The hitch in changing the rules

One of the earliest and most important elements of human development, according to Jean Piaget, is learning how to play fair within the agreed-upon rules of a game. In other words, we learn how to function within a context. Children who wrestle with their parents learn what is allowed and what isn’t allowed at very early ages. No eye gouging.

As we continue to develop we continue to play with agreed-upon rules. There is no game without them. Poker night at a neighborhood home is defined by “house rules.” Everyone in the game agrees on the rules and plays by the rules. Anyone caught outside the agreed-upon structure is out of the game. In ages gone by a more violent solution was reserved for those who cheated at cards.

A democratic society is based, more or less, on agreed-upon rules. A dictatorship is not. The citizens in a dictatorship are forced to play a game based upon rules they did not consent to. Neither are they allowed to disagree with the rules.

Game playing sounds as if it is a trite and unsubstantial concept but the fact of the matter is that all of human interaction is based on the application of agreed-upon rules to a situation and then a competition or collaboration ensues.

That is not to say that rules don’t change. They change all the time. Every year the NFL, NBA, MLB, PGA etc. have meetings to discuss the rules of the sport and how they should be changed based on the current state of competition.

Congress, state legislatures, and local legislatures do the same exact thing. The rules of government are discussed and changed based on the current situation — ideally. Sometimes the rules are changed without proper discussion and authorization in order to benefit a particular entity or industry.

We don’t like that.

It goes deep. It goes all the way back to our first memories of wrestling with a parent. It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game. That is the essence of a healthy society.

At one point the rules of the opera were well understood by a large portion of the audience. This audience enjoyed understanding the fach system, voice types, legato singing, archetypes, performance traditions, etc. That audience has become a smaller and smaller percentage over the past several decades.

It is difficult to define when and where the rules of opera began to change. One thing is for certain, it was after World War II. Opera productions began taking on poorly defined psychological representations which have alienated vast swaths of opera fans.

Singers such as Pavarotti began eroding the fach system by singing roles which were financially beneficial to opera houses but were outside the repertoire of his voice type. The agreed-upon rules of voice types were ignored in order to benefit a specific entity or organization.

When Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt, and Richard Wagner changed the rules of music in the mid 19th Century they wrote hundreds of thousands of words explaining and defending their position while attacking the established position. Patrons were free to choose sides and to discuss the merits of the new rules. There was an attempt at creating agreed-upon rules for the new game of the new music.

Today audience members who used to know the rules are increasingly alienated and new audience members simply don’t know any rules whatsoever. The rules have changed but no one has bothered to define the new rules.

Imagine trying to play a game of basketball without knowing the rules—lack of skills aside. How many times would you double dribble or "travel" or be in “the key” too long and be forced to give up the ball? How do you respond to repeatedly not understanding the rules and constantly feeling like an idiot?

This is what is happening, by and large, at opera houses. Patrons pay for tickets and then feel like idiots because they don’t know the rules of the game. I’m making a very broad generalization here. Established audiences respond with something like, “That isn’t opera”, while new audiences struggle to understand the rules.

If we don’t know the rules to a game how are we ever going to become good at playing it?