Athanaël. Gosh. Quiz question No. 2: What sort of voice originated this role? To find out, listen to Jean-François Delmas (I’d particularly recommend the long-lined, wide-ranging “Quand la flamme de l’amour,” from Bizet’s La Jolie Fille de Perth.) There’s your first Athanaël, opposite the reputedly delectable and stratospheric Sybil Sanderson, also the first Esclarmonde. So it was a bass role, and Delmas was a big, deep bass, yet possessed of ringing Es, Fs, and higher—one thinks of the Italian De Angelis, the Russian Reizen, and a handful of others for a comparable uniting of depth and darkness with command of the bass top. And for a bass voice, Athanaël  lies up there, with many a strongly accented phrase between C and E, and the occasional climactic F,  as he gives Thaïs the Cenobite working-over. Because of that tessitura, the role has seldom been taken by a bass since Delmas relinquished it. Here in America, the great Maurice Renaud took the part opposite Mary Garden down at Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera Company, while Hector Dufranne (the first Golaud) sang it, again with Garden, out in Chicago. At the Met in the years when Geraldine Farrar, then Maria Jeritza, sang Thaïs, their Athanaëls were Pasquale Amato, Clarence Whitehill, and Giuseppe Danise—two Italian dramatic baritones and an American Heldenbariton, and all singers of stature. In the succeeding, widely spaced revivals before the 2008 production, John Charles Thomas and Sherrill Milnes sang Athanaël.

For Athanaël to really fulfill his mission, there must be at the least a sense of overbearing evangelical power and dignity or, better yet, something of demonic compulsion. Chaliapin would have had that, and the New York City Opera missed a good bet in the ’60s, when it could have paired Norman Treigle with Beverly Sills and/or Patricia Brooks, all then in their primes. This season, the Met cast Gerald Finley. I’ve heard him three times, always in French roles that lie low for lighter baritone voices like his: as Golaud with the BSO under the ice-cold Haitink; as Rossini’s Guillaume Tell up till intermission; and now as Athanaël. Always, he has sung with pleasing tone, good legato guidance, excellent intonation, and accurate pronunciation. And always, these fine professional attributes have been insufficient, because his presence, both  vocally and temperamentally, has proved far too modest for these assignments. I am told he sings the English song literature beautifully, and can imagine him a good recitalist in a friendly venue. Unless he has notes of brilliance above F that he has not yet disclosed, the outer limit of his operatic utility would be as, say, Mercutio.

With the necessary heat between these two principals nowhere to be found, Thaïs is a non-starter. But there was plenty else gone missing, too. Copious detail would be tiresome, so I’ll note just two or three of the delinquent items:

1) The First Scene. It is skeletal in any case, a sketchy bit of prologue. It has a single event, Athanaël’s decision to return to Alexandria to convert Thaïs, and that can’t happen without some persuasive version of his nocturnal vision. The score asks for a view of the interior of the theatre at Alexandria, where Thaïs, semi-nude but veiled, her back to us, performs “The Loves of Aphrodite” before a great throng, whose cries of acclamation we hear at a distance. This tableau builds to a fevered climax, then suddenly disappears. At the Met: Ms. Peréz (or, I hope, a double) wriggling none too persuasively on an upstage platform, followed by Mr. Finley singing earnestly but dimly with outstretched arms (his acting throughout featured these last, the angle from the horizontal indicating the height of whichever passion ruled the moment), then finally exiting with little hops across the undulations of imitation sand that forbade taking a single firm step.