Christopher Allen Featured in Opera News Magazine
October 1, 2017
Photo by Gabriel Gastelum
““Opera is not dead. I’m just going to keep saying that.””
During a late afternoon lunch in St. Louis’s plush Tenderloin Room last June, Allen answered questions carefully and succinctly; his voice is soft, but his passion for opera is loud and clear. “The stories of our time need to be told. And the medium where I can help that is opera. That’s what we do—tell stories. Look at Ricky’s Grapes of Wrath, which we are doing now. Steinbeck’s novel was written in the ’30s, but there are so many things in it that are relevant today. How scary is that?
“Did you see Fellow Travelers at Cincinnati Opera? Greg Spears is a brilliant composer, and that piece is a perfect example of a story that is relevant to our time and needed to be told. I sat there and thought, ‘Wow, this is absolutely entertaining—people need to see this.’ And the reaction of that audience was astonishing. Opera is not dead. I’m just going to keep saying that. I suppose ‘Opera is dead’ is a good media headline, but I don’t know how true it is.
Read the full feature in Opera News.