Twitterdaemmerung

It's very likely the very first opera that's truly a child of the information age - and all that was needed for its inception were a few hundred tweets.

Tweets are the short messages, up to 140 characters in length, which users can post on the popular social networking and micro-blogging website Twitter.

Over the course of four weeks, the renowned Royal Opera House in London gave users of the service the opportunity to collectively write the libretto to what would eventually become "Twitterdaemmerung" - tweet by tweet and only with a little careful guidance from a "mystery director."

The opening lines were tweeted by the Royal Opera House: "One morning, very early, a man and a woman were standing, arm-in-arm, in London’s Covent Garden. The man turned to the woman and he sang ..."

Chaotic story line

And with that it was handed over to the Twitterers. The storyline soon showed evidence of a developing bird-theme - not surprising, considering the extent of tweeting involved. And, as may be expected from a libretto authored collectively by hundreds of people, the result is somewhat chaotic.

Broadly speaking, it revolves around a love triangle between two men and a woman and it involves a kidnapping, a talking cat and some biochemistry. However, it could have been much more confusing.

"Although the storyline has wandered a lot, people did have a sense of tying stuff back together," said John Lloyd Davies, the head of opera development at the ROH, who also turned out to be the mysterious director.

"It hangs together much better than I expected," he added. "I thought it would be utterly random and very hard to pull together. We have inserted narration links to try and knit it together a little bit more. And I think that the music helps to hold it together even when the story seems very chaotic."

Unconventional approach

The music, which the final version of the libretto was set to by composers Helen Porter and Marc Teitler, was partly original but also included some well-known tunes by opera staples such as Mozart and Wagner.

"It was a very fast process", said Porter. "We had just two days to write as much as we could and to set as much material as possible. It was great fun, and we didn't take it too seriously. We just got on with the job."

The performance of Twitterdaemmerung was as stripped-down as the writing process. Linked by a narrator, the scenes were performed by a mezzo-soprano and a baritone who sang all the various parts, indicating them by cardboard signs worn around their necks.

The instrumentation came from a solo piano and the entire performance took place in a secondary hall of the Royal Opera House with the audience squatting on the floor directly in front of the performers.

"Wagnerian with a bit of Doctor Who"

Judging from their postings on Twitter, most of the users who took part enjoyed the experience. One of them was Helen Woods: "It started off rather Wagnerian and turned into Gilbert & Sullivan, with a bit of Enchanted and some Doctor Who in between."

After the first performance however, she wasn't so sure.

"In the end nothing I wrote survived, except as ideas," she said, adding that she found the tweets to be heavily edited. "I suspect that the tweets used in the final version came from only a handful of people. The people's opera became a few people's opera. Still, it was an interesting experience."

Critics, however, were appalled at the thought of the centuries-old art form of opera morphing into a Twitterdaemmerung.

"This is nothing more than a gimmick, an attention-seeking missile launched by the Royal Opera House," said Norman Lebrecht, a London-based cultural analyst and writer.

"One of the missions of opera houses is to make them seem younger than they are," he said. "We can all have a nice little chuckle and say: 'Wasn't that a brilliant piece of marketing - now everybody has heard again of the Royal Opera House and the season - the real season - starts in two weeks - let's get on with business.'"

A chance to reach wider audiences

The Royal Opera House isn't passing off Twitterdaemmerung as a serious effort.

"Obviously none of us are making great claims for the quality," said John Lloyd Davies.

"It's a kind of pastiche game we're playing," he added. "The Internet is a big opportunity to reach a wider audience and to defuse the associations with the word opera and make people see that it can be a much more accessible art form."

Author: Julian Bohne in London (sp)

Editor: Sean Sinico