We live in a society that processes information through controversy. Like bats, who bounce sound off walls to find their way, we bounce ideas off the sounding board of conflict to find where we stand. On television, competition or conflict structures almost every popular program. Fears of the body are processed through contests in programs such as Fear Factor. Courtroom dramas structure anxieties about crime and divorce. Even a cable-television channel devoted to animals has borrowed the late-afternoon “people’s court” model to dramatize the care of pets.

Yet in the world of opera, controversial, topical subject matter seems all but taboo. John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer, with its focus on Palestinian–Israeli tensions, is a case in point: arguably one of Adams’s strongest works, it has languished in the U.S. since its premiere in 1991.

Can an art form that is averse to controversy survive in this kind of society? Doesn’t it risk seeming to be in the care of dull people, equivocators and cowards? There is an argument, a powerful argument, that opera should stand apart from the baser trends of society. If the larger culture thrives on simple oppositions, on sound bites, not serious discussion — on voices talking over each other at a fevered pitch — then opera, and art, should go elsewhere. So it seems that opera occupies a place of refuge in the lives of its fans — a safe, quiet place, genteel in tone, removed from the rubbish of television and its relentless assaults.

Other voices argue that standing apart from mainstream culture is an inherently radical act. For them, art is rebellion against a culture of ephemera. The relevance of art is its irrelevance, and in that lies its strength. Jonathan Miller, who has created some of the most trenchant modern resettings of classic operas, once said that he considered relevance “highly overrated” as a concept. If art doesn’t teach us about the other, about things that are foreign and unfamiliar, what good is it? In terms that sound remarkably familiar from arguments about the role religion should play in a material society — a bulwark against modernity, some have argued — philosophers are making arguments about music on the margins. Julian Johnson, a composer and aesthetic philosopher, argues that classical music should oppose itself to the commercial and the dehumanization of daily life. “The high value accorded to art, classical music included, derives from its opposition to the social devaluation of the particular and individual,” he wrote in Who Needs Classical Music? For some critics, the opposite of popularity isn’t obscurity but truth.

Arguing about the relevance of classical music has been a staple of well-intentioned conference panels for two decades at least. These conversations usually follow the same path. There is outrage at the very notion that the question should have to be asked. There are new and fancy definitions of relevance that turn the whole problem on its head. But there really isn’t argument. Opera never was central to American society, and it never will be. No politician will cite an example from opera in a speech to the nation. No late-night comic will joke about the foibles of the opera house in his monologue. No matter what happens to the audience, whether it shrinks, stabilizes or grows, opera is marginal within American culture. Even a supposed boom in internet downloads or online sales, if it happens, is unlikely to change opera’s cultural status: a peculiar entertainment that appears in the larger popular culture mostly as a subject for caricature. The only argument about its relevance is whether relevance matters. If opera matters to a few people, deeply and with transformative power, perhaps that’s relevance enough.

But the curious thing about opera is that, as it became marginal, it didn’t seem to enjoy any of the benefits of its marginality. Our culture is experiencing an atomization of authority and meaning, at every level. Newspapers, the nightly news, museums, academia, even science — almost every sector of our intellectual culture is losing mainstream authority. Decades ago, opera was the canary in the coal mine. Now the panic that many have felt for a long time in the classical-music world has spread throughout the rest of the society. Newspaper circulations are declining. Scientists have lost the ability to guide discussions of public policy. Academia is increasingly vulnerable to political and partisan attack. There is talk of doing away with the once revered position of the nightly news anchor — a small but very symbolic change in the way Americans think about the idea of a mainstream, collective understanding of the world.

Some institutions will weather this change and thrive. But it’s a matter of finding a new voice in a world without central, or mainstream, authority. As newspapers have suffered declines, internet news thrives. In the recording business, small labels with interesting repertoire and a firm sense of their niche have forged ahead, while the large labels flounder. Much was made of Plácido Domingo’s recording of Tristan und Isolde, predicted by many observers of the business to be the last major studio opera recording to be made. But that’s certainly not true. It may be the last major studio opera recording by a major label. Operas will continue to come from small firms, and perhaps no one will really notice the loss.

With marginality comes freedom — or at least the possibility of freedom. Small dance companies that exist without large front offices, huge donor lists and regular engagements at major arts centers have the freedom to make dance pretty much as they see fit. Again, newspaper executives may scratch their heads about circulation loss. But the problem may well have nothing to do with reading habits or daily routines, or changing modes of information exchange. The real problem is that the value placed on objectivity is dwindling, and the pleasure taken in freewheeling, wildly interpretive understandings of the world is growing.

From the margins, one can speak freely. The so-called blogosphere is the most salient example of this. But this basic rule has truth in the arts as well. As symphony executives (and often opera executives as well) have pursued the shrinking mainstream audience for their art forms, they find themselves ever more constrained by a mainstream taste that is only narrowing. But artists, authors and even some presenters who have no particular desire for a huge following indulge in freedom with often bracing results. Monologuists, performance artists and self-published writers all have what every artist supposedly considers essential — real freedom for expression. And marginality doesn’t necessarily mean you have to think small. Two of the more celebrated movies in recent years, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, share at least this: the filmmakers weren’t interested in tempering their message to build the largest audience possible. Instead, they said, “Come with us, if you like — and if not, that’s fine too.”

But look at opera. Even from the margins, it never found a new voice of freedom. If anything, it has taken upon itself ever greater creative strictures. In this country, the experimental opera director, scourge of traditionalist audiences more than a decade ago, has largely been run off the stage. New operas continue to come forth, but they have become essentially mainstream product. Composers often look to the established American literary canon for librettos. The favored music style is increasingly anodyne. The presence of big-name stars in major roles is as much about reassuring nervous audiences as it is a healthy sign of faith in new work.

There’s a strange nervousness that is telegraphed to audiences, often unintentionally, by the opera world. Six years ago, the creative team of Dead Man Walking — one of the starriest new American operas in decades — assembled to assure the world that their work, about the death penalty, wasn’t really about the death penalty. In interviews before opening night, the librettist and composer wanted to keep the focus on the drama, not the politics. Librettist Terrence McNally said in the L.A. Times, “What first attracted me to it was not where you stand on the death penalty” and denied it was an “issues” opera. The opera, the first composed by rising star Jake Heggie, garnered mostly rapturous reviews and was subsequently seen at several other major American companies. But the chance for its creators to make a larger moral statement about an issue that isolates the U.S. from most of the world was lost.

The saddest part of the efforts by the creators of Dead Man Walking to deny political meaning was the lack of faith in opera it suggested. They may have believed firmly that art should be above politics. But what the public hears is that art is afraid of politics. And again, in a country that is becoming ever more a place of conflict and controversy, that suggests weakness. It’s not even fair to the nature of opera, which in times past has shown itself more than capable of maintaining strong political and moral views. Verdi stood against reactionary clerical forces, and for the Risorgimento; Beethoven dramatized revolutionary sentiments in Fidelio; and a strong and noble pacifism runs through the works of Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett. The question one wanted to ask the creative team for Dead Man Walking was this: Why not take a stand? What have you got to lose?

Decades before social critics were diagnosing the fragmentation and atomization of culture, and cultural authority, opera was already going down that path. The stewards of the opera profession might well be expected to have some particular wisdom about what they have learned. But even wisdom is missing, perhaps because there has been no honest acceptance of the great errors that were made. Paramount among these was the idea that opera could be enjoyed without any particular understanding of the art form. From custodians eager to recruit new audiences, the message went out: opera is a transparent medium, no different in the challenges it poses from the cinema or television. This was absurd, of course, but it seemed to offer promise for bringing in the uninitiated. Fear not the arcana of the art form — just listen.

This message took many forms: Come as you are; projected titles will open all doors. Yet as we look at what has happened in the larger culture, there’s a more sinister subtext to the message. Essentially, the opera world was one of the first places in our culture that said there’s no shame in ignorance. Again, it seemed like an obvious, populist gambit to soothe the nervous newcomer.

But think of the cultural repercussions of this same message writ large. There’s no shame in ignorance. Turn on the television, or the radio, and you hear people preface political opinions with the statement, “I don’t know much about this, but….” Politicians now eschew displays of actual knowledge, fearful that they will alienate the electorate. An uninformed but folksy intuition is the only safe demonstration of intellectual engagement. Once you separate shame and ignorance, there’s no particular need to hide ignorance, or reduce it, in yourself or in others. The cultural loss is huge, and the danger this syndrome poses to a democracy is inestimable.

Within the arts, the loss is primarily to the pleasure of the audience. Without an understanding of the mechanics and history of the art form, it becomes very difficult to fix any particular performance in the memory. Baseball fans can spend hours citing statistics and debating the fine points of a big game. For the casual operagoer, there is no context. If the basic structure of a piece of music isn’t known, you can’t point to a musical event. You can’t say where the pitch went astray, or an ornament was inserted or a money-note interpolated. You can’t make comparisons, or sustain much of a conversation about the evening. Opera becomes a generalized, generic experience. And people aren’t necessarily willing to invest hours at a time in something that can’t be effectively retained, analyzed, compared and argued about.

In that sense, opera becomes ephemeral in a way that other pastimes — say baseball — aren’t. Jonathan Miller is probably right, that relevance is a highly overrated concept. What matters is not some connection between the real world and the art form but the ability of the art form to be a forum for human passion. People will remain intensely loyal to things that anger and disappoint them once that passion is there. They will continue to watch beloved teams lose night after night. They continue to attend churches they consider medieval or misguided. To a certain degree, these odd loyalties are based on a sense of necessity — the feeling that they can’t drop out of the conversation, because nobody around them is dropping out. To a certain degree, they continue to go because they’d feel guilty not going.

Opera has, in many ways, failed to develop this larger sense of necessity and loyalty in its audience. There’s a great deal of desire to see the established stars but very little sense of duty to hear the new crop of singers. The same is true for new operas. And even when the effort is made, so much of the public-relations process that surrounds the opera world is an effort to reassure the audience that nothing dangerous is going to happen. Classic productions. Classic works.

For opera to survive as an intellectually engaged art form, it needs to rethink its identity. Without an enemy — whether it’s apathy or ignorance or moral callousness — opera will stagnate. That’s not the way we’re used to thinking about art, of course. It is meant to uplift, to entertain, or to tenderly coax us to catharsis. But without an enemy, there’s no fight, and if an art form has no fight in it, who really cares, in the end?

PHILIP KENNICOTT is culture critic for The Washington Post.

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