Throughout time, many operas have been written which, due to the nature of things, distracts from their quality, instead leaving them behind for other, newer alternatives. However, thanks to opera’s dedicated fanbase, including everyone from laymen to academics to performers and beyond, many operas which didn’t get their fair shot are given new life after their premiere. Many of the operas throughout history have come under new investigation, operas like Giacomo Meyerbeer’s 1836 ‘grand opera,’ namely “‘Les Huguenots ,” Giacomo Puccini’s less-successful second opera, “Edgar ,” and the operas from the late-1950s onwards, opera’s ‘post-war’ era to the turn of the 21st-century to the very present, are now being looked at with greater clarity for their importance.
From the experimentation of the late-20th century avant garde when techniques like serialism, expressionism, new simplicity, spectralism, Neo-Romanticism, and even aleatoricism were combining to form radically new ways of composing. However, despite the sheer amount of progress made in compositional methods after 1945 to the developing present, one of the most interesting is our interest in reviving forgotten, long since shelved, and generally underperformed operas from the past, giving them new life for a radically changed world and an equally changed audience. In this article, we’ll look at three operas which, thanks to revivals, gained new ground in the world of contemporary opera history.