Ashley, a librettist, foughtto expand opera’s frontier

Robert Ashley, an American composer who helped wrestle opera into the 20th century, and in so doing broadened the genre in strange, unexpected ways, died Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 83.

The cause was liver disease, his wife, Mimi Johnson, said.

A prolific composer who first came to prominence in the 1960s, Ashley decided early to concentrate on opera. To him, though, the definition of opera was far different from what it had been for centuries or even from what it was for many modern composers.

“I hate the word ‘opera,’” he said in 1983. “I loathe and despise it, because for us in the West, it has only one, limited meaning.” He added, “The actual word means far more than our narrow usage of it.”

In Ashley’s hands, “opera” could take in spoken dialogue, chanting and even mumbling. His librettos, most of which he wrote, had little conventional plot. Unlike the gods, ghosts and noblemen that have long peopled grand opera, his characters were ordinary, even marginal.

The result — performed over the years in Manhattan, Miami and throughout Europe — was a series of operas “so unconventional that they tend to be received as either profoundly revolutionary or incomprehensibly peculiar,” as The Los Angeles Times wrote in 1992.

“Crash,” an opera by Ashley directed by Alex Waterman, is scheduled to receive its world premiere on April 10 at the Whitney Biennial in New York.

That month, the Whitney will also mount productions of two of Ashley’s earlier works: “Vidas Perfectas” (a Spanish-language version of his best-known opera, “Perfect Lives”) and “The Trial of Anne Opie Wehrer and Unknown Accomplices for Crimes Against Humanity.”

If Ashley was less well-known than some of his composing contemporaries, he was, in the view of many critics, no less important.

In a 1983 profile in The New York Times, John Rockwell called him “one of America’s most innovative multimedia artists” and “a composer who has always stretched the bounds of conventional classical-music avant-gardism.”