The gradual loss of artistic focus and lowering of vocal standards by no means fully accounts for the death of the New York City Opera. Many other factors, including demographic shifts that undermined both the audience and donor base; increasing competition for front-line talent; the weakened presence of arts in education (and the defining-down of what’s meant by “arts”); social changes in where people look for entertainment and what they’ll pay for it —these and more, not to mention the economic punch to the gut of the recession of 2008-ff., were and are involved for all opera companies, and for high-culture enterprises in general.^(I) Waleson brings these into her discussion, and in her final chapter tries to be optimistic about some of the postopera fauna that are gamboling about. I’m not too sanguine about all that. But meanwhile, Waleson’s book is most useful for the lessons to be extracted from her grappling with the nitty-gritty of one major company’s trip in the tumbrel.

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An intriguing follow-up on Fanciulla (last post): Richard Garmise, a highly informed opera devotee and a lawyer knowledgeable in matters concerning intellectual property, writes as follows:

“I knew someone who was the last lawyer for David Belasco. His name was Eddie Colton, and at the time I knew him, which was something like the mid 1990s, he was quite up in years but still practicing, and as a young lawyer had represented Belasco. I of course asked him about the TWO libretti. Eddie was  very clear. David did NOT write them (and I had some trouble, looking at the other things he had done, imagining that he had). He bought them. This was NOT uncommon at the time.

“Arthur Miller told me once about going into John Golden’s office as a young writer, and seeing shelves of volumes of plays behind Golden (the theatre is named after him) with bindings saying ‘Play by John Golden.’

“‘Mr. Golden,’ said Arthur, ‘I didn’t know you write plays, too.’

“‘I don’t,’ responded Golden, ‘I bought them.’

“He [Belasco] seems in his earliest years to have written some plays, but the Butterfly was an adaptation written with the writer of the underlying work. I would have had no reason to believe that Belasco didn’t write these, other than some skepticism that writing was really his métier, but I have even less reason to doubt Eddie.”

Well, this is fascinating, and something I’ve never seen suggested in any of the Belasco material I’ve come across, such as the Lise-Lone Marker book I cited in my post. By way of playing devil’s advocate: in Kim Marra’s Strange Duets, a book about the relationships between powerful impresarios and actresses between 1865 and 1914 (U. of Iowa Press, 2006, and believe me, some of these duets are passing strange, indeed), two long chapters are devoted to Belasco, and Marra painstakingly builds bridges between Belasco’s personal history (particularly its sexual, ethnic, and religious aspects) and the content of his (if they were his) plays. She does not give much space to Belasco’s working relationship with Blanche Bates, the original Minnie of Girl of the Golden West, but she goes deeply into the way Belasco worked with Mrs. Leslie Carter, the very intense star of several of his biggest hits. With quotations from Mrs. Carter’s autobiography, she describes the changes a script would undergo as Belasco worked with her on a character. Mrs. Carter speaks of the plays Belasco “wrote for me,” and seems in no doubt that the work was his.