Politics & Power Quote by John Eaton

Eaton is pitching opera not as a rarefied European import, but as a civic project that has to earn its place in an American public sphere. The word doing the real work is "responsibility": he frames clarity as an obligation, not a courtesy. That’s a politician’s instinct. Art becomes a matter of public service, and the producers are cast less as auteurs than as stewards managing comprehension.

The line also smuggles in a quiet anxiety about audiences. "At any rate" and "American audience" signal a perceived gap: opera, with its foreign languages, stylized conventions, and aristocratic associations, risks reading as illegible in a culture that prized practicality and suspicion of elitism. Eaton’s solution is not to simplify the music but to mobilize "visual elements of all kinds" - staging, gesture, scenery, costuming - as an interpretive apparatus. He’s describing theater as a translation engine.

There’s subtext in the insistence on "exactly what is going on". Opera thrives on excess: characters sing instead of speak, time dilates, emotions bloom into spectacle. Eaton wants the spectacle to point, not drift. That desire for legibility matches a mid-19th-century American mood: rising mass audiences, expanding print culture, and a push to domesticate Old World forms into something democratically digestible. His framing anticipates a modern argument about accessibility - except it’s less about inclusion as a moral good and more about preventing culture from looking like insider trade.