Art & Creativity Quote by Carlisle Floyd

Opera is forever getting written off as a museum piece: too grand, too expensive, too drenched in powdered wigs to speak to anyone with a Spotify account. Carlisle Floyd’s line pushes back with the calm insistence of someone who spent a lifetime proving the opposite. “It seems to me” is doing quiet rhetorical work here. He’s not thundering a manifesto; he’s refusing the premise that opera needs special pleading. The understatement is the point: opera doesn’t have to justify its existence any more than film, theater, or the novel.

Floyd’s subtext is also a defense of opera as a living language, not a fixed repertoire. As the composer of Susannah and other distinctly American operas, he understood that “relevance” isn’t an automatic property bestowed by prestige; it’s earned through subject matter, vernacular, and moral risk. His work put contemporary social pressure on an old form, dragging it out of courtly Europe and into the heat of American hypocrisy, religion, and rumor. So when he says opera is “just as relevant,” he’s arguing against a cultural hierarchy that treats some mediums as naturally modern and others as inherently obsolete.

The line reads like a rebuttal to arts funding politics, too. Opera is often the first target when budgets tighten, cast as elitist indulgence. Floyd reframes it as expressive necessity: a form capable of big feeling, public argument, and communal attention in an age that atomizes both.