(Photo Credit: WDR/Teatro Real/Javier del Real)

From the earliest days of opera to the cutting edge of today, work was and remains at the heart of opera plots no matter how inventive they are. One of the earliest operas, essentially the one which spearheaded the start of opera itself, Jacopo Peri’s ‘Dafne‘ (1598), features the theme of labour as Apollo’s slaying of the serpent Python and Cupid’s vindictive revenge upon him for winning an archery contest. Here, their jobs and their identities are one and the same. These Gods exist to be their jobs and their jobs are assimilated with who they are as Gods.

As the centuries progressed, this only became more and more pronounced as the idea of labour-as-identity and identity-as-trope became key themes in operas, especially during the Classical period onwards. Perhaps the best examples of this dynamic are Rossini’s ‘Il barbiere di Siviglia‘ (1816) and Mozart’s ‘Le nozze di Figaro‘ (1786), where Figaro, while having agency of his own, is never allowed to have a personality and is defined by his job.

 To celebrate International Labour Day for 2026, let’s explore some of the ways operatic history has depicted the act of work, and the various dynamics of what it means to work according to opera. While sidestepping issues like “invisible labour” for the moment, although it is semi-addressed in opera like Richard Danielpour’s ‘Margaret Garner‘ (2005), the issues of work, exploitation, subjugation, and inequality proliferates opera as much as love.

It is, however, difficult to conceptualize how common these themes are in opera as in many works like Joplin’s ‘Treemonisha‘ (1911), Dove’s ‘Flight‘ (1998), and Glass’ ‘The Perfect American‘ (2013), the labour-identity relation is also connected to the role of educator, moralizer, teacher, and innovator. This fundamentally destabilizes the idea of labour and identity as the person’s very worth does not come from an internal, unalienable quality but is directly related to what they can provide to others, rendering their so-called worthiness dependent upon what they can give.

Another apt example of this lies in Britten’s ‘Peter Grimes‘ (1945), where work consumes him to the detriment of others and his internal-external alienation kills not only two innocent boys but himself in the end. Another apt example is Jake Heggie’s ‘Moby-Dick‘ (2010), Captain Ahab’s obsessive need to prove himself and his lordship over Nature quite literally killing him in the end, with the war to defend his lost honor ending with nothing but death.

Mid-20th century operas with historical and topical themes like Dzerzhinsky’s ‘And Quiet Flows the Don‘ (1935), Hindemith’s ‘Mathis der Maler‘ (1938), Prokofiev’s ‘War and Peace‘ (1946), Poulenc’s ‘Dialogues des Carmélites‘ (1957), and ‘Sea of Blood‘ (1971) all showcase different aspects of this type of labour-identity homogenization. However, this is just a drop in the bucket when it comes to mid-20th century operatic depictions of labour and the collapsing of job and person into a thoroughly abusive system of corrosive appropriation of altruism. Within the USSR, the Nazi regime, Fascist Italy, and Communist China (ca. 1910s to early 1990s, the latter still ongoing), new operatic genres emerged to support them like Socialist Realist, Italian futurist, and Chinese revolutionary. 

However, most if not all of the operas associated with these three genres are no longer performed, and are only seen now as anachronistic pieces of antiquated political theatre. Their relevance, if they retain any at all, were and remains as reactionary symbols of a brutal world ruled by vengeance, idealism, and fabricated reality. What operas like ‘Sea of Blood’ and its propagandistic companions hide is the crude underbelly of the ideology that work makes you free (Arbeit Makt Frei). If one’s value comes through the work they do, what happens if you cannot work?

What if your contribution to the collective you support is smaller than the support you need from the community? The assimilation of one’s value to the work they create is dangerous at best and subjugative at worst, trapping someone into a mindset of voluntary feudalism to a Lord they may not actually be aware of nor recognize. In operas like Dmitri Kurliandski’s ‘Octavia. Trepanation‘ (2017), we are shown what the face of apathetic ideology looked like.

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