Well, yeah, it would be. I, too, can only speculate. But there aren’t that many possibilities. As my wife was quick to point out, Mr. Row T couldn’t have been on the house tech staff, because then he would have had access to the booth or some other means of direct backstage contact. He still could have been someone in the know, however. Or he might have been an ordinary audience member accustomed to the amplification of everything as his unalienable right. Or, like me, a devotee accustomed to my unalienable operatic right of natural, unamplified sound, in which case my backstage message would have been, “Everyone but Chris and Denyce: SING LOUDER! LIKE, 50% LOUDER!” Or perhaps, from my acoustically favorable balcony spot, “What?”

In any event, while Steve’s 50% is of course a subjective estimate, it is difficult to infer from any such noticeable, sudden gain, confirmed by others present, anything other than the activation of amplification. I suppose that, were I a Met spokesperson questioned on the matter, I could contend that, a few minutes after Mr. Row T’s complaint, some unauthorized blunderer must have, in an unfortunate coincidental act entirely unrelated to said complaint, punched the Enhancement Button. I won’t attempt to rank this on the vertiginous scale of recent Implausible Official Explanations, but it wouldn’t be toward the bottom.

Aural enhancement has become very subtle. Even since I wrote the chapter of Opera as Opera entitled “The Enhancements” (which dealt mostly with the openly avowed practices of the New York City Opera for several seasons), it has taken long, surreptitious strides. With the best of it, a low general level can be established that boosts the voices just a bit, and/or an individual performer can be selected for assistance of an almost subliminal sort, all without telltale artifacts—unless someone makes a mistake. At a recent Broadway performance (of a play, not a musical, and let’s not get started on the latter), I had no suspicion of amplification beyond the now-necessary all-points alert until well along in the evening, when one actor’s voice suddenly popped out at triple or quadruple volume, and from a displaced location, for just a second—a syllable or two—and one realized he’d passed by another performer and picked up her amplification before anyone could jump on it.

In the theatre world, one often hears the argument that if such enhancement is undetectable and is helping the actors speak “naturally,” i. e., as if in a real-life private conversation, why should we object? Sounds like a reasonable proposition, at least with certain kinds of plays, but there are two things wrong with it. The first is that the conversation is not private, it’s public. It is being held in a theatre, and whereas onscreen we can be brought in close enough to “overhear,” in the theatre we’re stuck with the ongoing contradiction between visual and aural perspectives, and the notion that we’re overhearing at the distances our eyes are confirming is anything but “natural”—it’s as phony as any rhetorical ranting. And the second is that a downward spiral is set in motion. The actors, aware of the help they’re being given—and even though they’ve no doubt been cautioned about it—let their vocal energy sink so low that in addition to exacerbating the first problem, they drop out of earshot even with the enhancement. Hence the oft-heard snipe, “If they’re miking, they’re making a pathetic job of it.”