Are y’all familiar with the Organization for Transformative Works? It’s best known in internet circles as the parent nonprofit for the Hugo award-winning (yeah, you read that right) Archive of Our Own (AO3), an online database of fanfiction and other fanworks based on popular media. Although its profile is rising in recent years, fanfiction (and fan culture at large) often gets a bum rap. It’s perceived as the domain of silly tween girls who like to make their favorite handsome characters smooch, or insert idealized avatars of themselves into their favorite media. And you know what? There are plenty of those stories. There’s nothing wrong with a little self-serving creativity for one’s own entertainment, and tween girls deserve to have fun without being shamed for it. But just as slash and self-insert are part of a broader modern fan culture, that same culture can trace its roots to a long and storied artistic tradition of transformative work, of which opera is a prime example.
The first known work of what we would consider “opera” was Dafne, composed (mostly) by Jacopo Peri and with a libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini. Dafne was first performed in 1598, and was based on the Greek myth of Apollo courting the nymph Daphne. Even the format borrowed from preexisting traditions: the work is considered to be a contemporary effort at an ancient Greek dramatic format. Compelling new operas are composed all the time, but the works that spring to mind first when we think of “opera” fall mostly in the period from the late 18th century (Mozart, suave and farcical) to the late 19th (Wagner, horned helmets and screaming). Throughout the centuries-long life of the art form, though, the great composers have rooted their works in familiar soil: plays (The Marriage of Figaro); myths (the Ring Cycle); novels (Eugene Onegin); and history (Don Carlos) top a prodigious list of influences.
Much as it does for modern fanworks, opera’s foundation in existing canon influences its structure. Because audiences frequently come to a work already steeped in the narrative and its context, composers (and fic writers) can skip to the good stuff. This is how you get fic structures like Five Things, or the whirlwind first act of Don Carlos, in which the title character falls for, meets, woos, wins, and loses his love Elisabeth to another man (his father, but hey, this is opera we’re talking about - there’s gonna be drama). We know the background; instead of spending time on exposition, we can focus in on the emotion of the moment or the interplay between the characters, drawn out and elevated by the score. In Eugene Onegin, we know that Onegin will kill his friend Lensky in their duel; we can lean into the heartbreaking layers of their affection for one another as they express regret before even taking up their weapons. These narrative shortcuts may make for a stilted plotline by modern standards, but it allows us more time with what we came for: that good Greek katharsis, the brush against big emotions under controlled conditions.
Copyright law isn’t what it used to be in the Baroque era, and modern transformative works face regular resistance under the law and in the court of public opinion. The Organization for Transformative Works and the Archive of Our Own are out here doing the Lord’s work, upholding the right of everyone to engage in a dialogue with art that generates rich, nuanced interpretations (and, it should not be discounted, often features representation that’s sadly lacking in mainstream media). From its place among the canon of vaunted Western classical art forms, opera serves to remind us that transformative works are nothing new, and provides a great case study for the value that exists in this kind of dialogue.