The Priests of Amun Go to the Opera

By Rodrigo Uchoa, special for Brazil Stock Guide

It was at the London Coliseum, and I had bought a ticket out of stubbornness rather than conviction. On the bill was Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, in Phelim McDermott’s production, complete with jugglers—actual jugglers from the Gandini Juggling Company—crossing the stage in slow motion while the pharaoh, a countertenor with an otherworldly voice, was stripped before his court and the ancient world dissolved into endless arpeggios.

I have no idea how long it lasted. I left the theater in a kind of suspended state, as if I had just stepped off a moving train. Glass’s music does not move in a straight line; it circles. And in circling, it persuades the brain to stop searching for the next chord and simply remain there, suspended. It did not feel like opera in the sense the art form’s traditional detractors use the word: overweight singers portraying characters half their age, shouting in Italian or German until everybody dies at the end. It felt like something else. At the time, it felt like the beginning of something.

There were reasons to think so. Glass was hardly alone. Thomas Adès brought Buñuel to the stage in The Exterminating Angel; George Benjamin wrote Written on Skin; Missy Mazzoli adapted Lars von Trier in Breaking the Waves; Nico Muhly put online predators at the center of Two Boys. Then came Terence Blanchard, the first Black composer staged by the Metropolitan Opera in its 138-year history, with Fire Shut Up in My Bones, and Jeanine Tesori’s Grounded, about a drone pilot.

McDermott’s production eventually crossed the Atlantic and achieved exactly what its admirers had hoped for at the Met: sold-out performances, younger audiences, cinema broadcasts, and fifteen-minute standing ovations. The lesson seemed obvious. Just make opera like this.

A decade later, the lesson looks far less straightforward.

In February, during a panel hosted by Variety and CNN at the University of Texas, Timothée Chalamet said he had no interest in working “in ballet or opera, where it’s like, ‘Hey, let’s keep this alive,’ even though nobody cares anymore.” He realized the damage about half a second too late and added: “Much respect to the ballet and opera communities.”

The backlash was transatlantic and impressively choreographed. The Royal Ballet and Opera told The Hollywood Reporter that ballet and opera “have never existed in isolation” and have shaped theater, film, contemporary music, and fashion. Soprano Isabel Leonard accused Chalamet of being shallow. The Met responded with a TikTok celebrating its backstage crews—which, to be fair, is exactly the sort of response you make when you understand where the argument is actually taking place.

The irritation was understandable, because the numbers are not encouraging. The Met sold just 72 percent of its available seats last season; subscriptions accounted for only 7 percent of ticket sales, down from 12 to 15 percent before the pandemic. In March, Moody’s downgraded the company’s debt to Caa1, seven notches below investment grade, citing a structural deficit and roughly $120 million drawn from its endowment since 2023. Twenty-two administrative positions were eliminated. Salaries were cut. The company announced its smallest season in sixty years: just seventeen productions.

At one point, management even floated the idea of selling the Chagall murals in the foyer—on the condition, notably, that the buyer leave them exactly where they are. There has also been talk of auctioning naming rights. One shudders to imagine a “McMet,” complete with golden arches painted across its arcades. Peter Gelb has staked much of the institution’s future on a potential Saudi Arabian partnership worth as much as $200 million, though the deal has yet to materialize.

Across the Atlantic, the Welsh National Opera lost 35 percent of its Arts Council England funding and is marking its eightieth anniversary with only one full-scale opera in repertory. English National Opera spent years negotiating its own survival. Covent Garden, facing its own financial pressures, is moving through 2026 without a major new opera premiere.

How does an art form respond to that reality?

By reinventing itself—preferably as loudly as possible.

Regietheater, the tradition of giving directors wide latitude to reinterpret works, continues to produce opera’s most entertaining scandals. Michael Mayer’s Rigoletto turned the court of Mantua into a 1960s Las Vegas casino, with the Duke in a tuxedo singing “La donna è mobile” like a Rat Pack crooner. Barrie Kosky has been dismantling Wagner’s Ring in London. Calixto Bieito has spent three decades being booed with remarkable consistency. In São Paulo, the Municipal Theatre will present the Latin American premiere of Luigi Nono’s Intolleranzain 2026, with visual artists Nuno Ramos and Eduardo Climachauska directing a story about a migrant worker who ends up in a concentration camp.

Then there is the digital front, where things become slightly embarrassing and surprisingly effective. Opera houses and singers have discovered Reels. Experiments in “TikTok opera,” designed for one-minute vertical videos, have begun to appear.

None of this is as heretical as it sounds. Mozart premiered The Magic Flute not in some grand aristocratic court theater, but in Emanuel Schikaneder’s suburban Theater auf der Wieden, with affordable tickets, bawdy jokes, and audiences that laughed loudly. And The Marriage of Figaro, now treated as untouchable cultural property, grew out of a play banned by Louis XVI because it portrayed a servant outsmarting his master.

Opera spent two centuries as popular entertainment before deciding it was sacred.

While the Met calculates the market value of its Chagalls, São Paulo’s Theatro São Pedro is preparing the world premiere of Conceição Evaristo: An Escrevivência Opera for Brazil’s Black Consciousness Day on November 20. The work celebrates the eightieth birthday of the writer Conceição Evaristo—author of Becos da Memória, the daughter of a washerwoman, a schoolteacher before she became a novelist, and the creator of escrevivência, a form of writing rooted in lived experience, memory, and collective history.

The score is by Juliana Ripke, the text by Evaristo herself, and the staging by Julianna Santos. There will be five performances, the last coinciding with the author’s birthday.

It is a medium-sized company with a modest budget doing exactly what larger institutions insist, in their annual reports, they must do.

The new audience, it should be said, does exist. It simply behaves differently from the old one. The average age of individual ticket buyers at the Met has fallen from 50 to 44 since the pandemic. What disappeared was the subscriber: the patron who reserved seven evenings in September without knowing exactly what he would see. His replacement buys a single discounted ticket the night before because he saw a clip on his phone. He is younger, more diverse, and infinitely less reliable from a cash-flow perspective.

And it is worth remembering that Akhenaten also believed that doing things differently would be enough. He abolished the old gods, built a new capital in the desert, and championed an artistic style full of soft bellies and elongated skulls. His revolution lasted seventeen years.

The moment he died, the priests of Amun returned to their temples, restored the old gods, erased his name from the walls, and struck him from the king lists as though he had never existed.

The uncomfortable detail, for those of us moved by this story in the dark of an opera house, is that the audience is not Akhenaten.

The audience is the priesthood of Thebes.

We rise to applaud the revolution, buy the T-shirt—and then renew our subscription to the old La Traviata.

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