I kept thinking about our descriptions of faults and our efforts to maintain optimism as I re-read Will’s article, because both the faults and the efforts are bound up with the slippery-slope relativity of critical language we often find ourselves skidding down, owing to the limitations of words. Suppose, for example, that this season’s Forza had gone forward. If I recall its announced cast correctly, it would have included the four singers who became the soloists of the substituted Requiem: Krassimira Stoyanova, Ekatarina Semenchuk, Alexandrs Antonenko, and Ferruccio Furlanetto. I don’t remember who was announced for the role of Carlo, but based on recent house history, the likeliest candidate would have been Zeljko Lucic. And had I written about their work, my assessments of virtues and failings would not have sounded radically different from those I would have assigned to the singers of fifty and more years ago. Further: embedded in those older assessments was the same implication that would have haunted the current ones, to wit, that a standard set in earlier times was being applied. That’s what Will meant with his reference to our “intimidating stories,” and it always causes consternation and resentment among the Presentist optimists, who argue with apparent logic that nothing much has really changed, and that every generation mourns the Golden Age of its youth. Besides, in my ’50s teenage-to-twentysomething case, where would this older standard have come from? The sighs and wheezes of my older fellow standees? The autobiographies of superannuated prima donnas?

For such reasons, my evaluation of the unrealized 2017-18 Forza, unless it were  the occasion of a final abandonment of conscience, would have been forced to include one or two of those feeble parentheticals (e.g., “Of course, this cast is not to be compared to . . .” or, “Musicianly though she is, she is no Tebaldi or Milanov,” etc.) that do little to persuade the incurious and are unnecessary for the rest of us. The language deceives.The goal posts keep moving, but closer, not farther—the kicker wears the same uniform and goes through the same motions, but must now hit from only 20 yards out, not 40, to earn even bigger money. So I must stipulate at the outset that though I will make note of some failings in these performances of the ’50s, and in terminology that won’t seem unlike many contemporary reviews, the context is utterly different! We aren’t talking about the same thing! 

The earlier standard lurking in my old reviews is also present in Will’s. On an imaginary 1-10 scale, he rates the ’58 Naples performance at 7, and compares that with a contemporaneous Verdian average of 4. (No, he wasn’t cheating. The Naples performance was just a good top-level one, no more special than many first-cast rep evenings at international-level houses.) But where would that 7, which after all is no better than a B-minus, have come from? Idealist fantasy? An element of that, perhaps, but even such dreams are mostly extensions of real-life sounds. My own standard for Forza is probably the cast of the Met’s 1918 house premiere: Ponselle, Caruso, De Luca, Mardones. With acknowledgement that it’s impossible to reconstruct what effect Enrico Tamberlik (the first Alvaro) or Teresa Stolz (the first Leonora of the revised version) or their colleagues made, and further that with the exception of Caruso it’s not impossible to prefer known individual alternates to the others (that, in fact, is part of the point here), it is still unlikely that taken all in all, La Forza del destino has ever been sung more beautifully or powerfully than it was then. Since nothing human attains perfection, I’d give that team a 9.5.