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ABSTRACT
This article explores the impact of the digital world on opera and questions whether ‘digital’ is simply a fashionable bolt-on construct within the conventions of opera, or whether it represents a pivotal moment when a new order of transformative phenomena fundamentally changes our experience and cognition of performance. While the avant-garde will continue to challenge our intellectual and emotional psyche with or without digitization, a new breed of artists is currently reinventing the medium of opera, redefining notions of time and space, and blurring traditional distinctions between performer, audience and the fourth wall. Intelligent, informed and musically literate audiences exist, ready to engage with a plethora of alternate media forms, of which opera is not generally one. If subtle technologies enable us radically to alter opera, turning it into an entirely new state that can connect with such audiences, these technologies should be embraced. Some form of hybrid opera formulated from games play, thematic entertainments and reactive architecture might well repel traditional opera audiences, but it might represent the injection that I argue opera needs.