The Future of Opera at the Kennedy Center

by Joshua T. Katz
American Enterprise Institute

For New Yorkers, one hard thing about moving to Washington, D.C. is that there aren’t world-class concerts every day. Both the nation’s capital and what is sometimes called the capital of the world have outstanding museums: a great boon for my wife and me as well as for our young daughter, not least because so many of them in Washington are free. But music is different. Even in good times, the Kennedy Center (as I still call it) hasn’t been a cultural focal point the way Lincoln Center is, and you won’t get laughs by substituting “Strathmore” in “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” Also, Strathmore is in Maryland.

Of course, music in New York isn’t what it once was either. The Mostly Mozart Festival was canned after the summer of 2023; the glorious chamber music concerts and solo recitals in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art have mostly gone the way of the colorful metal buttons; and this past January, the other Met—the Metropolitan Opera—laid off employees, cut salaries, reduced the number of productions in the 2026–2027 season from eighteen to seventeen, and is even publicly considering selling its Chagall murals.

But it is dispiriting to take up residence in Washington as musical and other cultural storms rage on F Street. Whatever one may think of these storms, they are unlikely to increase the opportunity for wonderful music in the near future.

My own views on matters pertaining to what President Eisenhower and Congress envisaged in 1958 as our “National Cultural Center” are complicated. I don’t object to President Trump’s overhaul of the Kennedy Center’s board a little over a year ago, though I would have spared David M. Rubenstein—as significant a patriotic philanthropist as our nation knows and someone who has cultivated relationships across the political spectrum—and would have preferred a few more of the new members to have serious artistic credentials in addition to being opposed to DEI. I do, however, object to the board’s vote in December to change the name to the Trump Kennedy Center (which has led to a linguistic issue, though that’s the least of it).

And while I’ve read impassioned opinion pieces by people I respect in favor of the decision by certain composers, performers, and troupes to bow out of forthcoming events or boycott the Center entirely, I do not believe that depriving people of music in the hope of solving problems is a net good. To be clear, this means that I am also unhappy about the word from the White House last month—presumably in part a response to the artistic backlash—that the Center will close in July for two years of renovations that certainly do not appear necessary to the casual attendee.

In any case, one of my main concerns is the Washington National Opera, which was housed at the Center from its opening in 1971 until just a few weeks ago. Even if the main reason for the WNO’s departure really is money rather than political pique, and even if some of the impetus does come from the company itself rather than the Center’s board, January’s announcement hit especially hard.

It hit hard personally. It is one thing for me to complain that there are no longer enough concerts in Washington for my wife and me to attend. It is another thing for me to worry about what this might mean for our daughter, whom we are doing our best to expose to the best that has been thought and said, painted and composed. I make no apologies for pushing for cultural conservatism for her at any time, much less now, when the tastes of President Trump—not unlike the tastes of plenty of his predecessors, to be sure—are decidedly middlebrow: for pushing, as Mark Bauerlein has put it, for “an elite counterpart to MAGA’s populist thrust.”

While our daughter is still too little to attend most live performances, my wife and I have been paying close attention to the Center’s programming for children, which most recently included a WNO production of Rachel Portman’s opera The Little Prince, meant for sixth to twelfth graders. (I don’t care for Saint-Exupéry’s book and don’t know the opera, but the idea is attractive.) There are many things I hope for the Center, post-renovation, but a big one is that it will find inventive and not dumbed-down ways to bring children and serious music together. Imagine what it must have been like to sit in the audience as Leonard Bernstein led the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. That’s the sort of experience I wish for my daughter a few years from now—and for her parents, who would accompany her.

In fact, our principal worry is not orchestral music so much as the genre many consider irredeemably elite: opera. Yes, the financial difficulties of maintaining a great opera house are widespread, broadly acknowledged, and a matter of concern that goes well beyond the Kennedy Center, the District of Columbia, and the 47th president. And, yes, very young children do not generally belong in an opera house. But done right, with colorful sets, imaginative staging, and (when appropriate) good supertitles, opera can be the friendliest form of music for the young, who are, after all, drawn to elaborate stories, costumes, and battles between good and evil. Assuming you start your child with Die Zauberflöte, Hänsel und Gretel, L’Enfant et Les Sortilèges, or (for all I know) The Little Prince rather than, say, Tristan und Isolde, it has never been clear to me why so many people consider opera to be rebarbative and kid-unfriendly.

It should surprise no one that Maurice Sendak, whose books Where the Wild Things Are and Higglety Pigglety Pop! Oliver Knussen turned into short operas, designed wonderful sets and costumes for Die Zauberflöte and The Cunning Little Vixen. And Daniel Handler, the author (under the pen name Lemony Snicket) of A Series of Unfortunate Events, has frequently noted that his parents met at the opera and regularly took him to the San Francisco Opera as a child. In his words,

I think my childhood exposure to opera has a lot to do with the way I write children’s books, with incredibly melodramatic things happening every 15 minutes, because that’s the way opera operates. Opera always has a wide appeal for children; there’s always something sinister going on.

Indeed—so maybe opera could be called in some sense populist as well as elite?

The opera house at the Kennedy Center is beautiful. No, it’s not the Met. But it looks like a real opera house—unlike the Lisner Auditorium at George Washington University, where the WNO first performed in 1957 and to which it has now decamped—and has fine acoustics. I pray that the house emerges from the Center’s proposed renovation much the same and that a reinvigorated WNO, or some other company, is able to return happily to it. (Or, conceivably, a number of opera companies might perform at the Center, as board president Richard Grenell may be suggesting in a tweet about “end[ing the WNO’s] exclusivity.”) Above all, I pray that we will soon be able to take our daughter there to enjoy Mozart, Humperdinck, and Ravel—and, eventually, also Wagner.

Joshua T. Katz is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on higher education, language and culture, the classical tradition, and the humanities broadly defined.