Midway through the first act of the Metropolitan Opera's Two Boys, there's a scene in which detective Anne Strawson laments the "ghosts in the machine," the inhabitants of the chat room world she's been tasked to investigate.
It's a despairing moment — a woman who admittedly has no computer and no Internet knowledge seeks to understand a world so brazenly opposite her own. In the following scene, teenaged Brian, the boy she's investigating in a bizarre attempted murder case, explains that this world is "a real place," one he says is "better because it's real."
Two Boys is no technophobic dirge, nor does it represent a cyber dystopia , but rather it explores loneliness and delves into the repercussions spawned from the actions of being lonely in our tech-centric society.
It's easy to get caught up in the set, which so brilliantly incorporates early-web chat room visuals, or the way Internet lingo is woven throughout the opera's libretto ("omg" appears on screen, but I found myself disappointed when it was sung as "Oh my God"). But the era Two Boys is set in and the technology that's woven in is merely a distraction from a more timeless, human story.

"The emotional content of it is a more eternal thing, one hopes," composer Nico Muhly tells Mashable. "In as much as this piece takes place in a technological landscape, it's really about loneliness and people behaving in human and shady ways as a way of reaching out, which I think is a lot of what opera is about."
The verisimilitude, Muhly notes, is not the point in opera — a genre that has a long history of having characters be the wrong gender, the wrong age, on an abstract set — oh, and everyone is singing. "It's not like you're watching a documentary."
The early Internet, both technologically and conceptually, is clearly a big inspiration in Two Boys. Muhly cites the opera's choruses: "A lot of that is taken from images or representation of Internet in the early days."

Two Boys is based on real events from 2003, as detailed in this Vanity Fair article. It's a "catfish" scheme that seems too over-the-top to be true, featuring a cast of improbable characters, including a high-ranking British spy who asks for the murder of her character's creator: a younger boy whose name in Two Boys is Jake. We don't meet him right away, but his desperation and loneliness is palpable. Though he befriends Brian in real life, he continues the fraud, eventually calling for Brian to kill him. Brian thinks he'll be rewarded with a high salary and position in MI6. How he could believe this is hard to comprehend. And yet, here we are 10 years after the Two Boys events, with one of the most high-profile Internet hoaxes (Mati Teo) barely in our rear view.
Muhly sets Two Boys back even further, in 2001, but the technological leaps we've made perhaps don't make us collectively any less prepared to deal with the complex and blurred realities of our digital world.
As a piece of art, it's breathtaking. The setting in the chat room era makes it a convenient talking piece for making opera more modern (I asked Muhly about this, and he politely but not without annoyance offered me a 10-minute history lesson on opera). Despite that, he doesn't feel any responsibility to make opera relevant to young people, though he admits that for many people, Two Boys is their first opera.
"One of the misconceptions that I find hard to fight is the sense that opera is expensive," he says. It won't be as expensive as Beyonce tickets."
Despite his best attempts to avoid demographics ("I'm not reading press and I'm not counting box office receipts or whatever. Fortunately that's not my job, thank God"), the Met has used this opportunity to court a new audience. The New York Times points out that Muhly's fans in the world of indie music are not typical Met attendees, while a New Yorker author writes that Two Boys is "fodder for a classical-music press hungry for hipness — 'Sufjan collaborator writes Internet opera' is an angle too good to pass up."
Anecdotally, I didn't think the audience was noticeably younger than I would have expected when I saw the piece. As we filed out, one woman (seemingly at least 70 years old) remarked to her companion that it was "weird." And it is weird, but not because it's an opera that takes place in the digital age. As Muhly notes, opera is inherently weird.
To his credit, he's avoided reading press, though he's a willing participant (in addition to interviews, he conducted the Met's first Reddit AMA. This must be some challenge, as a user of social media himself. But he claims to no longer even open the Arts section.
"I think it's better just to keep the whole thing focused on the economy of the performance and keeping the people who actually have to make the music — because I don't actually usually perform — keeping those people afloat and energized and involved," he says.