And is it lost, altogether? I know some liberal humanists. They walk about, have lunch together to bemoan lost liberal humanism, and have so far evaded arrest. There are other perspectives, too, from which to ponder the civilizational chaos, inimical to opera and high culture in general, that has made the going tough for us over the last hundred years. Take, for instance, the “Anxiety of Influence” problem, as theorized by Harold Bloom in relation to poetry. Pretend you’re a brilliant young composer of any Western nationality, c. 1920, and pretend there’s been no WW1—no Lost Generation, no breakup of empire, no Treaty of Versailles or hyperinflation. The society you belong to is still intact, and even in the twilight of the old understandings, it has plenty of socio-sexual-political trouble of its own to conceivably write about. But looming over your little artistic valley are the unscalable peaks of Wagner and Verdi and the daunting cliffs of the still-active Puccini and Strauss and all the others, to say nothing of the giants that trod your patch of sod for centuries before them. How different—how much more confident, more reconciled to what had come before—would your work have been, I wonder, from that of the operawrights who did toil through the Zwischenkrieg decades? Would not operatic creativity, minus WW1, in any case have found itself floundering then? And while I certainly believe that the unresolved trauma and guilt of the Second World War, twisting and turning down through generations, remains the primary cause of production going ga-ga in our time, I still wonder if singeractors’ instinctive access to the characters and stories, to the musical and verbal rhetorics of the previous century’s masterworks, would not have already begun its fraying as well? Just asking.

But is nothing, then, to be done? Speaking strictly for myself, I rate my agency with respect to the state of Western civilization at very close to zero, but my shot at giving some little nudge to the street-level practicalities of the operatic disciplines, while short of a sure thing, better than doomed in advance. So though I wouldn’t for a moment deny that the strange new tenorial paradigm personified, at its best, by Jonas Kaufmann, or the signs of fragmentation in the voice of an “overparted” Anna Netrebko, are influenced by the world we find ourselves in (everything is so influenced), I also feel quite sure that in both cases (and those of many others I’ve already had occasion to speak of here), there are at work specific and identifiable factors of training and career management—choices—that are at least as determinative, and that it is at that level that we can work with reasonable hope for artistic gain. My correspondent concedes that masterful teaching and coaching can make a difference, but then asks: ” . . . how do they in the end truly connect with the music and drama, with the audience, and very importantly with one another?” That is, for sure, the operative question. My answer is that that connection must itself be the goal of the teaching and coaching, and that the techniques (of voice, of acting, of acting through voice) must answer to that purpose.