This kind of document: It’s so much Muhly’s goal that, upon seeing Two Boys, some New York critics scoffed that chatrooms had become trivial. “The opera’s subject is topical and important, though anything about the Internet is in danger of becoming dated quickly,” writes Anthony Tommasini in his New York Times review. “Chat rooms are already kind of passé.”

Never mind that the younger Muhly, an avid Twitter user, might know the web well enough to judge the contemporaneity of chatrooms. Much like how jazz critics ruled the piano trio The Bad Plus “ironic” after they covered “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the theme from Chariots of Fire, some critics seem unwilling to recognize that there might be virtue in retelling recent but transpired history. The age of chatrooms has passed, sure, but the humans who dwelled there, who made friends with bodies they didn’t know, still live and breathe and type. The opera’s Brian, 16 in 2001, would be in his late twenties now; isn’t he almost certainly a Redditor, befriending other anonymous males he’s never met in person? (And that’s not even mentioning Grindr, a service that traffics in a different kind of male camaraderie.)

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Up to the mid-19th century, composers largely built operas from three types of components. There is first aria, in which characters, sometimes alone on stage, express themselves in solo song. Second, there is recitative, in which characters prattle to each other in a kind of speak-singing. And, finally, there’s chorus, where masses of nameless faces stand on stage and lament, celebrate, or mock. Opera began at the turn of the 17th century as a way of reviving the raw, refined emotions of Greek drama, and the choruses are thus “Greek” in nature: Their feelings are reactive, unsophisticated, the id of the show.

“The history of the chorus in an opera, you know, they always represent this chorus of townspeople and various peasants. They represent sort of the multitudes,” says Muhly. “What’s exciting about this online world is that you can get the sense of people online behaving in this sort of hive mind.”

Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

There are six choruses in Two Boys, and each imitates and incarnates the world of the chatroom. I found the first chorus the most successful.

Like the first instant chatroom scene, it begins in Brian’s room. The towers stand on the right and left sides of the stage, with two at the back in the middle, creating the sense of two doors open to a space. Brian, in his room, on one side of the stage, sits down at his laptop and enters a chatroom.

All at once, projections flicker upon the surface of the towers. We see the same massive chatlike interfaces, and a single phrase scrolling down them, like someone is typing it, again and again and again: “U there? U there? U there? U there?” The chorus sings those words, too, so we’re hearing and seeing them, and more words follow, until all the words tumble away into a projection of a vast, open space, across which helixes and plasma and networks flash and spin. Under all this, the strings pulse with exhilaration, and the low winds sound low, sustained tones, a phase slower than the anxious beat. As the chorus sing short phrases like this—“u there? u there? hey hey hey”—dancers now enter, gesticulating, moving fast-slow-fast with the artificiality of a simulation.