With the collapse of tonality, music had lost much of its narrative power, they reasoned, and so storytelling need no longer be a prerequisite of opera either.
Gradually, however, attitudes softened until almost all of those former hard-liners became more or less reconciled with the form, even if they had to reimagine it in their own terms. Composers who still found it had something to offer (Benjamin Britten and Hans Werner Henze, for example) were generally regarded with disdain. It was an outmoded art form, they decided, too heavily indebted to the past. In the years after the second world war a whole generation of young avant garde composers viewed opera with suspicion. Though some composers continued to write operas in which the symbiotic relationship between the music, the words and the drama they conveyed was much the same as it had been for the previous 300 years, others took the opportunity to reconsider basic assumptions about dramatic structure, and the role of music within it. At the beginning of the 20th century, when modernism began to undermine the basic grammar of music, some of the principles that underpinned the workings of opera inevitably came under attack, too.
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