Why Do Old Operas Sound Better? Schirmer’s Blunt Answer

Ask a conductor why audiences still flock to Tannhäuser and La Traviata but rarely to contemporary works, and most will offer a careful, diplomatic response. Ulf Schirmer gave three words: “They sound better.”
It is the kind of statement designed to start arguments. Coming from a conductor with over forty years at the podium, world premieres of new operas on his record, and a lexicon of 26,000 opera titles on his shelf, it demands to be taken seriously.
The Sound of Escape
Schirmer’s reasoning goes deeper than personal taste. It reaches into the function art once served — and what it has chosen to become instead.
The great operas of the 19th century offered audiences something the world outside could not: escape. Gods and grandeur. Royalty and ruin. Worlds constructed entirely from fantasy, existing at a deliberate remove from the exhaustion and disappointment of daily life. Tannhäuser, La Traviata, Don Giovanni — these works did not mirror their audiences’ lives. They lifted those audiences out of them.
“You go into an opera house and you want to see gods,” Schirmer says. “You want to see rich people and fantastic worlds. It has nothing to do with our daily life. That is the reason for the success of the old operas.”
The escape was never literal, of course. The 19th-century audiences watching kings fall and lovers die were no closer to that world than we are. But the distance was built into the aesthetic itself — aspirational, mythological, gloriously unreal.
When Art Decided to Confront Instead of Comfort
Something changed. Gradually, and then decisively, contemporary art shifted its priorities. Where opera once offered a door out of daily life, much of what followed held up a mirror to it. Ugliness, confrontation, and rawness became virtues. Accessibility became suspect.
Schirmer traces this shift with a historian’s eye and a practitioner’s frustration. He draws a striking parallel: two hundred years ago, classical music was entertainment on a high level — pleasurable, communal, and thrilling, much as cinema is today. Ask someone whether La Traviata belongs in the same category as a great film, and most would hesitate. Schirmer would not.
“The contemporary arts,” he observes, “would deny if you said they do good entertainment. They want to save the world. Entertainment is a low region.”
A Plea to Contemporary Composers: Don’t Fear the Audience
There is something quietly courageous in that admission — an acknowledgment that the drive to be taken seriously has cost contemporary opera something irreplaceable.
Schirmer is not without sympathy for living composers. The pressures they navigate are real. Popular music commands vast audiences; serious composition risks irrelevance if it sounds too accessible. The temptation to confront, to challenge, to signal artistic seriousness through difficulty — he understands it.
But understanding something and endorsing it are not the same.
His counsel to contemporary composers is direct: “Don’t fear the dialogue with the audience.”
Not a plea for simplicity. Not a call to lower the bar. Simply a reminder that music was always made for someone — and that the fear of that someone is its own form of artistic failure.
What might opera become if it stopped being afraid of the people it was made for?