Turnage Turns His Back (On Opera) Due To Twitterstorm.

[Conchis]

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/apr/09/no-more-operas-from-turnage-as-twitter-row-turns-toxic

It's notoriously difficult for critics to evaaluate new works at their premieres.

As the article states, Turnage has subsequently commented that he'd already resolved to write no more operas before the notices appeared. Maybe he just fancied making a splash?


Fiona Maddocks stating it was 'overlong' seems a bit off to me, considering the opera is 'for children'. Do children necessarily have low boredom threhsholds? I'm not sure they do...

[Braunschlag]

Is there a chance that he might be calling a bluff? I seem to have read somewhere that was the gist of it all.
Whatever - I can’t really see why someone would be that goaded by critics as to burn bridges so quickly. Best course of action is to turn off the twitterers and get back to composing. Not that I like his music much at all but that’s besides the point.

[Bergonzi]

The fault lies in using Twitter! It's only meant to be for twits. And no one should take any critic seriously! They only do it because they can't get a job doing anything else.

[ahinton]

If he really had decided to turn his back on stage work before this then it might have been better for him to make this clearer; otherwise, doing so because of some Twitter storm does seem at best petulant..

That said, I do recall, in the days long befor Twitter represented anything other than birdsong, answering some question or other by saying that one of my ambitions as a composer was never to write for the stage and, so far, I seem to have contrived to achieve this; what relationship this might have, if any, to The Turning of the Turnage, I have less than no idea...