Both brothers belong to a generation of modernist directors, including Robert Wilson and Peter Sellars who are known for staging revisionist opera productions.
Christopher studied theater at the University of Pennsylvania and began his stage career as an actor, appearing in Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival production of Two Gentlemen of Verona in the early ‘70s.
In 1974, Alden staged his first opera productions in New York (Francis Poulenc's Les mamelles de Tirésias) and Omaha (La Traviata and The Barber of Seville).
In the early '90s, he began a similarly long relationship with the San Francisco Opera, staging the American premieres of Aribert Reimann's Ghost Sonata and Hans Werner Henze's Das Verratene Meer as well as new productions of Les Contes d'Hoffmann, Coronation of Poppea, Virgil Thomson's The Mother of Us All and Wallace & Korie's Harvey Milk.
He likened his own 1984 production of Coronation of Poppea to "a new wave rock video"[4] and has frequently expressed his desire to connect the inner world of opera theater to the modern sensibility of a younger audience.
His use of overt sexuality, brutal violence and over-the-top, satirical humor has soured his relationship with conservative patrons (most notably, a critically derided Rigoletto production for Chicago Lyric that the company declared un-"revivable").
Rather, his approach to stagecraft — with its anachronistic cultural symbols, blood-and-guts characterizations and eye-catching visuals — is driven by a desire to reveal how powerfully opera stories can resonate with modern experience.