Sendak’s Wild Things and Opera’s Anteriority

Maurice Sendak, one of the twentieth century’s most distinctive artist-scenographers, brought images to life with particular directness by staging his own storybook, Where The Wild Things Are (1980). A collaboration with the British composer Oliver Knussen, the opera exemplifies a phenomenon that has largely escaped scholarly attention: contemporary opera’s ongoing preoccupation with setting children’s stories. This is a striking phenomenon, given the highly dissonant, complex idioms of contemporary classical music. It relates to a broader question: whether opera’s affinity with children’s material is distinct from its general association with magical subject-matter. The operatic realization of Sendak’s storybook offers ways of addressing these issues. Sendak’s project facilitated a simple solution to the problem of transferring artistic capacities in two-dimensional media onto the three dimensions of the stage. As with other sets, he evoked an archaic stage design through numerous painted drops, which reproduced rather than renounced the flatness of the page, helping to reinvent onstage the experience of childhood reading. This drew attention to how audiences approach the opera’s flights of fancy—and, by extension, opera’s fantastical realmmore generally—with the imaginative leaps of faith that characterize childhood reading. Opera scholars have recently examined the form’s strongassociations with pastness, or, in David Levin’s words,with a “determination to regain a lost anteriority.” Sendak’s operatic storybook explores an overlooked instantiation of that “anteriority”: childhood. Through the sound-worlds of compositions such as Knussen’s, the contemporary opera-house becomes a space for rediscovering, with or without regressing, the darker implications of such stories.