Tom Service disparages the attempts of opera houses to attract new audiences with "cool", youth-oriented events (Give me divas - not DJs, March 26). I am the co-creator of one of the works singled out for criticism by this hugely generalised polemic.
Service says that every time opera houses "try to tempt a demographic of young, ethnically diverse, trend-setting opera-lovers through their doors, they end up creating more problems than they solve". From its lofty white perch, this statement deliberately overlooks the coherent work in the major opera houses over the past 20 years in developing young audiences, and ignores many successful productions.
Service's intention is doubtless to provoke, but should we really accept this kind of lazy hyperbole: "Anyone who knows what opera houses are really capable of in full-scale productions of standard repertoire feels short-changed"? Anyone? Not this one actually. Nor the many who have enjoyed the productions Service so categorically condemns.
Glyndebourne's main-stage youth operas Misper and Zoë, and its Mozart hip-hopera School 4 Lovers (complete with DJ) - for all of which I wrote the librettos - enjoyed critical and box-office success. A hip-hop audience at Glyndebourne? Yes, it did happen, Tom, and they were thrilled.
The rise in community opera in the last two decades has also been astonishing - thanks to the education departments of the Royal Opera House, Glyndebourne, Opera North, Pimlico Opera and the Hackney Music Development Trust. These productions have introduced a whole new generation to opera, as well as allowing them to participate creatively.
Without all this work (in which I have been personally engaged since running opera workshops in prisons in the early 1990s), few young people in Britain - except the offspring of the privileged - would have had any interface with the art form whose purity Service cherishes. He is right to say that traditional opera is managing to find new audiences, but this is precisely because of all the work to widen access.
Equally, if he thinks the coming generations will be content to sit respectfully in public squares and cinemas in their smelly trainers and have the great classics beamed to them on large screens, then he underestimates the hunger of contemporary musicians to see their music realised on the dramatic stage.
Yes, there will be failures - experiments that disappoint or infuriate - but that is all part of the radical change taking place. Service would have us shut out these influences, and the audiences they bring, so that the opera houses remain a lock-in for those who share his 19th-century views. How risible this stance will seem in a hundred years, when the multiple traditions of popular and world music, including genres we haven't heard yet, are welcomed alongside the great favourites. Ultimately, Service's antipathy and trepidation towards the future is revealed by the fact that his article attacks a series of Royal Opera House events that has not yet even taken place.
· Stephen Plaice is a dramatist and librettist
cultureshock@ntlworld.com
