both California and Washington in the future.
Since his death in 2011, Steve Jobs' life has been the subject of myriad books, movies, and documentaries, including an Aaron Sorkin-penned Danny Boyle-directed feature film that debuted in 2015.
Article Link: Steve Jobs Opera Premieres in Santa Fe This Saturday
thats seems extremely pathetic imho. i don't know how much - and if - ill be successful in life, but i kinda hope not enough for an opera to be composed...
