(In truth, this should be called “Not Very Compatible Mediums,” but I couldn’t resist a fancy-sounding, two-word heading…)

In my first post on this series, I commented that sci-fi is often critiqued for its less-than compelling characters. In general, this stems from where sci-fi comes from; it’s about questioning SOCIETY, not people, and this goes against opera’s priorities as a medium.

In Music History class, we learn that most operas feature two types of sung music. There are recitatives (recits), which have a drier, more speechlike texture, and arias, which are full-blown songs. The rule of thumb is that recits are for plot and arias are for emotion. Recit might be used to describe an upcoming wedding, until the bride-to-be has a meltdown on stage by singing an aria about how she doesn’t want to be married. Arias are, in general, the memorable parts of the opera. Yet, they’re about character-building and emotion, which don’t match up with sci-fi’s priorities.

This also explains why, of all the genres I’ve covered, gothic horror is the most likely to appear in opera. As a reminder, common gothic horror tropes include humanity versus evil, melodrama, damsels in distress, and romance. The emotionally charged grandeur of gothic horror matches opera much better than any “What If?” genre.

But, we haven’t accounted for every type of sci-fi. Take Star Wars as an example. Star Wars is soft sci-fi and (theoretically) the Skywalker Saga; that makes it definitively character-based (and let’s be honest, the political/society-based shenanigans that happen in the prequel trilogy are part of why everyone hates those movies). So why doesn’t something like Star Wars show up in opera? Heck, Star Wars is even called a “space opera,” so it feels like a major oversight not to have the opera version floating around.

I repeat the same argument: the mediums are not very compatible. Let’s pretend we’re trying to make Star Wars into an opera. Which scenes would we make into dramatic arias? There are several iconic moments one can imagine being sung: “I am your father” from Empire Strikes Back as well as the “high ground” speech from Revenge of the Sith come to mind. But opera isn’t known for the best-paced storytelling; some arias are five minutes or longer and only cover a few lines of text. Without intensive cutting, a two-hour Star Wars film could easily become six hours or more in opera-form, and that’s a lot to ask of an audience.

There’s also the fact that big space operas like Star Wars require massive set-pieces. How would you adapt Luke shooting down the Death Star? Even if you had the budget to make giant ship props fly around the stage by wires, you’d have to add words and singing to a scene that’s mostly silent. And to fit an intergalactic battle on stage, you’d probably have to use projected images… at which point you might wonder, why not just put the whole thing on the silver screen?

From this, we can conclude that sci-fi opera would be generally difficult to make reality. What about dystopian fiction? Like sci-fi, dystopian fiction is usually centered around society, which makes it a less-than ideal match for the opera medium. And to make matters worse, modern culture has been inundated by Young Adult (YA) fiction. Nowadays, when people hear the term “dystopia,” they tend to think of The Hunger Games, the Divergent series, The Maze Runner, and all the other YA series that sprang up in their shadows. And these works are just as difficult to bring to the stage as Star Wars, at least when it comes to large action set-pieces.

In short, classic works of dystopian fiction are antithetical to opera’s goals, and modern works of dystopian fiction might not be worth to effort it would take to adapt them for the stage. What about horror? Look forward to those musings and more in the next post…