‘Nothing like it in any amusement hall!’: Opera, audacity and the audience in The Who’s Tommy

Abstract

When Pete Townshend decided to call his band’s 1969 record Tommy a ‘rock opera’, he established a phrase equally easy to interrogate and to take for granted. And yet that provocation remains a remarkably fertile framing device that challenges conventional understandings of both ‘rock’ and ‘opera’. This article analyses Tommy as a conscious attempt to engage the conventions of the traditional opera medium and as a postmodern provocation that challenges the limitation for fixed media to inspire active engagement in its audience. As a work explicitly about the framing of entertainment, Tommy engages an ontological contradiction – between performed music and its conventions on the one hand, and the social signification of an ambitious story about liberation on the other – that is reflected in the work’s liminal connection to both the commercial and artistic worlds. The article considers the opera from several angles: as a libretto, meaning its structured story; as a score, meaning the recording which any subsequent performance is expected to reference if not reproduce; and as performance. I focus on Tommy’s first stagings: The Who’s own during their album tour (which included a show at the Metropolitan Opera House), the 1971 Seattle Opera production and Ken Russell’s film. I suggest that the gambit of a ‘rock opera’ allows us to engage the essential question of whether an audience can ever be truly activated in a landscape where the slipperiness of meaning is too often codified into empty signifiers of the very activation it ostensibly wishes to produce.