And here again I’ve discussed one isolated element of a larger topic (electronic vs. acoustical voice) that itself seems artificially separated from others of broader sociocultural reach. Gender modeling, for instance. Yes: for the first two-and-a-half centuries of opera’s history (and millenia before that) nearly all public speaking (N.B.: except in the theatre) was done by men, and formal instruction in rhetoric or elocution, derived from principles defined by the classical Greco-Roman orators, was almost exclusively the province of men. We also note that the changes in vocality we associate with the advent of Romantic grand opera (their extent is open to debate, but not their general character) could also be described as a virilization—and thus, what’s happened more recently, in which the microphone is implicated, but cannot be extricated from the whole matter of male and female self-presentation—as a de-virilization. Asking, from my operacentric perch, “Is that good or bad for opera?”, I sense a roiling of the waters I suddenly have no time to dive into. But it’s a major Before the First Lesson influence, and I will return to it when the waters seem calmer.

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A Correction: In my last post, I had a bit of fun with the thought that it was Cecilia Bartoli who conceived the casting of Anna Netrebko with Jonas Kaufman for the 2021 Salzburg Easter Festival. Alas, an alert European reader has written to point out that I must have conflated in my heat-oppressèd brain the Easter Festival with the Salzburg Whitsun Festival. It is the latter of which Cecilia Bartoli is the Artistic Director; ergo, it evidently was not she who had this  inspiration—though it still leaves open for her the possibility of saving the day when/if Anna thinks better of it all. My sorrowful apologies for the error.

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NEXT TIME: I’m mulling the subject of a highly selective look at “Don Giovanni Then and Now”—probably a two-part project. But then, in response to some reader questions on terminology, both of the general technical kind and my more personal idiosyncratic sort, I’m also contemplating a CLO Glossary, covering these terminologies as they appear both here and in Opera as Opera, wherein the second kind is fairly thick on the ground. Both will get written; it’s purely a matter of timing. And suspense, I hear, is a really good hook for readers.

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