Trying to account for an acoustical peculiarity is like trying to track down water leakage or a bad smell. Where did it come from, and how did it get here? No overt incident of the sort Steve Blier recounts happened at my Marnie performance, and my perspective (Balcony, Row A center) was not that of Orchestra, rear. But from my unalienable-right assumption that Marnie was not amplified, I am virtually forced to the conclusion that in fact it was, sneakily. And in that case it’s time for a new mass revolutionary movement: #RowTGuy.

Well, back to Il Trittico and “WHAT?” I may as well pick up where I left off, with Suor Angelica, who is nearly always the (pardon) weak sister of the trilogy. First, though, a statement about the occasion’s overall WHATness, attributable to its pit/podium component, is in order. In Opera as Opera, I write about a phenomenon I call Notperformance—the sort of event in which all the pieces seem in place and execution is on an elevated plane, yet the emotional and aesthetic qualities of the given work pass by unrealized. This wasn’t a Notperformance. It was simply a bad performance, as flat an evening of Puccini as I’ve ever heard. The first two operas, Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica, just squatted glumly in the pit, emitting an ongoing low-level moan that was interrupted by alarming moments of cessation, as if the creature had stopped breathing altogether (like the “WHAT?” moment itself), and others of sudden, unprepared raw loudness. In Tabarro there was no suspense, no molding of melodramatic buildup, no passionate surge. Nor was there any pointing of the delicate episodes early in Angelica; or more than the minimal tension inherent in the writing in the scene with the Principessa; or any ecstatic, morbid shine the rest of the way. Schicchi chattered along with its marked changes of tempo, but none of orchestral texture or individual instrumental color. Throughout, I could detect no reason the players found to play anything beyond the instructions on the page. In charge of all this was Bertrand de Billy. Since only the oldest of my readers will know what I mean when I say I tried to summon the spirit of Dmitri Mitropoulos, I’ll just ask for management to please page Fabio Luisi.

Mitropoulos gave us no Trittico, because in his day at the Met there was none to be given. Schicchi was often paired with Salome, and before that, in the ’40s, Tabarro with Don Pasquale. But for New York audiences post-1920, the complete Trittico was a closed book until the New York City Opera made it a quite regular item in the ’60s. And had the Met mounted Trittico in Mitropoulos’ time, there would surely have been down evenings with someone else waving the stick. But always, there would also have been singers to give at least an intermittent charge to the goings-on. ^(I) Here—to pick up from “WHAT?”—we have arrived at the terrible moment when Angelica, her reason for living gone, must consent with her signature to the Principessa’s division of the family property. In the course of the preceding scene, we have been thankful that the voice of the Principessa (Stephanie Blythe’s) has been ample enough that the scene can happen in basic musical terms, though less than charmed to hear that she seems to angling toward roles like Bloody Mary or the Old Lady in Candide. The bright, somewhat brassy timbre she has always had has devolved into a loud belt mix topped by a few head-dominant notes, still full but understandably a tad shaken up, so that the cries of “Espiare! Espiare!” aren’t as satisfying as they formerly were.