Reconsidering CNN Opera: The Archival Dimensions of Documentary Opera History

Amidst the growing trend of documentary operas, the moniker “CNN opera” has returned to common parlance. A reference to the first television channel to provide twenty-four-hour news coverage, the term is often used in both critical reviews and scholarship to gesture towards works that draw on topical news stories as subject material. Since the 1990s, “CNN opera” has played a significant role in taxonomizing works such as Nixon in China (1987) and X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X (1986). In her monograph, American Opera (2001), Elise Kirk dedicates a chapter to the ways so-called CNN operas immortalize heroes as operatic protagonists. As recently as 2023, critics have used the term as a generic categorization and explanatory descriptor in reviews for publications such as The New York Times and Opera News. However, despite its ubiquitous usage, the term itself has yet to receive critical scrutiny.

This presentation interrogates the term “CNN opera,” contextualizing its denigrating coinage by music critic Peter G. Davis in his 1995 New York Magazine article, “Headline Muse.” In response to Davis, I reframe these works under the broader concept of “documentary operas,” placing opera in dialogue with the televisual aesthetic and generic affordances of documentary film and theater. To illustrate how considering opera through the lens of the documentary opens new methodological and aesthetic possibilities, I turn to Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels’ Pulitzer-prize winning opera, Omar (2022), a work created from the only extant slave narrative written in Arabic in the United States. Ultimately, by returning to the genealogy of CNN opera in American opera history, I posit that the embrace of the documentary impulse is not the mere promotional strategy Davis alleges, but rather part of opera’s continuous justification of its place and role in contemporary culture.

Allison Chu is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music. Her current book project investigates how embracing the documentary impulse has transformed American opera in the twenty-first century, a trend she terms “documentary opera.” Allison completed her Ph.D. in Music History at Yale University, and she holds additional degrees from Yale and the University of Michigan. In addition to her scholarly endeavours, Chu is a co-founder and educational partner of Midnight Oil Collective Innovations, and she has also written and given public lectures for the Cleveland Orchestra, Boston Lyric Opera, and the Lakes Area Music Festival.