Since their closure in 2020 due to the coronavirus, American opera houses have been struggling to regain their financial footing—and their audiences. Most have reduced the number of performances they give and retreated to a repertoire of safe favorites. However, the Metropolitan Opera has taken a different tact by embracing untried contemporary works it hopes will appeal to younger, more diverse audiences. Recently released attendance data suggests that this Met initiative might not be working.

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Bolstered by significant governmental support, European companies mostly appear to have returned to a pre-pandemic status quo. A recent visit to Germany found both the Hamburg and Berlin Staatsopers fearlessly mounting challenging operas of questionable popular appeal, but both Olivier Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise and Modest Mussorgsky’s Chowanschtschina (better known in the U.S. as Khovanshchina) proved to be singular artistic and reasonably popular successes.

Written nearly one hundred years apart, both operas deal with rigorous religious beliefs and both require enormous resources from the theaters presenting them. Messiaen, one of France’s leading 20th-century composers, had never written an opera when in the early 1970s, Rolf Liebermann, then head of the Paris Opéra, commissioned him to create Saint François, his first and only opera and one he struggled for more than a decade to complete. A devout Catholic, he toyed with setting Christ’s Passion which he eventually found too daunting and settled instead on the life and death of Francis of Assisi, the early 13th-century saint.

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Messiaen intently studied Francis’s life, including visits to Assisi, and though the vows of ascetic Franciscans, the religious order founded by the saint, focused on poverty, chastity and obedience, the composer-librettist created a four-hour opera that demanded huge resources. The program for Hamburg’s production listed an orchestra of 110 and a chorus of 125, plus nine vocal soloists. Saint François, long a favorite of Hamburg’s music director Kent Nagano, proved too large for the relatively modest Staatsoper, so it was presented in a semi-staged production at the large concert hall of Elbphilharmonie, an awe-inspiring structure constructed on top of an old warehouse on........

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