We have opera buffa, opera seria, soap opera, horse opera (my father’s term for a cowboy picture) and now an opera written and performed in Klingon. Some people in Holland, perhaps unemployed in the current depress….I mean, downturn have prepared a musical work that will feature not merely a libretto in that other worldy language but also some special instrucments crafted just for this work. An invitation was sent to the Klingons to attend but so far, at least, no answer has been received. People, on and off, have been lamenting the decline of opera as an art form, but that can’t really be the case, since composers are churning them out like nobody’s business. We’ve had The Great Gatsby, Streetcar Named Desire, something Lord of the Rings-ish with elves and whatnot. A lot of them just sink from sight after the premiere, but a couple have managed to elbow their way onto the regular repetoire and are performed with some regularity;Little Women, for instance, by Mark Adamo. Well, we’ll see or hear, or see and hear, since this is opera after all how the Klingon opus fares.
By the way, the fact that many new operas don’t seem to succeed is nothing unusual and certainly no sign of the composer’s deficincies. Many of the famous opera greats wrote plenty of operas that didn’t go anywhere. Sometimes it takes a while for a piece to be discovered.