What is...'Popera'?

This column appears in The Times today.

ONE OF today’s top-selling music albums is by a group called Il Divo. Its output comprises operatic versions of popular songs, and its target audience appears to have been carefully researched. As The Sun puts it: “They’re good-looking, have oodles of charm and a debut album that’s flying off the shelves but there’s one more thing pop opera quartet Il Divo are hoping for — female fans falling at their feet.”

Il Divo is the latest confection in a line that encompasses such tripping names as Andrea Bocelli and Opera Babes. The collective term for these performers is “popera”.

An irresistible target for this series on buzzwords, popera denotes the output of classically trained performers who, having made a commercial virtue of what would otherwise be a problematically inverse relationship between personal decorativeness and technical proficiency, apply a melodic gloss to popular music and a magniloquent treatment to light arias.

Critical comment on the genre has been, on the whole, unburdened by solicitude. Faced with popera, it would be easy and tempting to join in the derision, draw slighting inferences about popular artistic appreciation, and issue jeremiads about the state of musical education. So I shall do all those things.

The managing director of EMI Classics UK justifies popera, and its close relation “crossover”, as “trying to get great melody to as large an audience as possible”. But melody is not music. It is one of the vehicles of music. The Western musical tradition is about the development of shifting relations between melody, harmony and musical form.

Popular music, by contrast, is almost entirely about repeated melody, without musical development. It depends for its potency on an immediate sensory impact on the listener. Classical music that does the same thing is no longer classical music. Opera with the excision of the drama of which the aria is an integral part is doubly diminished. Getting popera to as large an audience as possible is an aim of startlingly attenuated ambition. Being, in all essentials, pop music, it has already got there.

There are critics who, in affectedly decrying popular taste and confusing aesthetic judgments with antediluvian political prejudices, only make it more difficult to defend the claims of art. The task is important nonetheless. Entertainment confirms us in our immediate emotional states. Art takes us beyond those states, by forcing us to consider how we are affected by its formal properties.

If popera has any rationale, it is that this is a false and stuffy distinction, and that classical music needs to be stripped of its forbidding complexity to be more widely appreciated.

In practice, a music business intent on feeding us the same nourishment will produce only the same old manure.