Next Post (Oct. 27): I’ll pick up on a theme I introduced in my Preamble and touched on in Part One of the present article. Among the reasons that might account for the dearth of major grand-opera voices, some of the important ones must have to do with the ways singing is taught and the ways young singers are steered as they move from student to professional status. But before we assign all the blame to teachers and educational systems, we should at least consider the factors that influence voice before training ever begins—the condition of the raw materials, so to speak—and how those have changed since the days when voices of superior quality and calibration were thicker on the ground. It’s a lot to chew on, and not to be swallowed in a single gulp. But we’ll get a start.

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