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.)