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1981
Volume 17, Issue 2
  • ISSN: 1750-3159
  • E-ISSN: 1750-3167

Abstract

When Pete Townshend decided to call his band’s 1969 record a ‘rock opera’, he established a phrase equally easy to interrogate and to take for granted. And yet that provocation remains a remarkably fertile framing device that challenges conventional understandings of both ‘rock’ and ‘opera’. This article analyses as a conscious attempt to engage the conventions of the traditional opera medium and as a postmodern provocation that challenges the limitation for fixed media to inspire active engagement in its audience. As a work explicitly the framing of entertainment, engages an ontological contradiction – between performed music and its conventions on the one hand, and the social signification of an ambitious story about liberation on the other – that is reflected in the work’s liminal connection to both the commercial and artistic worlds. The article considers the opera from several angles: as a libretto, meaning its structured story; as a score, meaning the recording which any subsequent performance is expected to reference if not reproduce; and as performance. I focus on ’s first stagings: The Who’s own during their album tour (which included a show at the Metropolitan Opera House), the 1971 Seattle Opera production and Ken Russell’s film. I suggest that the gambit of a ‘rock opera’ allows us to engage the essential question of whether an audience can ever be truly activated in a landscape where the slipperiness of meaning is too often codified into empty signifiers of the very activation it ostensibly wishes to produce.

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2023-10-24
2026-04-11

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/content/journals/10.1386/smt_00119_1
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‘Nothing like it in any amusement hall!’: Opera, audacity and the audience in The Who’s Tommy
Studies in Musical Theatre 17, 73 (2023); https://doi.org/10.1386/smt_00119_1
/content/journals/10.1386/smt_00119_1
/content/journals/10.1386/smt_00119_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): Jacques Rancière; Ken Russell; musical theatre; Pete Townshend; popular music; postmodern; rock opera

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