The whole conceit bothers me, anyway. The reason given us for feeling superior to these people is their very existence as a class. These superficial, undeserving swells (home from the opera!) apparently inflict social harm merely by being alive, and consequently merit a punishment so extreme that no real-world agent can carry it out. A mysterious, vaguely Biblical, force must do the job, then remand its remaining victims for another round. It’s a splendid paradigm for the Deconstructionist project of an endless deferral of meaning, which really amounts to the meaning of no meaning. Among the philosophes of the Postmodern one can find some highly sophisticated argumentation on behalf of that notion. I have a hard time seeing it as anything better than cultural Nihilism, and I don’t understand  where that’s supposed to get us.

∼ ∼ ∼

And what a happy segue this makes! For it is precisely an imagined primal Presence, namely that of the infernal voiced word forever lurking behind the written one, that the Deconstructionists and their fellow travelers want to out and shame. They seek the absence of Presence, and that’s just what I had decided to write about regarding this season’s Met revival of Thaïs. Sometimes it’s more useful to talk about what’s missing than about what’s there, and this is such an instance.

Opera, of course, is nothing but Presence. That’s why it’s such a terrible fit for the postmodern mentality, and why that mentality wreaks such damage with the artform. In opera, presence (I’ll drop that special-meaning initial-cap “P” for the duration) has to start with the impact of the singing voice, and continue with the physical person of the performer. It goes on to embrace many other things, but those two—ideally as a unified dramatic reality—constitute the sine qua non. I was reminded of this last spring in Rome, at a performance of Andrea Chénier. The male leads were in the hands of two reliable veterans, Gregory Kunde (Chénier) and Roberto Frontali (Gérard), and Maddalena in that of Maria José Siri, a young soprano who is singing this and other roles of comparable calibre with a warm, round timbre but no chest register. (Believe me, I know how sick you are of hearing me rail on about this. Imagine how sick I am of having the occasion to do so. Imagine as well, if you can, “La mamma morta”  with no low notes.)

This Chénier puttered along into Act III without noticeable highs or lows until the entrance of la vecchia Madelon. I had been awaiting the moment with some curiosity.  Back in the ’60s, Renato Fasano and his Virtuosi di Roma had set up a little stage on the Carnegie Hall platform for a couple of evenings, one of which was devoted to the Barbiere di Siviglia of Giovanni  Paisiello. It was a musically enjoyable, witty traversal, and I was especially taken with the Rosina, Elena Zilio. The role is not very challenging vocally (it lies easily within the compass of a light mezzo), but she sang it well and gave an adept performance of the “saucy baggage” variety. Thereafter, I saw her name occasionally in dispatches from Europe, then lost track of her altogether and assumed she had retired until I saw her name listed for this production. From her first onstage moment, she reminded us of what was missing the rest of the time—the ability to seize the stage, the whole opera house, and single-handedly hold it captive, as if with held breath, from entrance to exit.