In my first “Before the First Lesson” post (Oct. 27, 2017), I set as the context for this series the fact that despite an unprecedentedly crowded field of unprecedentedly large-bodied candidates entering an unprecedentedly extensive system of formal higher education in music and opera, we have little to show for it by way of voices capable of satisfying the demands of the greatest roles in the greatest works. I further stipulated that these entries would consider some of the environmental, sociocultural, and technological factors that influence vocal development (or lack thereof) in advance of training. And I followed the lead of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in presenting the first of these factors, the heavy and pernicious presence of the chemicals known as endocrine disruptors, with their scary and vocally intriguing effects on sexual maturation and obesity. ^(I)

In the second of the series (Dec. 22, 2017), I wrote about some of the ways our “technologically determined secondary aural environment” governs the largely unconscious modeling of the ear-voice loop that now conditions the vocal upbringing of everyone save for rare off-the-grid souls, who are unlikely to include many budding Tristans or Aïdas. In that discussion, I touched on two aspects of what I’ve decided to call the Digital Covenant (see below): the fragmentation of attention and the tyranny of the Now, with their concomitant losses of orientation and context. These are perhaps the components of the digital culture most commonly cited as problematic by educators and cultural commentators concerned with how minds are being structured and personalities formed. Today I’d like to enter some preliminary thoughts on a subject I see discussed less often, and that is the effects of our digitized life on emotional development. In a way, these thoughts follow a thread I’ve been tugging at since my first posts, concerning the unique intensity and, at times, the apparent waywardness of the emotional bond we form with musical and dramatic happenings. (See, especially, my article of Feb. 2, “How Are We Moved, and Why Do We Like it?” But, as I say, it’s a thread.) Until now, I’ve spoken about the receiving end of the bond—the taking in of emotionally directed events, our response to them, and our incorporation of reception and response into our storehouse of memory and expectation. What about the conditions on the sending end, with the artists themselves, who after all begin as receptors, too? Might the recent shifts in the ways we all mediate the world (especially with regard to relationships) also be mediating (I was going to write “stunting”) the ability to mobilize emotional, visceral energies—or even the recognition of the necessity to do so?—among potential creators and interpreters of the most emotional and visceral of the arts? Obviously, if I didn’t have a suspicion that the answer could be “yes,” I wouldn’t be addressing the question.

Richard Wagner said what could well have been his last word, as Verdi was soon to do, with a comedy that brought the story of the outsider protagonist couple (the underlying narrative of Romantic opera, and thus of most of our active canon) to an unaccustomed happy end, and incorporated it into the world of the bourgeois quotidian. Instead, after Die Meistersinger, he not only turned back to his native habitat of myth and legend, but to a species of musicodramatic realization that really has only one other specimen—his own Tristan und Isolde. In my post of Feb. 9, I mentioned that in his study of ten great dramas, The Idea of a Theatre, Francis Fergusson named Tristan a “drama of passion,” distinct from all other kinds. To be sure, “passion” is the emotional condition that besets most premodern dramatic characters, and with which we are meant to empathize, even to celebrate and declare a “right.” But passion as a ruling, immersive force, to which we are asked to give ourselves over unreservedly and beyond reasoning as the very purpose of the artistic experience, and which only music has the power to impose upon us, is unique to Tristan and Parsifal. Or, perhaps I should say, those are the only two works that truly achieve that aim, for anyone willing or eager to undergo it. Parsifal returned to the Metropolitan Opera’s repertory this season in the production directed by François Girard, first seen in 2013. Then, it was conducted by Daniele Gatti; now, it is led by the company’s Music Director Designate, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

As always, we can talk about performance or about production, or the relationship between the two. And we can talk either about what’s there, or what’s missing. When we talk about what’s missing (which all criticism must come to), we inevitably speak of our own expectations, and those depend in great part upon the route we have taken into the work, and what we’ve found there in the past. I’ll be speaking about all these things here. But since I know many readers will be interested first in performance and in what was there (how was it?), as with any other opera that pops up of a Tuesday evening, I’ll begin with that.

This was the lightest Parsifal cast I’ve ever seen or heard, nosing out the 2013 contingent. The only exception was the Kundry, Evelyn Herlitzius. She commands an upper range of cold, focused power. This, allied with an often gripping intensity of vocal and physical action, allowed the latter part of Act 2, climaxing with the great cries of “Irre! Irre!” to build with a fair measure of its desperation, and put her in second place in the lightness derby to Katerina Dalayman of the 2013 cast. Lower down, though, Herlitzius’ voice lacks the presence and color, the complexity, and often simply the supported steadiness needed earlier in the act, from the first call of Parsifal’s name through “Ich sah das Kind‘ to the “ersten Kuss.” She’s an interesting artist, and I’d like to say I would welcome seeing her in other roles, but it’s hard to know which.