Dr. Lola Salem is not a household name, but within the hallowed halls of the University of Oxford and the intricate world of early music scholarship, she is a rising force. With a background that uniquely blends rigorous academic training, professional musicianship as a child, and sharp cultural criticism, Salem represents a new breed of intellectual—one who is as comfortable dissecting 18th-century legal documents as she is publishing polemical essays on the state of modern culture.
To understand Lola Salem is to explore the intersection of baroque opera, administrative law, and the urgent debate about the future of classical art forms. This article delves deep into her multifaceted career, tracing her journey from the choir of Radio France to the lecture halls of Oxford, and examining her provocative stance that the opera world must either evolve or face extinction .
A Foundation in Music and Thought: The French Years
Lola Salem’s connection to music is not merely academic; it is visceral and was formed at a very young age. Growing up in France, she was immersed in a culture that prizes artistic education. Between 2005 and 2010, she became a member of the Maîtrise de Radio France, one of the country’s most prestigious children’s choirs .
This institution, attached to the national radio broadcaster, is renowned for its rigorous training, combining a high-level general education with intensive musical instruction. For a child and teenager, this experience would have instilled not only vocal discipline but also a deep, practical understanding of repertoire, performance, and the sheer labor required to bring music to life. This formative period as a young artist gave her an insider’s perspective on the stage, a perspective that would later inform her scholarly work .
After her time at the Maîtrise, Salem pursued higher education with a focus that bridged the humanities. She graduated from the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Lyon in 2015 with a Master’s in Musicology . The ENS system in France is designed to produce elite researchers and thinkers, and Salem thrived in this environment. She then expanded her intellectual toolkit by completing a second Master’s degree at the Sorbonne in 2017, this time in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Arts . This combination was crucial: musicology gave her the historical and analytical tools to study music, while philosophy provided the theoretical framework to question its meaning, its beauty, and its place in society.
During this period, from 2016 to 2020, Salem also began working as an art critic for I/O Gazette, a French publication dedicated to covering festivals and contemporary creation across Europe . Her articles from this time, archived on the publication’s website, show a young critic engaging with a wide array of subjects—from operas by Puccini and Offenbach to the choreography of Trisha Brown and the theatrical work of Gaëlle Bourges .
This role as a critic forced her to articulate her thoughts for a public audience, honing a clear, accessible writing style that would later distinguish her from academics who write only for their peers. Titles like “Paradoxe musical” and “Une femme peut en cacher beaucoup d’autres” hint at a critical eye interested in the complexities and hidden layers of performance .
Oxford and the Path to a D.Phil.
Seeking to deepen her research, Salem moved to the United Kingdom to pursue a doctorate at the University of Oxford, one of the world’s leading centers for musical scholarship. In 2023, she completed her D.Phil. in Musicology . Her doctoral research marked the crystallization of her unique academic interests: the intersection of 17th- and 18th-century opera with legal history.
At Oxford, Salem’s research began to gain significant recognition. Even before completing her doctorate, her innovative approach to opera studies was acknowledged. In 2018, she won the Young Scholar Prize at the STIMU Symposium (University of Utrecht) for one of her papers . This prize is a notable accolade, signaling to the international community of early music scholars that a fresh and important voice was emerging.
Her academic focus is both specific and groundbreaking. She scrutinizes opera performers and their roles through the prism of legal frameworks. Rather than looking solely at musical scores or librettos, she delves into administrative law, contracts, and patronage records to understand how the material conditions of the time shaped artistic creativity .
Her published work, including the article “Creative Law: Singers, Roles, and Legal Disputes at the Parisian Opéra during the Ancien Régime” in Studia Iuridica Lublinensia (2023), demonstrates this approach . She examines how legal disputes between singers and the management of the Académie Royale de Musique influenced casting, the development of specific roles, and the very structure of operatic production in Paris.
By studying pensions and administrative law, she reconstructs the often-invisible framework that governed the lives and careers of performers like Marie Fel, a famous singer of the Rameau era whom she has also analyzed in academic journals . This “material conditions” approach provides a far more grounded and complex picture of operatic history, moving beyond the music itself to consider the business, the laws, and the personalities that made it all possible.
The Educator and Public Intellectual
Today, Dr. Salem is a Lecturer in Music at Oriel College, Oxford, where she is an integral part of the undergraduate teaching program . She teaches a remarkably wide range of papers, demonstrating her versatility. Her courses include foundational music study, musical thought and scholarship, historically informed performance, music and nationalisms, and specialized courses on the string quartet and 18th-century opera .
This breadth ensures she remains engaged with the full sweep of Western musical history, from the Baroque to the modern era. In addition to her music duties, she also leverages her French background as a Lecturer in French at Wadham and St Catherine’s Colleges, further cementing her place in the interdisciplinary fabric of Oxford .
Beyond the ivory tower, Salem has become a prominent public intellectual, particularly in the UK. Since 2022, she has been a regular contributor to The Critic, a monthly magazine known for its highbrow cultural and political commentary . She also publishes in other outlets such as Athwart and Engelsberg Ideas . Her role as a Civic Future Fellow and a consultant in London on issues related to education, culture, and the arts places her at the heart of contemporary policy debates . She is not content to simply study history; she actively seeks to apply her deep understanding of culture to the challenges facing the arts today.
“Opera Must Change, Or It Will Die!”: A Provocative Stance
The most public-facing articulation of Lola Salem’s philosophy came with her appearance on The Samuel Andreyev Podcast in an episode titled, “Lola Salem: Opera Must Change, Or It Will Die!” . The title is deliberately provocative, but it encapsulates a deeply held and carefully reasoned belief.
For Salem, the crisis facing opera is not just about shrinking audiences or funding cuts; it is about a fundamental disconnect between the art form’s presentation and its historical essence. Her argument is nuanced. Coming from a scholar who studies the material conditions of 17th- and 18th-century opera, she understands that the art form has always been in flux. The operas of Lully or Rameau were not conceived as museum pieces to be preserved in amber. They were living, breathing, commercial enterprises that responded to the tastes of the court and the city, the availability of singers, and the whims of patronage. They were, in a word, adaptable.
The danger, in Salem’s view, is the “museumification” of opera—treating the great works of the past as sacred texts to be reproduced with a kind of reverent fidelity that stifles their life force. This approach ignores the fact that historical performances were anything but standardized. By insisting on a certain kind of “authenticity” (while paradoxically often ignoring the authentic conditions of production, like the legal and economic pressures that shaped them), modern opera houses risk turning the art form into a lifeless artifact.
Simultaneously, she critiques attempts to modernize opera through superficial updates—setting Mozart in a corporate boardroom or Wagner on a spaceship—without engaging with the deeper dramatic and musical core of the work. Such productions can often feel gimmicky, alienating traditionalists without genuinely attracting new audiences. Her call for change is not a call for gimmickry, but for a re-engagement with the spirit of innovation and audience connection that defined opera in its heyday.
This perspective is informed by her unique background. As a former child performer, she knows the discipline and passion required to sing. As a philosopher, she questions the aesthetic assumptions behind modern production choices. As a historian of law and patronage, she understands the institutional frameworks that make opera possible—and the ones that threaten to undo it.
And as a critic and public writer, she can communicate these complex ideas in a way that sparks debate. Her argument is that to survive, opera must rediscover its capacity for genuine reinvention, learning from its own history of adaptability rather than being imprisoned by it.
Conclusion: A Voice for the Future of the Past
Lola Salem is a compelling figure because she embodies a rare synthesis of talents. She is a scholar with a performer’s soul, a philosopher with a historian’s rigor, and a critic with a teacher’s patience. Her journey from the Maîtrise de Radio France to the lecterns of Oxford is a testament to the power of interdisciplinary thinking.
Through her research, she is rewriting the history of opera by focusing not just on the composers, but on the singers, the lawyers, and the money. Through her teaching, she is shaping the next generation of musicians and thinkers. And through her public writing and commentary, she is fearlessly entering the fray,
challenging the cultural establishment to rethink its relationship with the past in order to secure a future. Her warning—that opera must change or die—is not the cry of a nihilist, but the diagnosis of a doctor who loves her patient and desperately wants to see it live. In a world grappling with the relevance of high culture, Lola Salem’s voice is not just important; it is essential
