The latest on “Opera as Opera”: We are promised a shipping date of July 16. Full info on ordering, including pre-orders, will be posted here and on the “Opera as Opera” page of my website within a few days. 

I recently laid out a pocketful of change for the DVDs of the Dec., 2011 performance of Don Giovanni at La Scala. I intended it mostly as catch-up listening/viewing on Anna Netrebko, in connection with my reactions to her Tosca (see my post of May 25), but didn’t get around to it. I also hadn’t listened yet to an older purchase, the Naxos Immortal Performances CD restoration of the March, 1942 broadcast of D.G. from the Metropolitan, the LPs of which I’d first heard upon their first release on Eddie Smith’s Golden Age of Opera label in the late ’50s, and had referred to periodically ever since. And I decided that, with D.G. on the mind, I would indulge a curiosity about the 2016 studio version emanating from the P. I. Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Theatre of Perm, the final installment of that company’s recorded Mozart/Da Ponte cycle.

Knowing that, whatever they might contain, the 2010s representations would give views of the work radically different from that of the Met in the 1940s, I thought about the experience of a young person coming to this Top Ten opera now in contrast with my own early familiarization with it, conditioned by Met performances similar to the 1942 airing and by the only complete recording then in existence, a studio version on 23 78-rpm discs in three volumes, based on the 1936 Glyndebourne Festival production. And having learned by now that my style of thinking and writing is insufficiently Hemingwayesque to explore these examples in a single post, I’ve decided on a two-part article, with the Met and La Scala up for consideration today, Glyndebourne and Perm two weeks hence. It’ll be a trip, I’m sure, but possibly a trip without a destination, because that is in the nature of the times.

The Met performance is conducted by Bruno Walter and stars Ezio Pinza—a collaboration quite worth a few words of its own. They were close in many ways. They first worked together at the 1934 Salzburg Festival, Walter already long established as one of Europe’s most important symphonic and operatic conductors, and Pinza as the Metropolitan’s leading basso. (It had been for him, in fact, that Gatti-Casazza, burned at the box office by previous Mozart projects, had restored Don Giovanni to the repertory in 1929 after a 21-year absence. And it was because of Pinza’s vocal and personal magnetism that the Don—and later Figaro—became for many years the property of basses and bass-baritones, rather than of baritones.) Walter worked with Pinza to reconfigure his portrayal of the Don, nudging him toward the the embodiment of “a magnetic rogue,” rather than a ” conquering male.” ^(I) After the big success of the 1934 production, D.G. stayed in the Salzburg repertory, with Walter always the conductor and Pinza the Don, except for one season, when Mariano Stabile took the role. (A recording of the 1937 revival survives, though barely; we may take a sideways glance at it, too.) In Bruno Walter, Pinza felt he had found a conductor worthy of the respect he had held for Toscanini—”but neither distant nor harsh”. Moreover, Pinza and Walter’s younger daughter, Greta, both in much-deteriorated marriages, fell in love and appeared headed for a marriage of their own, very much with Walter’s blessing. Then Greta was shot by her husband in a murder/suicide. The bond between conductor and his could-have-been son-in-law remained strong till Pinza’s death in 1957.

The latest on Opera as Opera: The print run is starting as I write, and a final production schedule (of three weeks or less, I’m told) should be forthcoming this very day. If you’re reading this, you’ll be among the first to be told.

As I get back to this blog-within-a blog devoted to exploring all the ways in which today’s young singers start their formal training in a quite different state-of-being than that of earlier generations, I pause to contemplate the next item on the docket and am struck anew by the apparent futility of discussing any single factor independent of a thousand others, and by the tension between working insights and cultural overview.

In my last post, I described the present vocal condition of two of our most gifted artists in largely technical terms—a natural emphasis for an author involved with singing from both a practical pedagogic viewpoint and a theoretical one. The most extended and thoughtful response I received came from a  correspondent who’s been reading along pretty much since Osborne on Opera‘s inception, obviously interested in what I have to say, yet also, perhaps, a trifle impatient with my attempts to analyze cause. This correspondent hears all the things I’m describing, but believes they are largely symptoms of a more general sociocultural malaise. After citing the impact of the internationalization of performance on the directness of communication through words, he goes on to outline—quite accurately, I should say—the cultural breakdown of Western civilization (a breakdown broad enough and deep enough, I think, to merit “civilizational” status) through the horrendous half-century of the two World Wars. Referring to W. H. Auden’s perception of opera as an expression of liberal humanism (W.H.A: “Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance.”), he proposes that ” . . . something was finally dismantled in the human spirit by W.W. II,” and that liberal humanism is, effectively, dead.^(I)

I second all my reader’s arguments, and elaborate on them in my book. Indeed, I believe an awareness of this overarching reality hangs over opera’s own view of itself and its function in society. It is revealed in the grasping after some new thing to sing about (and how to sing about it) among our composers and librettists, in the way performers think about themselves and their careers, and in the otherwise inexplicable expressions of some of our most intellectually sophisticated directors. (It is absolutely unavoidable and right for the latter, as citizen-artists, to have the awareness, and absolutely wrong for them to turn it into the basis for adversarial critique while interpreting masterworks grounded in the now presumably lost sensibility.)